Silk Cotton

[113]

In the Shambu Prasad article on the Innovation trajectory of Spirulina Algal Technology (http://www.crispindia.org/docs/Shambu~s_EPW.pdf) he talks of an engineer at the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre (MCRC) who was “asked to make paper from silk Cotton”. It was actually me. Well, me and Vailoor Vasanth (B-Tech, IITM, 1980) were asked to do this by Dr C V Seshadri.

There was a silk cotton tree (Ceiba Pentandra) in the MCRC campus that had just borne fruit. There was plenty of silk cotton to collect and work with. The cotton is generally used to stuff mattresses and pillows. Each fibre has a coat of wax which prevents moisture entering the fibre. So typically a pillow stuffed with the fibre will provide years of comfort. If you keep the pillow for a day out in the sun, it will drive out any other moisture accumulated in the pillow and become fluffy again.

Vasant and I trawled the library and read up on the industrial paper making process, the entry in “How stuff works” and also the properties of silk cotton from the Wealth of India.

At our first attempt we ignored the wax and found that despite our great efforts at cooking the fibre it was not making a satisfactory pulp. It just became a fluffy mass when left in the sun to dry. We tried washing with soap to remove the wax and got a slightly better result and finally decided to cook it with a strong solution of NaOH. This gave us a decent material which we ran through a household grinder (mixie). We then placed the pulp in a wire mesh and with a plastic sheet squeezed to drain out the water, removed the plastic sheet with the pulp attached and left in the sun to dry. After drying, when we peeled of the mat we could write on one side with our ball point pen. Success!! One of many Eureka moments at MCRC!

Later there were attempts to do the various steps with microbes to reduce the energy requirement. That is another story and not mine to tell but can be seen here http://www.amm-mcrc.org/programmes/ecotech/paper.html.

My teachers and pooja

[112]

Having done most of my schooling abroad it was difficult for me to understand why my technology instructors seemed to have come fresh from what I perceived to be ritualistic homage marked by ash on the forehead.

What was explained to me was that a practicing Hindu will have different forms of expressing his or her beliefs. Some may not even express them at all. But the forms of expression are by and large accepted by society and it is also seen as a matter of personal choice and very private. Work and all other activities (like teaching engineering) have a different code and are separate from ones personal choice of expressing belief.

I think it is important to respect everybody’s expression of belief (or non belief) as long as it is passive and respects the other persons as well. Social enterprises too should respect each others endeavour. Especially since the goal is to improve the quality of life of the poor. With such a noble goal there should be cooperation and not competition. Competition is the mantra for the commercial marketplace and not for the social one.

Banking Correspondent

[111]

Not many detailed social impact studies have been done on the introduction of the mobile phone in rural areas of India. The general consensus is that it is helping the poorer find jobs. The latest use of the technology is to integrate it with the banking system. The government has an avowed goal of financial inclusion but the implementation has seen competing systems.

The banking correspondents model promoted by FINO and other companies are about to collide with the UIDAI demand for interoperability and the Interbank Mobile Payment System. Much of this will make sense only if you read this link: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-11-08/news/30373364_1_uidai-bank-accounts-smart-cards

Everybody involved was expecting this and everybody went ahead implementing their solution on a pilot basis. This is typical of how technocrats and bureaucrats in India perceive their end customer: a guinea pig to be experimented upon.

FINO claims to have 40 million customers and is now crying that new standards may make their system obsolete. Why did FINO make a contingency plan, knowing full well that anything could change in to the future?  EKO for that matter was also aware that there would be authentication issues; no doubt their solution is in real time and elegant but they had to have alternatives.

The stakes in the banking sector are very high and technologists have taken risks to prove their system works. For a developing country and market like ours why do we waste precious resources reinventing the wheel without paying heed to those who have done this before us in India and abroad? SKS were the first to introduce smart cards, they have the stories to tell what can go wrong. African telecom providers have developed working cash transfer mechanisms. If it works there, why will it not work here?

Everybody has messed up what should have been the fastest rollout of banking services for the poor. It is because the poor are not complaining, that this mess will go on for another 3years, before sorting itself out.

USA -Europe energy efficiency

[110]

The European and American response to the oil crisis of the 1970’s and to the current crisis has evoked different responses. In the 70’s when oil prices went from US$ 2 a barrel to US $ 20, only the developed countries got affected badly. The poorer nations had a different fuel mix and the growth of industry may have been hampered but agriculture was largely unaffected.

America and Europe started exploring alternative sources of energy and looked at every other option to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. But this search was discontinued as the real price of crude oil stabilised. The interest in renewable energy starts gaining ground whenever the price of oil crosses US $ 60 a barrel. Once oil prices cross US $ 100 a barrel (and does not seem to come down) we can expect global investment into all alternative energy sources to go up.

Because America has its population dependent on fossil fueled automobiles they get hit the hardest. Europeans use public transport for commuting to work unlike Americans. However Europe has been looking for ways to improve energy use efficiencies across all sectors. Some of the European nations like Sweden have built national plans to be completely free of crude oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Sweden_an_Oil-Free_Society).

Between 1990 and 2008 the population of America grew by 55 million people and Europe grew by 26 million however the energy use in USA increased by 20% in the same period while Europe energy use increased by 7%.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

In America the hope is that some invention will come along and make the energy problem go away. America is on a per capita basis the highest consumer of energy in the world. They have not yet found ways to reduce their consumption or implemented energy conservation measures of any kind. They are looking to meet the same level of energy consumption while searching for alternate energy sources. Europe has undertaken a 2 pronged strategy to reduce energy consumption by improving energy efficiencies and by investing into renewable energy.

What is India’s plan? It will be good to remember that an energy crisis in India will largely affect the urban population and not so much the rural population.

Dr. Claude Alvares

[109]

Well before ever meeting Claude when he visited the Shri AMM Murugappa Chettair Research Centre to meet Dr. C V Seshadri, many of us were familiar with his writings. The Illustrated Weekly of India was where many of his powerfully written pieces would appear. Claude wrote insightful pieces on Walter Dewaram, Verghese Kurien and MS Swaminathan. He wrote about the Green revolution and the milk revolution and opened the eyes of many readers to the true cost of these massive movements. All this happened almost 30 years ago. It is ironic that most of the people he wrote about (negatively) moved on to become heroes of modern India.

Claude was amongst the first scholars to write about an India, free of a colonised mindset. To propose and fight that Indian tradition and culture was not just equal but superior to what the colonial west keeps trying to impose on us. In a more recent article he has taken this fight to the social science research paradigm. You can read the full article at:  http://www.typewriterguerilla.com/2011/06/a-critique-of-eurocentric-social-science-and-the-question-of-alternatives/

Claude’s response to his critics is equally good to read.  http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/16663.pdf

Claude is a deeply caring person with a terrific memory. During his first visit to MCRC in the mid 80’s I had to drive him to the IIT campus. He happily jumped on to the backseat of my motorbike and we had a good chat. He was going to meet with members of the PPST group. We met up again 20 odd years later and he still remembered that motorbike ride. That meeting was about producing a book on Dr C V Seshadri, a work that is still in progress.

Prof. Shambu Prasad

[108]

Shambu did his B-Tech in IIT Madras and then went on to finish a Masters and PhD. He was deeply interested in development issues and I interacted with him when he was writing a piece on Spirulina. Shambu was working for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Andhra Pradesh at that time. In his words

“This paper explores a civil society initiative in agro-processing from the perspective of attempting to understand innovation processes and their institutional contexts. Civil society initiatives are unusual in that often they have not been driven by the formal science establishment and its outputs, but instead have been led by an alternative paradigm of learning and innovation. However, these initiatives have not been studied and their contribution to informing research, project design, research management, and practice remain largely unexplored. This paper thus explores and highlights potentially underutilized sources of innovations from which research policy can draw inspiration and lessons.”

There are several versions of this paper amended for different audiences. See http://www.crispindia.org/docs/Shambu~s_EPW.pdf and http://www.climatebabes.com/documents/Algae%20Spirulina%20Technology.pdf

I really liked this paper. In many of the previous blogs I have given fragmented accounts in which I was involved. This paper puts a lot of that into perspective of civil society, innovation and the marketplace.

My interactions with Shambu continue as his areas of research interest are in innovation management, policy studies, public systems management, science, technology and society studies (STS), social and institutional development, agroecology, sustainable development and insitutional studies (including institutional learning and change).

Pegasys Systems

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Nitish Kati was also a batchmate and leader of the IITM western music band. He is an accomplished musician who had a guitar that he built for himself.

Nitish joined Larsen and Tubro after his B-Tech and was enjoying his work in designing and building machines. He later left the company and formed his own company. Nitish is an excellent mechanical engineer who has created some remarkable automation solutions for big name companies that are still in operation.

His company is called Pegasys Systems and it manufactures an array of Assembly Machines, Shaft Straightener and Test and Measuring Equipment.

Dilip Panicker, Rajesh Rathi and Nitish Kati are B-Tech’s, all accomplished musicians who played together while in college. All three are independent successful entrepreneurs based out of India. There is a postulation that entrepreneurs need to be creative just like musicians.

Control Infotech

[106]

Rajesh Rathi comes from a traditional marwadi family and was my batchmate at college. Today he makes a joke about how naïve he was when he came to college. His introductory phrase on meeting anyone was “Myself Rajesh. Yourself?”. Rajesh is an excellent singer and percussionist. He would be called on when the regular guy was missing and would blend right in.

After B-Tech he went abroad for Masters programme, worked for a company in US, got the itch to start his own business and came back to India. The business did not gone as he planned, so he went back to the company he worked for. Then he set up shop in India again. His company is called Control Infotech and has offices in India and USA. “Control Infotech is a single source vendor of power & automation products, services and solutions.”  http://www.control-infotech.com/.

Polama

[105]

Dilip Panicker was 2 years my junior in college but we are about the same age. While at college aside from his passion for computers he was and continues to be an avid musician. He was an integral part of the college band that would end up winning almost any competition they entered.

He joined a company called Madras Computer Laboratory (MCL) after his graduation. They had an Apple Mcintosh. My colleague V Balaji and I were allowed to use it at night when the rest of the staff had left. Having never used a computer before both Balaji and I were worried we would damage the machine. Dilip spent about 10 minutes with us and we were, off writing our first proposal on a computer.

Dilip left along with his colleague Shirish Purohit and started Texel Systems along with the flamboyant P G Mohan Rao.  Texel did some very exciting work in Industrial Automation on the PC platform. Dilip had intimate knowledge of the hardware and software aspects of the PC and could coax incredible performance by coding almost at the machine language level. Texel Systems was acquired and dismantled(there is a longer story on Texel systems that I may write some other time). Dilip went off to Bangalore and started on a track saying “Now I want to make money”.

Dilip and his business partner built a 50,000 sq.ft. office space in Electronics City from the earnings of their company Siri Technologies. The company did back office work for larger companies and Bank of America was one of their bigger clients.

Dilip left Siri and is currently pursuing his passion for travel, building the backend software for Polama (http://www.polama.com/).  Polama is run by another IITM B-Tech, M D Ramaswamy (who is also a serial entrepreneur). They recently raised their first round of funding. See  http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Polamacom_gets_Angel_Funding-nid-91381-cid-100.html

Benchmark

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B-Tech’s in Business (the ones I know) – I had promised to write some of these in the blog dated November 10, 2011 No. 86. These are not social entrepreneurs but B-Techs who took the risk and became entrepreneurs when it was unconventional.

Raghu Rajagopal was my senior by 2 years and around 1983-1984 he gave me work after office hours writing software. This was on a machine made in Taiwan called Microprofessor II.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprofessor_II). I was in trainee mode but working with a chartered accountant who wanted a low cost electronic, double entry, book keeping system. My software programme became unusually large (written In BASIC) and would often crash the Microprofessor II.

Raghu and his classmate Senthil incorporated a company called Benchmark Systems in 1988. I believe they might be the first company to be created and incubated from IIT Madras. Under the guidance of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala and with technical inputs from the Electrical Engineering Department, Benchmark built and sold electronic kits. The kits were to be used in engineering colleges to teach the basics of micro processors. Each time a new processor was released a new kit would be made. This was a good business model as repeat sales were possible to the same customer as each new processor appeared. Benchmark and its current business can be seen at http://www.benchmarkgroup.com/

Raghu and Senthil were amongst the first B-Techs I encountered in Chennai who took the leap to become entrepreneurs at a time when entrepreneurship was unpopular and unfashionable.