Not just papad, pickle and petticoat; rural India can do much more: Impact investor Nagaraja Prakasam

Naga is also the author of the book, Back to Bharat: In Search of a Sustainable Future.

Passionate about appropriate-technology, Naga has contributed to policy design and rural innovation in an advisory capacity with NITI Aayog, NABARD, and the Ministry of Rural Development. He was actively involved in the setting up of the Kisan Mitr platform and is now helping NABARD set up Smart Village Centres in rural India.

Naga spoke to indianexpress.com about his work in appropriate-technology, the learnings from the Kisan Mitr platform, the need to move rural entrepreneurship up the value chain, Smart Village Centres, and his investments in appropriate-tech startups. Edited excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your journey towards appropriate technologies with an impact focus?

Nagaraja Prakasam: I believe that India has three things: problems, people and technology. If you pick up a problem and identify an appropriate technology to solve it, that is where real innovation begins.

When I say technology, I don’t mean the typical ‘Bangalore tech solution’ of developing an app and hoping it will solve some problem. I mean applying science and technology to address a real problem.

Take sanitation. S. Damodaran started Gramalaya in Tamil Nadu four decades ago with the goal of making villages open-defecation-free. He focused on finding a solution to a basic but serious problem.

In a typical household, a toilet is connected to a septic tank. Conventional septic tanks operate on an aerobic model and have a ventilation pipe. But the system does not always break down the waste effectively. After several years, a truck has to come, empty the tank, and take the waste somewhere else to be dumped.

Damodaran questioned this process, and that led him to Ecosan Technologies, which uses an anaerobic approach with twin pits. One pit is used while the other allows the waste to decompose. After a period of decomposition, the material can be used as fertilizer. That is what I mean by appropriate technology.

There is GoCoop, which created a marketplace for weavers, bringing thousands of them onto a platform where they could sell their products online. It is India’s first global online marketplace connecting rural handloom weavers and artisans directly with buyers. It fits into carbon credits and the sustainable fashion requirements. If Elon Musk can make money selling carbon credits, why not Indian weavers?

Then there is Kosha.ai, which is working on traceability in textiles. The company places a device on textile looms to track their geolocation. When a customer scans the QR code at a retail location, they can access information on the product, the specific location of the weaver, and perhaps see a video of the weaver in action.

GoCoop uses this QR-code technology to sell and authenticate its products, while Kosha.ai provides the technology backbone.

Many of my investments follow the same philosophy. I have 34 of them, and the common thread is that they are looking at real problems and asking how tech can be applied appropriately to solve them.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about Kisan Mitr and the learnings from the same.

Nagaraja Prakasam: During the pandemic, I saw lakhs of people walking back to their villages. That was when I received a call from the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, and we began brainstorming about how we could respond to the situation.

We saw an opportunity in this reverse brain drain. If people were returning to their villages, we wanted to empower them with technology so they could contribute to rebuilding their communities.

We began looking at IIT Madras, Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutions, and CSIR laboratories. A great deal of technology had already been developed within these institutions, but much of it was not easily accessible. We started curating those technologies that could offer practical solutions for rural India.

We brought together about 1,000 such technologies on an online platform called Kisan Mitr, where I served as an advisor. Every week, one of the scientists would explain a technology and how it could be used. Some were relatively simple technologies, such as a mobile jaggery-making machine that could be attached to a tractor and taken directly to farms. Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVK) were the outreach vehicles for these technologies.

Kisan Mitr was essentially a portal that brought ICAR technologies together in one place. We started with IIT Madras, which already had the Rural Technology Action Group, or RUTAG. Through RUTAG, IIT faculty and students go to villages, identify problems, and then return to work on solutions.

We built on that model. ICAR came in, followed by startups and CSIR, and gradually they all became part of the same technology ecosystem.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about Rural Smart Village Centers and how it would work.

Nagaraja Prakasam: After the pandemic, we wanted to strengthen Kisan Mitra and take it beyond the online model. That is where the idea of the RUTAG Smart Village Centre, or RSVC, emerged.

The basic idea is to create a physical centre in a village where people can walk in and understand the technologies available to them. Someone would be there to explain the technologies, understand what the person is looking for, and connect them with the appropriate organisation.

For example, if a rural entrepreneur wants to buy a particular machine, the centre can help facilitate the process. If they want to license a technology developed by a research institution, the centre can connect them with the institution and help them understand the licensing process.

The RSVC initiative has now been taken up by NABARD, which will coordinate the establishment of 200 centres across the country.

It is important to distinguish between the original RUTAG at IIT Madras and RSVC. RUTAG is an IIT Madras initiative that has existed for many years. What emerged from the Kisan Mitra outreach model is now being taken forward through the RUTAG Smart Village Centre. The RSVC is essentially the physical, village-level interface.

The purpose is not to create a large building where hundreds of machines are physically displayed. The idea is to create an accessible point where people can understand what technologies are available and learn how they can adopt them.

For example, the first centre we established was in Haryana, where one of the technologies being showcased had been developed at IIT Kanpur. It involves a microbial consortium that is added to cow dung to produce fertilizer.

We do not want the technology to remain inside IIT Kanpur as a research output. It should move through a startup, reach rural entrepreneurs, and eventually become a local business.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: How will the Rural Technology Business Incubator (RTBI) fit into the ecosystem?

Nagaraja Prakasam: RTBI was one of the first incubators at IIT Madras. After Professor Jhunjhunwala retired, I joined the RTBI board. With RTBI, the thinking is that instead of developing a technology first and then looking for someone to take it to the market, why not identify an entrepreneur, give that entrepreneur a problem statement, and involve them in solving it from day one?

Uniphore is a good example of this approach. India has hundreds of languages and dialects, and the problem they were trying to solve was how to bring people who did not speak English into the digital world.

At the time, they were taking weather information available in English, converting it into Tamil and delivering it to farmers through voice calls. This was about 15 years ago. They were working across around 100 dialects and 14 Indian languages, and about 98% of personal enquiries could be handled through the system.

Neurosynaptics is another example. The company worked with Professor Jhunjhunwala and IIT Madras on telemedicine technology that allowed video conferencing to work on extremely low bandwidth. That was important at a time when connectivity in rural India was still poor.

Skillveri is another example. India has a shortage of skilled welders, while training at ITIs requires a lot of consumables. Skillveri developed a welding simulator through RTBI. The simulator is now used by ITIs and by industrial organizations, including cement manufacturers, to train workers.

There is Microspin, which developed a relatively small machine that takes cotton in at one end and produces yarn at the other. The idea was to create decentralized spinning centres so that cotton could be converted into yarn much closer to where it was grown.

At this point, the plan is not to create RTBIs in every IIT. The immediate goal is to go deeper with RTBI at IIT Madras. No other IIT currently has an RTBI in the same form, so we want to strengthen what already exists before thinking about expanding it elsewhere.

Going forward, I see RTBI focusing much more deliberately on identifying problem statements at the beginning and bringing entrepreneurs into the process from day one.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Your thoughts on the ecosystem for appropriate tech in India.

Nagaraja Prakasam: Today, the word “tech” has become overused, particularly in the context of the IT economy. The moment we say technology, people often think of an app. There is a problem, you develop an app, people use it and somehow the problem is expected to disappear.

But many of the problems we are dealing with are much deeper than that.

We have adopted technologies developed for European conditions without asking whether they are suitable for India’s climate and environment. Appropriate technology requires us to start with local conditions and then determine what kind of solution will actually work.

I am also doing a course with Alliance University where, during their first-year summer, all 1,800 students go to villages. We ask them to identify problems and they come back with their observations. Later, they can then start thinking about solutions to those problems.

Digital tech alone cannot solve India’s problems. We need a combination of disciplines and technologies because the problems themselves are diverse.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about appropriate tech ideas which have worked in India.

Nagaraja Prakasam: One of the simplest examples I keep coming back to is the toilet. Someone questioned how a toilet was designed and came up with a different approach.

Waste management is another. Much of the Western world follows a centralised approach to waste. Waste is collected, transported to a central facility and then treated or converted into energy. But before we burn waste, we should ask a more fundamental question: how much value can we recover from it?

One of my investments, SAAHAS, has demonstrated this approach at the IIM Bangalore campus. For the last 15 years, the campus has been working towards becoming a zero-waste campus, and around 98% of the waste generated is now recycled or recovered.

The same principle applies to wet waste. Carbon Masters is another company in the biogas segment. Biogas tech is not new; it has existed for around 100 years. Yet, despite the tech being well known, biogas tech has repeatedly struggled in India.

Carbon Masters looked into how the waste generated in a neighborhood can become fuel for businesses in the same locality.

It identified this problem statement more than a decade ago, when it was not mainstream. Today, rising energy prices and India’s significant dependence on imported energy have made the same technology strategically important. Carbon Masters is now working on much larger plants. Bangalore generates around 6,500 tonnes of waste every day. If a plant can successfully process 900 tonnes of waste, the model can potentially be replicated across the city.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us some appropriate-technology ideas which have not worked in India.

Nagaraja Prakasam: Biogas, despite being a well-established technology, has struggled in India. The tech per se was not at fault. The way it was being operated was the problem. All kinds of waste were being put into the digester. Some of that material was effectively junk from the point of view of the bacteria that drive the biological process. It disturbed the system and, in some cases, killed the bacteria.

The problem was that the technology required a certain discipline in what went into the digester and how the system was managed.

That is an important lesson for India. We often see a technology working successfully somewhere else and assume that we can simply bring it here and deploy it in the same way.

The same principle applies to agriculture. We often look at technologies developed in countries such as Israel or the United States and assume that if something works there, it should work in India.

Take protected cultivation. Whenever we talk about advanced protected cultivation, we often look at Israel. Some of these systems can cost lakhs of rupees. But the environmental conditions are completely different.

Israel is a hot and relatively dry environment. Bangalore may also be warm, but the humidity is very different. If you take a protected cultivation system designed for one set of conditions and put it into Bangalore without adapting it, you can actually create a new problem.

The same question becomes even more important as we begin to use artificial intelligence in healthcare. If we are going to build AI systems for Indian healthcare, the data and knowledge base also need to reflect Indian conditions.

We are working with researchers at the Indian Institute of Science who are looking at building an India-specific healthcare Large Language Model using Indian data. There is a group working on this through an initiative called Translational AI for Networked Universal Healthcare TANUH, focused on the translational use of research and technology.

Because if you simply take a healthcare Large Language Model developed using data from the United States and ask it questions about healthcare in India, you cannot assume that the answers will automatically be appropriate for an Indian patient.

India does not necessarily need to reinvent every technology. But we do need to make sure that the technologies we use are appropriate for Indian conditions.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What are the challenges?

Nagaraja Prakasam: I am particularly happy about what the State Rural Livelihood Missions, or SRLMs, and the government have done in creating a strong base of rural entrepreneurs. But the question is: what opportunities are we actually giving them?

I often joke about the traditional focus on papad, pickle and petticoat. There is nothing wrong with these activities, but we should be able to offer rural entrepreneurs a much wider range of opportunities.

The challenge is to move beyond livelihood support towards technology-enabled rural enterprises. We already have entrepreneurs, institutions and technology.

What we need is a stronger bridge between these different parts of the ecosystem.