Barefoot women light up India

A group of poor women in Hyderabad have become solar power engineers. From Asia Sentinel:

Four dark-skinned women in multi-hued saris hunch over a solar power-generating circuit at the National Institute for Rural Development (NIRD) in Hyderabad, fleshing out details about solar lamps and panels for Indian villages. Chennamma, Yelamma, Kalavati and Zayda, all illiterate women in their 30s who previously worked as stone crushers in South India’s quarries, have left the furnace-like heat of their previous jobs to use the sun to a better purpose. This is the Women Barefoot Solar Engineers Association of Hyderabad.

Exploitive employers, 10 hours of backbreaking labor and a long wait in queues to collect a wage of a dollar a day pretty much summed up these women’s bleak existence in the quarries. But today, after the institute’s Rural Technology Park helped train them as solar engineers, the women manufacture and maintain solar lamps and travel across India’s vast rural landscape to install solar power generators.

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Indian inventor who lives in penury

Why does an incredible, awarded and feted innovator live in poverty? BBC’s Amarnath Tewary finds out.

Mohammed Saidullah, a resident of Motihari in the Indian state of Bihar, has received many awards and trophies in the last few years for his innovation.

In 1975, when his Jatwa-Janerwa village was swamped under flood waters - an annual monsoon menace - he pleaded with a local boatman to take him to safety. When the boatman refused to give him space unless he paid for it, the young Saidullah looked for other ways to tackle the floodwater.

Necessity met creativity and in just three days, he made an amphibious bicycle which could easily negotiate the floodwaters.

He modified the conventional bicycle by adding four rectangular air floats to support it while it moved on water. Two fan blades were attached to the spokes of the rear wheel which enabled it to run on both water and land.

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Lifting the veil using a ‘bluetooth burqa’

A Berlin-based artist has invented a digitally-enabled robe that will send an image of a woman’s face — or anything else — via Bluetooth. From Der Spiegel:

A burqa may not be the flirtiest garment ever invented for women. The highly modest head-to-toe robe even shrouds the eyes, so for centuries it’s been difficult for women wearing them to send suggestive signals to men. But now a German designer has debuted a digitally-enabled burqa that can broadcast a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones. Markus Kison calls it the “CharmingBurka,” and says it isn’t forbidden by Islamic law.

A model demonstrated a prototype of Kison’s garment at the Seamless 2008 design and fashion show in Boston, a high-tech fashion event run with support from the Masschusetts Institute of Technology.

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MIT’s Media Lab website has a full-length video of Seamless 2008, a fashion event featuring innovative and experimental works in computational apparel design, interactive clothing, and technology-based fashion.

India’s green revolutionary on wheels

In Mint Lounge, Venkatasha Babu profiles Chetan Kumar Maini, designer and manufacturer of the eco-friendly car called the Reva in India and the G-Whiz in the UK. Later this year he plans to introduce a dramatically revamped model that will will run for at least 150-200km before it requires recharging.

Call it prescience or plain luck. Even before oil prices touched a record $100 (around Rs4,000) a barrel, and it became both “geek chic” and economical to own a green auto, Chetan Kumaar Maini was in the business of manufacturing eco-friendly cars. Maini’s baby, called the Reva in India and the G-Whiz in the UK, can be spotted on the roads of Bangalore and outside hip homes in Chelsea.

We are sitting in the clubhouse of the Karnataka Golf Association, which overlooks a spread of manicured green. An evening breeze blows across the fairways as we sip hot cups of tea. The noise, dust and grime of Bangalore roads are mercifully out of seeing and hearing range.

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Tata’s Nano: An ingenious coup

Critics who focus on cost, environmental, or safety aspects of the Indian automaker’s “people’s car” are missing the point. Harold Sirkin, co-author of ‘Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation’, in BusinessWeek.

The media have been going gaga over Tata, more specifically over Indian automaker Tata Motors’ new Nano, the “one lakh” (100,000 rupees, or approximately $2,500 U.S.) car.

Ralph Kinney Bennett, for example, a longtime car buff, classic Cadillac collector, and for many years a senior magazine editor, hails the new four-door compact sedan as “the next Model T Ford or Volkswagen Beetle.” The Model T, of course, introduced in 1908-exactly 100 years ago-became what auto historians see as “the archetype of the American mass-produced gasoline automobile.”

Writing in the January/February issue of The American, a magazine for U.S. business and opinion leaders published by the American Enterprise Institute, Bennett says, “…the people at Tata know something that others seem to have forgotten. They have proven adept at learning not just the needs but the hopes and desires of their customer base.”

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