Whither rural technologies?

 Learnings from what happened to rural technology activities in India 

Prof D K Subramanian

IISc

"Are we really homo sapiens - wise humans?

Nobody disputes that humans today have a lot more information and power than in the Stone Age, but it is far from certain that we understand ourselves and our role in the universe much better.

Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?"

Yuval Harari    Nexus

Rural technologies, a fancy area in the seventies in India,disappeared. Why?

Indian Institute of Science set up a centre for development of rural technologies called ASTRA in 1974 and a support mechanism called KSCST in 1975 with involvement from the state government. While ASTRA developed technologies, KSCST took it to people and got engineering colleges in Karnataka involved in the development of technologies suited to rural tasks. The focus was on  renewable energy, efficient cooking stoves, mechanised agricultural operations , better water lifting methods , transportation etc. But the enthusiasm disappeared. But the doubt persists - has it become irrelevant?

The first reason why the approach didn't succeed was that I think our understanding of rural problems was weak. That is why focus on rural technologies disappeared from both ASTRA and KSCST by 1985 itself. It is not a fancy subject. That is unfortunate.Is climate change an important subject for ASTRA?

Technologies are not different ,but engineering is different. We didn't focus on engineering. More importantly, technology selection was totally misunderstood.

We had no problem architect in both organizations and so no problem discovery happened.  Only Dhruv Raina was serious about social aspects. None other had social interest. That was a tragedy. We all looked at technologies and not usability aspects. We need to address social acceptability.

What was my learning from ASTRA and KSCSTs experiments and experiences? Our approach was technology centric, not user centric. The belief that we need to develop an inferior technology was incorrect. We tried to improve the existing methods, not go on a different path - a radical path despite knowing that rural people adopted to plastics and radio easily.

When you look at any area you want to develop. How do you go about it?

There is the popular approach. Try to invent a problem based on your perception and knowledge. That is what ASTRA did? It looked at problems perceived by newspapers and some so-called experts. They said - improve agricultural operations, provide better cooking facilities, provide stronger and inexpensive housing ,provide better transport than a bullock cart, better water lifting etc. That was what ASTRA did. The early academic researchers left ASTRA and the in house recruited persons got bored and found climate change attractive.

That popular approach is all wrong. It is a weak perception based, lazy approach. Unfortunately,most researchers follow this approach and conduct extension based improvement research. We don't see breakthrough research. We don't see deep tech coming out of many institutions.

We need to start with perception. Most decisions are unfortunately taken based on ones beliefs ,ideas and understandings. Again, understandings of a person is based on ones knowledge, readings and mappings on the read information with the existing knowledge. Cognition is restrictive and additive, not transformative, not changeable in most cases.

Our knowledge of solutions for problems faced by people is based on a silos approach. We look at many parts but miss the whole . But what I see is that we miss many parts also.

The best approach is to look for problems faced by people and get the best technology solution, none of our ideas and ideals please.So the direction is  go from society to problems to solutions to technology , not the other way.This is crucial but hard. It will make us great researchers and lead to fundamental changes. Wisdom will come.

We need to understand there is no stand alone technology. What we have is a strongly interconnected system. That a practical system has the following subsystems:

Physical system- technology and tasks together.

Energy unit

Control unit

Computer and data

Communications

Marketing and logistics

Culture

People

We normally ignore the last two. All physical systems are socio technical physical systems. We may refer to irrigation, energy, transport, agriculture operations, food materials, but ignore the users. 

Computer systems and software initially ignored users. Then came the user friendly system. The internet and web changed everything. Mobile and social networks focus on people. 21st century saw this shift of developments from industry to user focus. 

Take agriculture. The country had several hundreds of practices and we just ignored them. In those days, we looked at bullock carts and were against tractors. We assumed ownership. But hiring concept changed the scene today. We see lots of tractors and bullock carts are disappearing. Our ideal solution for agriculture was organic fertilizers and pesticides. That didn't succeed. Yield goes down. The farmer goes bankrupt. 

APMC is an important institution - one stop solution provider. We didn't address marketing. I computerized APMCs in the early eighties.

When I designed the 1000 school computerization program for Karnataka, people suggested that I should not go for the latest PCs. But I went for the latest PCs. Similarly, there was opposition to teach MS office. One group suggested to use open source, another to go for non existing Kannada office. I rejected that. Similarly, a strong Kannada group wanted to translate technical terms. I refused and retained English names for easy understanding. Otherwise, storage unit becomes ugrana and computers, calculators become ganaka yantra.

We had issues with broadband in banks during 2000 period. We wanted to connect all branches of a bank to its data centre. It was tough. We found the deep valleys in Himalayas didn't get signals. So we ran cables to the top and connected a VSAT terminal there. So problem centric approach is needed. Choose a technology that is correct for each situation. Don't preach one solution. We may find thousands of solutions. 

To conclude: 

1.Go for inclusive systemic solutions, acceptable to people. Don't go for past inferior solutions.

2.Study a process deeply. Get a good understanding of a society or community. Find gaps in their lifestyle. See how many are affected and get solutions. Solutions can be many, not one, not universal. 

3.Don't push your ideas, your theories . Search for appropriate and sustainable answers. We went for climate change and ignored water pollution.

4.Research focus should change from extension of a known technology to finding problems - discover problems at ground level. Solve the garbage problem.

We need to focus on sociology ,not on technology alone. Find systemic solutions. Systems should not be studied from mathematical perspectives alone.

Thanks Chanakya for starting the discussions