Technological Solution for a Social Problem

Like many developing nations, India faces extreme issues of economic and social inequality. However, despite the challenges that India’s poorest face, its population also provides enormous potential to drive the nation’s growth and provide entrepreneurial solutions.

The National Innovation Council of India (NInC) began with a vision driven by Sam Pitroda, a highly-regarded entrepreneur who was behind the Indian telecom revolution. The NInC’s vision was to reorganize the Indian model of innovation from a culture of ad hoc innovation, or “Jugaad”, driven by scarce resources and customers’ needs, to a system based on strategic approaches that incorporate sustainability, durability, affordability, quality, global competitiveness and local needs.The NInC does not disregard the innovations of India’s poorest to meet their day-to-day challenges but focuses on building structures and policies that enable the government to identify, organize, support and scale these innovations.

India has an estimated 6,000 small and medium-sized enterprise industry associations (known as clusters) across the country; these associations are crucial to job creation for India’s poorest. However, they have largely remained unorganized as independent worker-based support networks, and businesses remain dependent on cheap labour, often providing inhospitable working conditions that cause serious health and environmental hazards. The NInC identified a huge potential for social and economic impact by providing these associations with support to innovate and stay relevant in today’s globalized world. To provide this support, the NInC created Cluster Innovation Centres (CICs), modelled on a public-private partnership that connects the industry associations to research and development organizations, industry experts, government programmes and financing institutions.

Moradabad (also known as Brass City) is a town in the state of Uttar Pradesh and home to one of the oldest brassware industry associations (known as a cluster) in India. Traditionally, production is based out of artisans’ homes and requires coal-based furnaces and cyanide-based solutions to melt brass and finish the products. These techniques generate harmful air pollutants that lead to increased respiratory diseases and cancer among the artisans and their families. Despite taking on these health risks, artisans in the cluster make very little profit. In Moradabad, the brassware industry has faced serious challenges from global competition, experiencing a drop of over 80% in export orders in the past decade.

The NInC intervened to remedy this situation, creating a CIC in the form of a physical hub in Moradabad to foster innovation in the brassware industry. The Cluster Innovation Centre builds the community ownership of ideas and reduces bottlenecks in both production and service delivery by pooling resources for research and development. These efforts have resulted in three vital innovations for the brassware artisans – improved coal-based furnaces, ready-to-use lacquer and cyanide-free solutions. These innovations increased daily incomes per furnace by 80% and improved the quality of products and working conditions for the artisans in Moradabad.