IIT Bombay

IIT Bombay is an oasis of calm and quietness where the cream of the young Indian intellectual elite comes to secure a economically rewarding professional future. The large campus next to the Powai lake has nice tree-lined streets and neatly tended parks. The large hostels provide good accommodation and facilities to the chosen ones. What is going on on campus has very little to do with the real India . To leave this oasis one just needs to cross the heavily guarded entrance gate. The streets are packed with all kinds of traffic: human, motorized, animal. Adjacent to the campus, a number of growing slums show the other end of the Indian social ladder. There small children play happily in the sewage that runs in the streets. The “luckier” ones are sent to work for food. The less lucky ones end up preys of prostitution and slave labor gangs. No matter how intelligent they are, they will never have a chance to experience IIT from the inside.

CTARA

The Center for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA http://www.iitb.ac.in/~ctara/ ) has spent about thirty years developing ingenious tools to facilitate the work of farmers. One of the projects, which was built on campus, consisted of compound of six adjacent houses with a water tank in the center to collect rain water. A prototype was built on campus, in which each house was built with different materials, but it was destroyed by people from the slums looking for construction materials.

It is interesting to note that except for one case, a metal bullock cart that has had a very limited acceptance (about 50 units have been produced so far), these tools are not attractive to farmers. It is my believe, that most of the academic research projects, in spite of initially being motivated by real needs, are developed disconnected from those who have to benefit from them and consequently take final shapes attractive to researchers but unattractive to the actual final user. The lesson learned here is that it is essential to keep the people who are going to benefit from this project directly involved in the research to make sure that the result will be acceptable.