Frugal Innovation - Local problems, local solutions

I watched this video today and it was a bit of a surprise for me. Sugata Mitra talks here about his experiments with kids from remote villages and shanties in India, and how they learnt to operate computers and the internet on their own, through a hole in the wall! Yup! 

One of the things it reinforced to me, is the importance of Frugal Innovation that my company’s founder Roy Singham and CEO Trevor Mather talked about this year. In the global south, we need to have smart, local and frugal solutions that solve problems in context. And while I hear all the learning theories and concepts and pioneering ideas largely from western folks, there are such novel & almost revolutionary ideas that the likes of Mitra are doing in countries such as India!

Another awe-inspiring example of Frugal Innovation in India that I came across was Arunachalam Muruganantham’s movement to provide sanitary pads for rural Indian women. The man, after years of research and struggle, finally came up with a super low cost machine that allows women to come and make their own sanitary napkins in a matter of minutes!

Some thoughts that are sitting with me after watching this:

• Is the world influenced largely by just one section of people’s thinking, simply because that’s where the media focus is?

• Are people living in urban areas far too removed from the realities of their country?

 I’m not the most patriotic person on the planet. But these are issues and problems close to home. Problems the context of which I would find far easier to understand and solve, rather than debating the political moves of a government in another continent. I don’t have anything against intellectual debates, in fact at one point I actively indulged in them! But I have realized the importance of solid and impactful action, without that the value of intellectual debate doesn’t quite manifest. To know that there are innovations happening close to home, and that impactful work is being done in simple yet powerful ways, gives me hope and challenges me to get involved with something closer than a donation agency in a far fledged place.

More thoughts on these lines in the hopefully near future…