In this article, we write about the Biomass Cooking Stove innovation that is being nurtured by the Villgro foundation.

Context and problems with LPG

Micro and small establishments that provide boarding services to 40 – 100 individuals in rural and semi-rural areas face the three pronged problem of not having the access, both financially and in terms of availability , to LPG, having to incur the costs of large amounts of biomass required to run their relatively inefficient stoves and dealing with the associated health impacts that inefficient, outdated stoves generate.
Unlike small households, micro and small establishments rely on purchasing fire wood and not on collecting biomass. These costs average around 2000 Rs. / ton. As such the inefficiency of stoves used by this category of users has a direct impact on their expenditure and thus on their income and savings. When compared to households these establishments utilize their stoves for much longer (upto 10 hours a day when catering to 100 customers) and thus the impacts on wood consumption and health issues are
exasperated.

Burning wood creates CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Establishments, based on size, generate between 20 – 80 tons of co2 a year. While small when considered at a national or global scale, this contributes to climate change in its own way.

Enter Biomass Cooking Stove, an innovation by Svati Bhogle of SustainTech India Pvt. Ltd.

The Biomass Cooking stove is an application specific high efficiency wood burning stove specifically designed for a range of cooking needs. The innovation offers to the end user: saving in fuel costs, by being up to 50% more efficient than conventional stoves and improved health impacts. The features that make the stoves innovative are, optimum air fuel ratios controlled by efficient vents, well designed combustion chamber volume resulting in high combustion and heat transfer efficiencies, good insulation to prevent losses to the walls and an optimally designed chimney to vent the flue gases away from the breathing zone of the cooks and designed to reduce heat losses to the atmosphere.

Who is impacted and how?

Owners of micro and small boarding establishments, including semi-portable food vendors will be impacted. This covers a range of individuals with daily revenues between 500 to 5000 rupees per day. A market survey revealed that the total number of tea shops, small & medium hotels and street food vendors to be 73,650 in the state of Tamil Nadu alone.
On the lower end of the economics scale – this includes street side food vendors who spend considerable amounts of their income on firewood. These individuals were shown to spend upto 30,000 Rs. annually on firewood with monthly take home incomes of around 7000 Rs. On the higher end of the economics scale – this includes proprietors of small size ‘hotels’ catering to the needs of approximately a 100 customers a day.

Environmental, social and economic benefits

SustainTech India Pvt. Ltd. (SIPL) is reaching out to the needs of a fuel stressed segment of society – initially the street food vendors, who operate on push carts and where cooking is done inside the cart or on railway platforms, roadside shops and small hotels who with a roof and some seating capacity.
A survey conducted shows that these stoves are in operation for about 10 hours every day and each unit caters to about 100 clients every day. The 65,000 fuel efficient wood burning stoves (considering only the tava, frying stoves and tea kettles) that would be sold by SIPL in the first five years would therefore offer a safer, cooler and healthier working environment to at least 65,000 cooks and 6.5 million people who would eat
around these stoves every day. India has a high incidence of respiratory ailments and a smoke free working environment would reduce the medical expenses of the affected people working around wood fires.
The survey data also shows that 38% of the street food vendors and tea shops use kerosene for their cooking needs. Very limited kerosene is available in fair price shops and this is inadequate. Very often the sector uses unfair means to procure kerosene creating stress and tension besides eroding the profitability.

Moving to a biomass stove would reduce the stress associated with procurement of kerosene, improve profitability of the business and show that it is possible to replace a fossil fuel with a renewable energy source.
At the global level the movement to a fuel efficient wood stove would significantly abate CO2 emission. A survey conducted in the project area shows that stoves are in use for about 8 -14 hrs every day and for 300 -350 days in a year. Data has also been collected about fuel consumption patterns in conventional stoves and performance of improved stoves tested and some of them certified. With a projected stove life of 5 years, the carbon abatement potential of the venture through installations in the first 5 year planning period would be 3.7 million tons of CO2. (1 kg of firewood saved = 1.5 kg of CO2).
Firewood is purchased by the end users of SIPL products at Rs 2000 / ton. The saving in fuel costs, because of energy efficiency should enable the end user to payback the cost of the stove without financial stress in 12- 18 months. Each stove purchased would on an average save Rs 20,000 – 30,000 of fuel cost every year.

The enterprise projects that through its intervention and in their life time, the stoves installed in the first
5 years period, it would conserve Rs 4000 million in fuel costs thus creating wealth for a very needy community.

Spread over a vast area of 170 acres of rocky wasteland in Kuppam, a deprived rural area in Andhra Pradesh, Agastya International foundation believes that complete learning is a combined form of shiksha (education), samskara (values) and sansara (world). It focuses on transforming the critical and much neglected area of primary and secondary education of the rural masses in India, including children and teachers.

Agastya does this by bringing hands-on science education to the rural masses through the use of outreach programs like “Science on Wheels” (Mobile Labs), Science Fairs, Teacher Development Program and Young Instructors Programs. Agastya seeks to fill the gaps in the Indian education system that threaten its socio-economic development. The conventional Indian education system instills little creativity in children and teacher education is generally divorced from classroom realities. Agastya’s projects overcome these problems with their unique features which involve idea generation and testing through the Creativity Lab, creativity generation for poor and disadvantaged through interactive and engaging learning methods, learning linked to environmental goals, emphasis on developing behavioral skills and a close link between teacher education and the classroom system.

If you ever hear Ramji Raghavan (Founder, Agastya International Foundation) speak, you would certainly hear him talk about the learning pyramid as he strongly believes in the fact that we learn about 5% of what is taught to us in a lecture, 10% of what we read, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what we discuss with others, 80% of what we experience and 95% of what we teach. Ramji Raghavan, a former NRI banker came back to India with a vision of providing education to poor children and teachers – education that would be the opposite of conventional techniques and this led to the birth of Agastya, named after Mahirshi Agastya, famous for spreading sacred knowledge to south India, as a charitable trust in 1999.

Agastya has started off successfully on the path of building a creative India of ‘tinkerers, solution seekers and creators’ that are ‘ humane, anchored and connected’ by impacting over 3 million children and 120,000 teachers from vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. The model is scalable and replicable anywhere in the world.

You can take a look at Agastya’s visual documentation here.

Website: http://www.agastya.org/

One question that you would perhaps like to answer is “How do I reduce my contribution to the city’s garbage system without altering my lifestyle too much?” Well, let Daily Dump answer that for you.
Daily Dump provides a commercial compost ‘pit’ that you can have at your home. All your leftovers and other organic waste can be dumped into these pits. Within a few months this becomes manure and you can use it for your garden or just sell it off to a needy farmer maybe.

Early Days

Daily Dump, the brain child of Ms Poonam Bir Kasturi, evolved from the question – How can design make a difference? Poonam graduated in Product Design in 1985 from the National Institute of Design. She worked in a small scale manufacturing company after college and then set up a craft based design company called Industree with two other partners. She quit after 5 years and set up Playnspeak, a proprietorship concern, to make products for the home. At the same time Poonam also was the founding faculty of Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore which she in May 2008 to start Daily Dump.

So, what exactly is Daily Dump?

In simple words, this product allows every homeowner to reduce their contribution to city waste. In India, no commerical home composter was available till the Daily Dump product was launched.
It is designed for a single family as the “customer”. It is supported by a service backup and customer support. It actually helps families convert their wet waste into eco-friendly compost. The knowledge base is open-source to encourage micro-enterprises.

The Product and its elements

Daily Dump has designed a product with which anyone can convert kitchen waste into compost at home. The product, made of terra-cotta, is sourced from village potters. It is marketed through word-of-mouth referrals, media awareness, and their website. It is sold through channels including individuals, retail stores, and societies. The designs are ‘open source’, so individuals in other locations can replicate, adapt, build on, sell and use – for wide and rapid propagation of the idea.

The current product works well in independent homes; and they are working on a ‘mechanical composter’ for use in flats. Daily Dump’s vision is to see a composter pre-fitted in every flat sold in the country, as a standard fitting. Daily Dump not only retro fits composters at homes and other establishments but also provides maintenance advice and assistance through its service plans, essentially allowing you to just dump and letting nature and Daily Dump do the rest.

This product, in addition to reducing waste, serves as a way to get over the social stigma attached to waste in our country. Without being preachy it makes the job of taking care of your waste “doable” and “possible”.

The potters who make the terra cotta pots have benefited significantly – their profitability has increased since they started making these products.

The Team

The current Daily Dump team comprises of:
Poonam Bir Kasturi (Founder), Delara Damania (Designer), Savitha, Shwetha, Vinita, Trupti, Sudheer and Anupama

Current Challenges

The challenge faced by the team presently is to create sustainable revenue streams and make money out of all the research and design work that they have done. The team has also learnt a lot and is looking to partner with NGO’s now to make strategic connections to enable waste to be managed better all over the country. Daily Dump has a robust design and an easily replicable one, which can be adapted by most people all over India.

Looking forward, Daily Dump is in the process of prototyping a mechanical composter to be retrofitted into homes in India. For this, they are looking to work with builders and see if this product can then enter into every home as a standard fitting.
The Daily Dump team is constantly trying to figure out:

• How to get builders to retrofit a composter in each balcony and utility?
• How to design a new mechanical composter such that it follows the cradle to cradle philosophy and yet is cheap and fits into the informal manufacturing setup that dots the Indian urban landscape?

Recognition

Daily Dump has received the following awards & honors:

• “Nominated for the INDEX awards 2007 – an international award to improve the quality of life
• Awarded the Green Product of the Year by Anchor Better Interior Excellence Awards 2007
• Made it to the final round of the TATA NEN Hottest Startups 2009.
• Indira International Innovation’s ‘Star Entrepreneur of the Year Award’, 2009
• Made it to the final round of the Sankalp Social Enterprise and Investment Forum Award 2009.

How much fun can Science be, you ask? Lots, if it is taught with the help of a simple rocket experiment and other practical applications! The techie duo of Udaya M V and Adithya B, who visit select government schools in Bangalore on weekends, do precisely this.

Both young software engineers who are in their early twenties realized that Indian students need to break away from the traditional mould of “mugging” and start taking a greater interest in their learning, with the aid of science projects. While educating themselves on the internet, they came across a demonstration on how to make Water Bottle Rockets. Taking off from that, they haven’t looked back. After successful programmes in six schools and a summer workshop as well, they are overwhelmed by the tremendous response. So much so that it has inspired them to create an NGO called Education Informal for improving the education process.

Handling everything by themselves, the two techies have so far funded their little experiment on their own. They do hope however that if they were to come across some talented student in need of financial backing, they will be able to source help.

Read the complete article in Bangalore Mirror.
Image Courtesy: Bangalore Mirror
Link Courtesy: Rithish. Thanks!

Up until very recently, it was believed that Ultra Violet (UV) rays from the sun can inhibit, or even prevent, formation and continuance of life. However, a team of Indian Scientists, led by the eminent Jayant Narlikar, has discovered 3 new types of bacteria which are UV resistant. What is even more fascinating is that this experiment has shown that life exists even 40 km above Earth’s surface!

K. Raghu carries an article in The Mint and mentions that the experiment involved sending a balloon in to the stratosphere of our planet. He goes on to write:

The balloon sent up to the stratosphere was the second effort by India after a maiden venture in 2001. It contained probes that collected air samples at different heights ranging from 20km to 41km above the earth’s surface.

This is a great breakthrough for Indian science, specifically so since it could alter the way we have been defining life and its necessary environments.
Read the complete article at The Mint by clicking here.
Image courtesy: The Mint

A Chemical Engineer and lecturer at IIT Madras is an unusual candidate to have worked on a heart valve that has drastically reduced the cost of such a medical procedure, in turn bringing relief to millions of poor cardiac patients in Asia. However, Professor AV Ramani has done just this.

damage to their heart valves. The device – an indigenous heart valve, which costs a fraction of the imported ones in use at the time, has been created after years of research and hard work.

Developed at the Chitra Thirunal Institute (CTI) under the patronage of Dr.Valiathan and Prof. S. Ramaseshan, the heart valve adheres to all international standards and has a titanium-based metal cage that is long-lasting and wear-resistant. The engineering demands of such a valve were very high. Deepa Mohan tells us more about the requirements of such a machine in this article for Citizen Matters, a Bangalore based news magazine:

“It is worth remembering,” points out Prof. Ramani, “that the life of the heart valve IS the life of the patient”. The human heart beats about 80,000 times a day. For even a ten year life-span, the valve would have to function for at least 400 million cycles, which means a very high-precision engineering requirement, and, because the heart valve, typically, would be surgically implanted in younger people, it needs to be something that would last for a ‘normal’ lifetime.

Important decisions like allowing contributing partners to retain their intellectual property rights under a concept of joint ownership, and designing the valve specifically for Asian anatomy, where the valve dimensions are different from those of the western population, were other factors contributing to the success and prominence of the venture. Once developed, the challenge of marketing and large-scale manufacture of the product was undertaken by the TTK group, which set up a unit for this in Bangalore.

The indigenous heart valve is, in the words of Deepa Mohan:

..a living proof of how academicians, government officials and business people can work together with great synergy to bring out a product that is both profitable and beneficial.

Read the complete interesting article here.
Image Courtesy: Deepa Mohan in Citizen Matters

Link Courtesy: Uday Arya. Thanks a ton!

In a Banana cultivation farm, once the fruits are sold off, what lies behind are the stems of the plants. Clearing these stems from the land would cost a farmer almost about Rs. 3000 on average. Now, however, a new technology plant has managed to manufacture paper out of these banana stems! So, farmers no longer have to pay to clear their land of stems, but in stead are now making money out of it.

 

Ranjani Raghavan writes in the Indian Express about Kailash Thate, who set up an agro processing unit to extract fibers from banana stems which are then used to manufacture paper. Over time, Kailash found that more than 400 banana growers were interested in his technology resulting in at least 60 farmers setting up their own plants.

Excerpts from the article:

The driving force behind the project is a Tamil Nadu-based paper manufacturing firm, Eco Green Unit, and a Pune-based NGO Chaitanya Mandal. Eco Green is buying the fibre directly from farmers for its two paper making units in Pondicherry and Chennai. The NGO is coordinating between the farm and the manufacturing unit. 

On the quality of the paper produced:

A study by Eco Green has revealed that the quality of banana stem from the state, compared to those grown in Tamil Nadu or Gujarat, is far superior and is an ideal raw material for manufacturing paper.  

“We have examined the fibre from the stems grown in Solapur, Satara, Sangli, Aurangabad, and Jalgaon. It is of far superior quality and has more brightness and shine when compared to the fibres from Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. We hope to have around 150 growers in this state processing stems for us. We want about 25 to 30 tonnes of fibre from Maharashtra,” S K Babu, project director, Eco Green.

And the benefits?:

Thate is confident his business would grow manifold but he would also have to pay growers from where he gets stems for free now. “It cost me Rs 20,000 to set up the unit but I have nothing to lose as the first consignment that I have already sent would get me Rs 40,000,” he said while supervising the unit. 

It is great to know that in the current state of impending crunch of resources, we have entrepreneurs like Thate and organizations like Eco Green and Chaitanya Mandal who are able to leave a significant impact on not only the environment, but also on people and the economy.

Read the complete article here.

Image courtesy: www.keralabackwater.com

Amidst much hype and debate, India’s first lunar spacecraft has taken off on this morning from a hazy launch pad in Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh. With the Rain Gods having given just enough respite for Chandrayaan 1 to launch on its 2 year mission, India now enters the league of a select group of nations who have successfully sent satellites to orbit the moon. This is a matter of national pride, and a feather in the cap of the nation’s premier space research laboratory – ISRO.

The goals of this mission are plenty. A special feature on Rediff News lists them as below:

The Chandrayaan-1 mission is aimed at high-resolution remote sensing of the Lunar surface in visible, near Infrared, low energy X-rays and high-energy X-ray regions.

Specific scientific goals are:
• To prepare a three-dimensional atlas (with a high spatial and altitude resolution of 5-10m) of both near and far side of the moon.

• To conduct chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface for distribution of elements such as Magnesium, Aluminum, Silicon, Calcium, Iron and Titanium with a spatial resolution of about 20 km and high atomic number elements such as Radon, Uranium & Thorium with a spatial resolution of about 40 km.

By simultaneous photo geological and chemical mapping we will be able to identify different geological units, which will test the hypothesis for the origin and early evolutionary history of the moon and help in determining the nature of the lunar crust.

Besides the above, there is an additional aim of exploring the possibility of harvesting Helium 3, a key fuel for nuclear fusion, which the moon is said to contain a whopping 5m tonnes.

While these are a few of the reasons for India to undertake this mission, there has been widespread debate and criticism of the Government’s decision to participate in the space race at the cost of development. A lot of critics feel that the budget of Rs.386 crores could have been better deployed in the improvement of basic living conditions. While these are valid arguments, and deserve attention, these are a few aspects of the lunar mission which might work in its favour:

1. The cost of the mission has been kept at a bare minimum. Infact, China’s lunar spacecraft which was launched last year had cost almost twice as much

2. Space programs to date in India, which largely consisted of sending communication satellites into orbit, have greatly benefited remote villages by linking them via tele-links to schools and hospitals in cities and providing education and healthcare facilities

3. The mission helps in strengthening India’s technological prowess and its reputation for research and development, thus opening up many avenues for high value trade and commerce

4. It will reduce the dependence of our nation on foreign superpowers for information, which might be critical in the future. Data collected from the moon mission could help in formulating India’s energy solutions as well as defense programs

Randeep Ramesh of The Guardian reports:

Earlier this year India was ranked by analysts at Futron, a hi-tech consultancy, as only a fraction behind China in global space competitiveness rankings, and well ahead of Japan, Israel and Canada. It is also building a low-cost, hi-tech base. China’s Chang’e I cost nearly double India’s Chandrayaan I bill of $86m.

This thriftiness was born of necessity. With an annual budget of about $1bn – less than a tenth of Nasa’s – Isro has to do a lot with little.

“The whole thrust of [India's space programme] has been to get real benefits,” said Gopal Raj, author of Reach For The Stars, a book about the country’s rocket programme. Raj pointed out that the Madras Institute of Development Studies recently calculated that for every rupee spent on the space programme, two were generated in “indirect and direct returns”.

It is obvious that there are many facets to this debate, and it is difficult for us to decide conclusively what the right path is. However, one thing easy to see is that India is on the path of scientific progress, which we hope will bear astronomical returns for its billions of citizens.

Excerpts from: The Guardian and Rediff News
Image Courtesy: Rediff News

Now lakhs of Indians with hearing disability will have access to a mobile dictionary in Indian Sign Language (ISL). Initiated by two youths in Vadodara – Rajesh Ketkar, himself 100 percent hearing impaired, and his friend Virbhadrasinh Rathod, this dictionary will enable the disabled person to have an image picture word with video-graphed sign language, all on the screen of his mobile.

The seeds of this idea were germinated in the minds of these youths when they attended a conference by the World Federation for Deaf in Madrid last year. Depariti Basu reports their story in this article in Indian Express:

“There were deaf people from across the world and we were amazed to see their confidence level. In India people still look at the deaf with sympathy unlike in other countries. There they ask for ‘professional assistance’ and not ‘help.’ We were exposed to their technology which is not used anywhere in India or even in any other Asian country,” Ketkar said through an interpreter. 

The two also run an NGO called Mook Badhir Mandal in Vadodara, for the hearing impaired. All this inspite of just having received education till class X, which is provided by the government, after which Ketkar took up vocational training in tailoring. Once again it is proved that education is not really a barrier for a firm determination and a will to succeed. Kudos to these youngsters who have taught us a lot.

Read the complete article hear

We have seen many protests worldwide against the use of leather products. However, surprisingly, there hasn’t been much resistance against the use of silk garments, especially considering the fact that thousands of silkworms are killed in order to make a small piece of fabric. Kusuma Rajaiah, of Hyderabad, has come up with an initiative to produce silk without the killing of silk worms.

In this article at Outlook India, Mythily Ramachandran writes about Kusuma, who started this ahimsa way of producing silk when he was approached by Janaki Venkataraman, wife of former President R. Venkatraman. Mrs. Venkatraman asked Kusuma if he had any saree which had not resulted in the killing of any silkworms. This led Kusuma to investigate whether silk could be produced without deliberate killing of the worms.

 

How did he achieve this?:

Silk comes from the cocoons of the silk worm (bombyx mori). In the silk industry, cocoons are killed by steaming or dropping them into boiling water when they are ten days old, before they metamorphose into a moth.

The silk is believed to be the finest at this stage. This is preferred because when the cocoons open naturally at one end, to release the moth, the continuity of the fibre is lost. But maybe not, thought Kusuma.
He purchases cocoons from mulberry farms in Chittoor district. The yellow coloured cocoons are reared in large cane baskets at his residence in Hyderabad. The moths emerge after 8-10 days, piercing the cocoon at one end. “The adult moths have a short life span of four days. During this time they mate and die naturally,” Kusuma explains. The pierced cocoons are spun into yarn. This is then woven into fabrics. Weavers of Nalgonda and Ananthpur district of Andhra Pradesh produce dhotis while fabrics, including saris, are woven by the weavers of Karimnagar district. “All my products are done on handlooms and benefits several weaver families,” says Kusuma. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he calls this silk ahimsa. While ahimsa silk may lack the shine of regular silk, it is comfortable to wear. It’s also wrinkle-free and has a better fall. 

You can read the entire article here.