There is hope all around- Innovations by all
Posted : January 10, 2005 at 3:27 pm [IST]
Education always helps, but it is not necessary that one must be educated to be innovative. I make this statement to impress upon my listeners that all of us who are engaged in some or the other work of certain worth can innovate and sometimes it may be an innovation that can get recognition in much bigger way. The innovation may help the enterprise or the society in a significant manner. Innovative individuals are driven by their own motivational ghosts. Many inventors or innovators do come from remote rural area too. I present two from the case books of National Innovation Foundation:
Radhey Sham Tailor is 62 years old and Nahulal Jangid is 52. Both are residents of Sikar in Rajasthan. One is a commerce graduate and the other is a fifth standard dropout. During a bus journey in 1999 through Rajasthan though its window they saw labourers digging trenches under the scorching desert sun. It moved them from some where deep. It became difficult to forget the plight of those labourers. Back at home they thought over some possible solutions. The result of their innovative effort was the invention of trench cutting machine attached to a tractor. The machine could dig 65 metres of trench per hour. They have sold 15 of their invented machines for Rs. 1.5 lakh each.
Yusuf Khan, alias the ‘mumphalli machinewalla’ is an eight standard dropout. Yusuf runs a small tractor repair workshop like many in different part of the small towns of the country. Yusuf works in a groundnut-growing region. Farmers would come and tell Yusuf how difficult it was to get labour during the harvest season, and how they wished their lives could be made easier. Yusuf started working on something. He tinkered around for almost a year and produced a machine. It draws power from a tractor and digs out as many groundnuts from one hectare of land as a hundred labourers. Additionally, it sifts out all the mud from the groundnuts. Is it not something great from some one who never finished school?
Every one today can appreciate the change in the air all over the country in every area of activities: growing aspirations for a better life, increased confidence in our own technical capabilities, and better possibilities of financial reward for entrepreneurial initiatives. Innovations can only take us ahead. And as the case stories prove it does not need a formal education as a necessity. Every one is capable to innovate. One need not be Einstein to innovate and contribute in improvement of the products that we make and the services that we provide.
I still remember the Thomas Gray’s poem of school days- Elegy written in the country church yard.’
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The deck unfathom’d caves of ocean bear
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
India requires a culture of fast improvements and innovations particularly in rural areas to come out of the mess of poverty. We should not feel happy by just giving some charity. Those who can must empower the people below poverty line to come up on their own through facilitating properly. Let this capability of number not be wasted and remain underutilized.
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
Leave a Comment