Krishna Kumar had a problem at hand. He had India’s biggest business empire backing him and a high-quality product―the finest tea from the most famous hills. But by the time it was transported in wooden boxes from the hills, he realised, there was a distinct loss of freshness.
“KK was a brilliant mind,” brand expert Harish Bijoor recalled the iconic managing director of Tata Tea, who passed away this year, and the simple idea with which he revolutionised India’s favourite drink. “But you don’t need a brilliant mind to come up with an innovation. All it takes is a simple idea!”
KK’s idea was simple, and, as it turned out, very effective. Along with fellow honcho Darbari Seth, he figured out that while the wooden chest was classy, it did lead to loss of quality. His solution? Laminate polypacks to vacuum seal the tea so that it is not spoilt in wooden or carton boxes during transportation and retail.
Bijoor was then working at Hindustan Lever, Tata Tea’s main rival. “I was on the other side of the fence, and my first reaction was ‘this is downgrading packaging!’ Marketers’ brand paradigm is that products must look glossy and upmarket, tempting people to buy. And Tata Tea was downgrading packaging,” he said.
Down the line, Bijoor and rest of the market realised it was packaging that was functionally correct. Not only did sealing keep the tea fresh, the reduced size and weight of polypacks meant the trucks coming down from the estates could carry a lot more load. This ‘polypack revolution’, as Bijoor called it, not just changed how tea was packed, but also “pioneered the way in many other categories”.
AN IDEA CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
The power of innovation has always been the driving force behind the advancement of human civilisation. And India, historically, has not done too badly. Right from Aryabhata inventing the ‘zero’ and the Indus Valley folks coming up with buttons to keep their clothes together, to giving the world anything from chess (initially called Ashtapada) to cataract surgery (Sushruta used a curved needle), we have been there, done that, and earned the historical laurels.
But, are we still at the top of the ideas game?
As it turns out, we are pretty well sorted. Of course, it might seem that innovations would today have evolved beyond the home lab or that ashram by the stream. In the case of technology, that may well be correct, but an idea ‘that can change your life’ need not always be science or hyper-fangled tech geeks coding it out. It could be as simple as a company hitting upon a new way of packaging that improves quality and saves money, as much as it could be a vaccine which had thousands of specialised researchers working in tandem, racing against the clock.
Today, ideas come fast and thick anywhere―a boardroom in Mumbai or a pharmaceutical lab in Gujarat or a garage workstation in Bengaluru. Or, for that matter, very much in the bedrooms of small towns or even the fields of rural India. If you doubt it, ask Sridhar Vembu, who virtually runs his software-as-a-service startup Zoho from a village on the foothills of the Western Ghats. Zoho’s revenue last year was around Rs 7,000 crore.
And they needn’t be all about advanced technology or inventing something from scratch. Sometimes, the power of an idea is very much the necessity it was spawned by, and the circumstances in which it took shape.
Like Operation Flood, for instance, the much-talked about dairy cooperative movement that made India the world’s largest milk producer. The programme, later billed the ‘white revolution’, came out of the search for solutions to a basic problem―the fluctuation in milk production, with animals producing more milk during the flush season leading to wastage, and less during the lean months causing scarcity across the country.
Dr Verghese Kurien came up with a two-pronged strategy―a cooperative of farmers coordinating through a network of centralised milk sheds that linked them to consumers, as well as a method to turn excess milk into milk powder. Unlike the west, India produced more buffalo milk than cow milk. So it required some nimble innovation on the part of Harichand Megha Dalaya (Kurien’s batch mate from college who came for a visit to Anand and was persuaded to stay on) to devise skim milk powder and condensed milk from buffalo milk.
THIS DRIVE IS UNIVERSAL
‘Global first’ innovations may seem to be the preserve of the west, but once you start counting, Indians do notch up a decent tally. While Sabeer Bhatia being the founder of Hotmail is pretty well known, the name Ajay V. Bhatt may not ring a bell except in tech circles. The Gujarati is the inventor of the USB, or universal serial bus, that helps us connect and transfer data effortlessly. Bhatt moved to the US after finishing studies in his home state, before ending up heading the team from Intel which worked with other tech biggies like Compaq to work out the universal standard.
And he is not the only one. Perhaps there is a reason Indians bloom bigger abroad.
HOW GREEN IS MY VALLEY
“A strong ideation ecosystem exists in India,” said business coach Ratish Pandey. “But if the idea is great and funding comes in, often these companies move to Singapore or other countries.”
Tax is not the only reason they do that. “You become far more ‘investible’ if you are based abroad,” said Pandey. “It is easier for investors to fund and to take their money out when the time comes.” This manifests itself as a different form of ‘flight of capital’. “Sure, the idea may have germinated in India, but ultimately, a whole lot of ‘Indian’ unicorns are registered in the US or Europe or Singapore,” said Pandey.
And even when companies based in India come up with innovative products or services, quite often they delay patenting it, or do it with the US Patents office. “There is a significant difference in the number of patents that get registered in India compared to the western world,” said Pandey. The Indian government has been trying to reverse this flow by offering incentives like covering a part of the cost of the patent process.
LOOK MA, IT’S THE GOVERNMENT!
While it is no surprise that the spirit of pioneering a new innovation is being held aloft by the startup community, the surprise package in the whole deal is the government itself. “A lot of innovative thinking is happening in the government space; the government as an enabler,” said Prashant Mishra, dean of the School of Business Management at Narsee Monjee University, Mumbai. “From the Jan Dhan-Aadhar-Mobile (JAM) innovation to the vaccine rollout to ONDC, this government has innovated in a manner many other countries are actually learning from it.”
Beyond innovation, most central ministries have also been spurring ideation through its agencies and schemes. “There is a significant government push. The amount of grants you can manage if your idea is good is not small, starting from Rs25 lakh. Pretty much every ministry is putting away money for startups,” said Pandey.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Another area which has come into its own has been the support initiatives by academia. “A significant shift I have seen is that every technical institute and university is putting in place incubation labs, because they want to capture every possible smart idea that these young students are developing,” said Pandey.
Starting with some of the IITs, many universities and technical institutes today offer incubation labs, grants and guidance on scaling the idea to a workable business. “We check if the startups have science at the core of it, and then whether there is a market opportunity,” said C.S. Murali, chairman of the entrepreneurship cell, Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. “If it all works, we say yes to incubation―provide space and seed capital, faculty become technical mentors and give them access to lab and equipment.”
IISc has to its credit startups like Bellatrix Aerospace, which provides end-to-end solutions for satellites and launch vehicle systems. The better known IIT Madras Research Park has spawned success stories like Ather, now one of India’s biggest electric two-wheeler makers. It has so far incubated 280 startups with a cumulative valuation of Rs33,000 crore.
MAKE FOR INDIA
But if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, where are all those innovative products and services? Bijoor puts the blame on the Indian mentality of jugaad. “Innovation is a process and a science in itself. We need patience to face failures. In India, we seem to be taking the patli gali (narrow bylane) of jugaad instead of the super highway of mega innovation,” he said.
This, however, is attributed to two distinct situational realities. One, India’s consumption levels are still below the global average. Take tea, for example. It might seem that the whole nation is gulping down cupfuls round the clock, but India does not feature even in the top 20 tea drinking nations when it comes to per capita consumption.
“For company marketers, that is a market still untapped. So their focus is on expanding reach to improve consumption,” said Pandey. “Innovation will come only once we reach a certain level of consumption. Then you start thinking, ‘now what is the new thing I can bring into play to excite the customer?’ In that sense, we are behind the curve vis-a-vis the western world in terms of innovating. Right now Indian businesses have so much of space to just produce and sell that they don’t really need to innovate.”
Second, while India does have a few ‘global firsts’, its pioneering spirit seems to be at its best in taking existing standards and innovations and adapting it. “Of late, India’s most significant achievements have been through process-based innovations or improvements for unique contexts in which Indian businesses operate,” said Mishra. “That way, Indian firms have shown much ingenuity and much greater resilience compared to many of the US-based or western origin firms.”
How? “India is complex and varied in its geography, climate and culture. A firm can’t just offer a standard product in many cases. Tackling that diversity requires higher agility, and much decentralised planning and execution,” said Mishra, giving examples of companies like Unilever coming with soaps and cleaning liquids that use less water and L&T’s engineering solutions to build railway tracks in difficult terrains.
Or even the Mangalyaan mission. It is not like ISRO reinvented the wheel―there were spaceships and missions to Mars even earlier. ISRO’s achievement was the process efficiency, driven through frugal innovation that eventually cost a fraction of NASA’s missions.
THE FUTURE IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
India could just crack the ‘global first’ criteria more frequently in the near future, if one sees the pace at which its startup ecosystem is thriving. Using technology as the backbone and the huge scale India’s population offers, startup ideas have been changing the country’s landscape. From UPI, a digital payment mode that is now a model for other countries, to tech-assisted agriculture, Indian startups are driving innovation. “Sadly our mainstream companies are not pioneering new ideas much,” said Bijoor. “But my happy factor is our huge startup ecosystem. They are not just a glimmer of hope, but millions of glimmers of hope!”
1955
FIBRE FOR GROWTH
Unless you are someone who checks the Padma awards list every year meticulously, the name Narinder Singh Kapany is unlikely to ring a bell (He got Padma Vibhushan in 2021, a year after his death). His fame beyond the Sikh diaspora in the US and the scientific academia is sketchy at best. Not surprising that a leading magazine recently billed the physicist one of the “greatest unsung heroes of mankind”.
It is no hyperbole. The modern telecommunication ecosystem, from telecom to broadcast and everything in between, owes it all to one not-so-humble invention Kapany played a pivotal role in inventing―fibre optics. After working in Indian Ordnance Factories in Kanpur, Kapany moved to Imperial College London in the early 1950s and worked with Harold Hopkins on achieving good image transmission through bundles of optical fibres. Coupled with the invention of optical cladding by Dutch scientist Bram van Heel, it spawned the era of fibre optics and modern communication.
FUN FACT
Jawaharlal Nehru asked Kapany to come back from London and become scientific adviser to his government. If Kapany had said yes, he might have got his Padma award earlier, but we may not have had today’s telecommunications!
1970
LET THERE BE FLOOD
Harichand Megha Dalaya came back to India just for a visit, but was given a job by his good friend Verghese Kurien. And the result was a flood.
Operation Flood turned India from a milk deficient country to the world’s biggest producer. In fact, India had a rather peculiar problem with milk before the White Revolution. During the flush season, so much of it went to waste; but during rest of the time, there was scarcity across the country. Until then, machines that converted excess milk into milk powder existed only for cow milk, and they could not be used effectively for buffalo milk because of its high fat content. Dalaya used his tech know-how and engineering capabilities to instal the world’s first spray dry machine for buffalo milk at Amul.
FUN FACT
Freedom fighter and father of the cooperative movement Tribhuvandas Patel, who set up the Kheda Cooperative, was known as the ‘father’ and Kurien the ‘son’ of dairy cooperatives. The publicity-shy Dalaya was its ‘holy ghost!’
1971
THE CUP OF LIFE
Dilip Mahalanabis came up with an idea that saved crores of lives while in a swampy refugee camp during the Bangladesh liberation war. Cholera and diarrhoea were rampant in the camps, and the traditional treatment was huge amounts of intravenous fluids. But Dilip, a paediatrician, realised this was not viable in developing countries. His solution was an oral solution of 22g glucose, 3.5g salt and 2.5g baking soda mixed with a litre of water.
Today we know this life-saver as ORS, or oral rehydration solution, easily available even in the remotest parts of the world, that does not need a health professional and can be easily mixed with clean water and works wonders with patients.
FUN FACT
After Mahalanabis started using ORS, the death rate in the refugee camp came down to 2 per cent from 30 per cent. And stories on this life-saving formula started getting broadcast on the underground radio station that beamed programmes to the Bangla freedom fighters deep inside East Pakistan.
1993
CHIPPING INTO THE FUTURE
As we in the 2020s see Intel and Apple take the chip battle into another era, it almost feels quaint harking back to that one product that was the must-have ‘inside’ every PC worth its RAM once upon a time. Intel came out with the Pentium chip in the early 1990s, giving a fillip to the PC revolution that was already under way. The fight to be the top cat of the chips block was intense―there were many consortiums vying with their products, including one led by Apple, IBM and Motorola and another by Compaq and Microsoft, besides others.
But none had Vinod Dham, who was later called ‘The Pentium engineer’. The Indian immigrant believed that Intel’s ‘focus and execute’ would pull through, and Pentium’s eventual market dominance is testament to the man’s vision. Dham has several other inventions to his credit, right from Intel’s first flash memory technology to, believe it or not, the K6, often referred to as ‘the Pentium killer’, brought out by Intel rival AMD, where he joined after leaving Intel.
FUN FACT
An Intel Pentium chip designed by Dham occupied the pride of place at Washington’s Smithsonian Museum’s ‘Beyond Bollywood’ exhibition on the life and contribution of Indians in America.
2011
PLASTIC, FANTASTIC
Urban Indians are used to the sight of plastic waste on streets and overflowing the dumpsters. Well, take solace in the fact that some of that plastic is beneath your feet.
As per government figures in 2021, more than 700 km of national highways alone have been made by mixing plastic waste. The actual number would be higher as this is the figure for national highways. Many municipal bodies are doing their own bit for the environment by constructing roads using discarded plastic.
Madurai-based scientist and chemistry professor Rajagopalan Vasudevan was instrumental in coming up with an innovative method of mixing shredded plastic waste with bitumen and using the polymerised mix in road construction. Not only does it make the transport glide faster on such roads, it also makes roads more resistant to monsoon damage.
FUN FACT
Countries like the Netherlands and Indonesia have constructed roads with plastic-asphalt mix, while the UK has announced that it will implement Vasudevan’s technology along with some of its own secret compounds to make the roads in London, Gloucester and Durham.
2013
MY SKY UNDER MY STAR
NavIC, or Navigation with Indian Constellation, came about when the US refused to allow Indian military use of its Global Positioning System (GPS). The Manmohan Singh government approved the project in 2006, with ISRO opening a Deep Space Network station in Karnataka and launching a bunch of IRNSS satellites. Almost every bit of this project is indigenously developed. Today, anyone from fishermen out in the sea to cargo vans on national highways use NavIC to find their way.
FUN FACT
NavIC currently covers only the Indian territorial landmass and 1,500 km beyond. There are plans for further extension, and new commercial usage is also likely.
2016
MONEY GOES MOBILE
From buying a tender coconut from a roadside vendor to a television set at a fancy mall, Indians are not swiping, but scanning―Rs17 lakh crore last month alone. Say thanks to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
While digital money transfer existed before UPI, this Indian model’s success lay in the government intervention that ensured that all such payment mechanisms were standardised. Due to the low penetration of credit cards and net banking, the RBI-initiated idea, concretised by the National Payment Corporation of India in 2016, was a runaway success, as anyone with a mobile phone and data connection could link their banks to their phones and use the apps for almost any payment. The entry of private operators like GooglePay and PhonePe only catalysed the popularity.
Today, UPI forms 84 per cent of all digital transactions in the country, and the rest of the world is also interested. Already, non-resident accounts in countries like the US, the UK and Singapore can use UPI.
FUN FACT
Inspired by the success of UPI in India (where its GooglePay is the second biggest player), Google’s suggestion to incorporate it as a template was accepted by the US Federal Reserve for the recently launched real-time payment system called FedNow.
2020
INDIA STACK
It is rather abnormal for a list of pioneering innovations to feature a governmental initiative. But that is exactly what India seems to have pulled off with the India Stack, its unified software platform to digitise service delivery between governments, businesses, startups and developers.
First off the block was Aadhaar, a unique identity number for citizens. Despite controversies over its data management, Aadhaar is today the go-to identity marker across India.
With Jan Dhan direct benefits using Aadhaar and UPI becoming a popular hit, and the massive vaccination programme success achieved digitally using India Stack as the fundamental, it is well on its way towards its aim of a digitised society. “India’s innovation ecosystem is now one of the fastest growing in the world. As the prime minister said, the next decade can be India’s ‘Tech’ade!” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union minister of state for electronics & IT.
FUN FACT
The Indian government has been conducting hackathons, inviting developers to play and develop more applications using the India Stack open source programme.