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TBI Changemakers: Mr. Nand Lal Gupta – Five Decades of Incredible Innovations

It is not often that we come across serial innovators. And innovators who use locally sourced materials to create products that impact the lives of people in the region by providing means of livelihood and everywhere else by providing useful products at lower prices, are rare indeed. So meet Mr. Nand Lal Gupta whose innovations include adhesives made from cactus, boards made from pine needles and building blocks made of soil!

April 2, 2013 / No Comment / Read More

TBI Innovations: ZIMBA – A Simple Machine To Quench The Thirst For Clean Water

May 3, 2012 4 Comments

An affordable device that does not need electricity or moving gears but runs only on gravity, is scientist Suprio Das’s answer to water contamination. Nilanjana Nag Pereira reports. Odd as it may seem, innovation and its usage have become inversely proportionate today. Says scientist Suprio Das, “90 per cent of our leading designs are created [...]

Grassroots Innovation: Pandharinath’s Onion Transplanter

June 14, 2011 No Comment

Onion transplantation is one of the most labour intensive and time consuming process in onion cultivation. Roughly 1,70,000 to 1,90,000 seedlings per acre are transplanted using 40 people. But one man used innovation, technology and ingenuity to make this a thing of the past. Mr. Pandharinath Sarjerao More has developed an affordable, semi-automatic transplanter for [...]

Carding Machine: Inventing India’s weaving genius

May 23, 2011 2 Comments

The idea of weaving brings back the Rumpelstiltskin story to one’s head. With one subtle but important difference – Unlike this famous fairytale in real life a happy ending calls for much more than guessing a weird sounding name. For families of weavers, tens and thousands of them in India, their saviour came in the [...]

Grassroots Innovation: Biomass Gasifier that generates energy at a low cost

May 17, 2011 No Comment

Innovators are scientists looking for the best possible solutions. And innovators usually don’t need laboratories – they are risk takers who experiment with whatever resources they have in their immediate environment. One such innovator is Raj Singh Dahiya who has developed an efficient biomass gasifier that ensures smooth operation of any engine at a low [...]

An illiterate Farmer designs a Water Mill to generate Electricity

April 8, 2011 6 Comments

Siddappa, an illiterate farmer from Somapur village in Gadag district of Karnataka, has designed a water mill to generate electricity. Right from conceptualizing to materialisation, the farmer has done everything on his own. He operates the water mill in the canal near his house. Using timbers, Siddappa prepared a giant wheel that joined at a [...]

Grassroots Innovation: Mini Sanitary Napkin Machine for Rural India

April 5, 2011 20 Comments

A nationwide survey gauging menstrual hygiene by Plan India revealed that 68% of rural Indian women are not able to afford sanitary napkins. Sanitary napkin, an essential personal hygiene product, has very low penetration in India due to it’s high price. The survey showed that 81% of rural women use unsterilized cloth since it is [...]

Meet Chintakindi Mallesham – The inventor of the Laxmi Asu Machine that relieved the pain of several Weavers

March 22, 2011 3 Comments

This is a part of an ongoing series called ‘Grassroots Innovation’. A hand winding process called Asu is required in the traditional ‘Tie & Dye’ Pochampalli silk saree tradition. This involves moving the hand over a space of one meter up and down around semi-circularly arranged pegs 9000 times (yes, 9000 times!) for one sari. [...]

Grassroots Innovation: Multi-Utility Fuel Efficient Stove

February 28, 2011 2 Comments

The National Innovation Foundation (NIF), India, was established on Feb 28th 2000 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The main goal of NIF is to provide institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green innovations and help their transition to self supporting activities. NIF has been supporting and incubating a [...]