Dream Think Innovate

Abhishek Shashank

Founder, InnovAccer

As a young entrepreneur I have always wanted to touch the lives of millions of people and create that small positive difference. It is and has always been a dream- a dream I have believed in. And here I am, writing this article as a dreamer and a believer.

The past couple of years have been very exciting. I had the opportunity to work with a global manufacturing giant, develop new technology products, lead a group of engineers, work with marketers to get a few products out in the market, and finally quitting a fabulous job to build a company that could accelerate research and innovation across the globe. During these times, I have had an opportunity to interact with an amazing set of people from various origins, speaking various languages, and having varied beliefs and it is exciting to see how people chase dreams in their own different ways.

When I first started thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, I was lost. I had no direction but immense passion. I wanted to build the next generation technologies, wanted to build schools, wanted to do my bit in politics, wanted to go to a top US university, and lot more.

As I walked down the path of being an entrepreneur. I realized that I was not superman after all and trying to do it all might not really work. I started focusing on what I could do something that no one had done before. I realized that the only way I could be successful was a “disciplined, focused and passionate pursuit of the dream”. Luckily, I found a set of people who shared the vision and are believers, hustlers, technologists, and innovators, all at once. Once I had the people who were ready to take that leap of faith and work towards a dream of creating a company that could create a lasting impact, we started InnovAccer, a Research and Innovation acceleration company.

As we started, we had challenges that every young company faces – acceptability in marketplace – lack of initial capital – lack of talented people to work with us and most importantly our internal fear of “What if”. These are challenges that every entrepreneur faces – I believe what would truly differentiate a successful one from someone who will have to try again is the “focus” on the pointed little problem that you are going to solve.

After hustling for the past few months, we are closer to having identified the problem that we are going to solve. It is an effort to get as streamlined, go as deep, and accomplish objectives as efficiently as possible. What we firmly believe is that this undivided focus and relentless passion are going to create a difference.

For anyone who is trying to build a company that could outlive them. It is challenging for the first few years – you will have to keep running - you will have to keep changing till you find that “sweet spot” – It could be your first shot or it could take you a couple of years – but in any case – if you are persistent and flexible enough you will find it - and when you do – your millionaire smile will tell it all.

Profile:

Abhinav Shashank is the Chief Operating Officer at InnovAccer - who believes that the next generation research will lead to products and services that will change the world. We try hard to accelerate this change. Technology, Data, and Innovation are things we live for. 

On a personal front - he loves philosophy and romanticism. My family and my values are the core of who I am and will go on to be.

In past, he has worked at Ingersoll Rand leading Innovation for the India business after graduating from Indian Institute of Technology.

Daughter’s Dilemma – A Book Summary

 Author Janet White

I learned to read at the age of three.  My family lived in Boston at the time in a small apartment.  The two student teachers who lived upstairs were practicing by teaching my older sister Linda to read, and no-one realized I was eavesdropping until Linda discovered me reading my own bedtime story aloud.  By the age of five at elementary school back in the UK I was wowing my own teachers with my advanced vocabulary.  The other mothers tried to discover my mother’s secret in producing a genius – what did she eat while pregnant with me?

At seven I graduated to junior school and I remember devouring all the books in the tall cabinet at the end of the hall in my first year at the new school.  I loved Enid Blyton’s mysteries and school stories and would read them by flashlight under the bedclothes at night.  Later I moved on to Agatha Christie and the world of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and by the time I entered my teenage years I excelled in creative writing.  However in England, where I was educated, children specialize early and inspired by my father’s example, I chose to pursue the sciences.  My father is a professor of physics, and my two sisters and I all chose to follow in his footsteps, one way or another, starting in physics or crystallography before our careers bifurcated later on.  Thus, at the tender age of fourteen, I stopped writing and focused instead on equations, proofs and theorems.

I remained an avid reader – purely for the pleasure of the printed word – and spent long summer holidays lying in sweet-scented piles of hay in the fields behind our house, with my nose buried in a novel, or lazing on a Cornish beach with a book held aloft, shading my eyes from the sun.  When I went to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, I envied the students majoring in English Literature.  As I cycled from lecture to lecture and labored through practical science classes in the laboratory I wondered what it would be like to sit around and read novels all day and earn my degree that way. Instead, I educated myself by reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and other books that seemed to be on the literary curriculum.  I attended Cambridge in the pre-internet, pre-mobile phone era, and so formed a habit of writing a letter to my mother every Thursday afternoon about my life as a Cambridge undergraduate.  Mummy told me that she kept all my letters and boasted to her friends that she would turn them into a book one day – a daughter’s memoir.

She never got around to writing that book and the letters languished in her bedside drawer until my parents moved to America again and tossed them out, with so much of the flotsam and jetsam accumulated over so many years.

I graduated and went to work as a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry.  After three years at the laboratory bench I realized that equations, proofs and theorems were not enough for me – I craved more human interaction, I was more fascinated by understanding what made people tick than by chemical structures.  I studied for an MBA, apprehensively at first, as I wasn’t sure I was still able to write coherent prose after all those years of charts, symbols and diagrams.  I waited with bated breath for the first year exam results and to my great relief I scored highly.  I could still write!  Thirteen years of scientific training, without exercising my writing abilities, I could still do it!  Post MBA, I changed career and went into strategy consulting.  I loved my new work, especially the travel.  I worked for clients all over Europe – Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, even the Middle East.  During the dot com boom I co-founded a start-up (didn’t everyone back then in the late ‘90’s?) and moved from London to the USA.  I continued my literary education, this time on the American curriculum, by reading all the great American classic books that I could find in the public library – Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, and “From Sea to Shining Sea”.  But in 2001 the economy weakened and for the next decade I struggled with instability in the pharmaceutical and consulting industries.  I started to look for other ways to find fulfillment.  I started reading biographies of famous people – business leaders, writers and musicians – to uncover the secrets of their success.

They say that everyone has a book in them.  I’ve had several ideas over the years for the book I wanted to write.  At one time, it was a cookbook with descriptions of various herbs and recipes featuring each one.  At another time it was a feminist diatribe entitled “Motherhood is for Mugs”.  The ideas kept coming but none of them alone was sufficient for a book, or had been done many times before by other authors.  In 2008 I found myself once again between jobs.  I spent a lot of time networking and over tea one morning started brainstorming a joint book project with a Venture Capitalist friend Killu who like me, was between jobs and dissatisfied with the status quo.  Our book was to be about the reasons why senior level women were leaving their top jobs in Corporate America; we would set up focus groups and interview women of our acquaintance to develop content for the book.  Killu suggested we start a blog to gather ideas, and that is how “Corporate California Women” began.  Fired up with enthusiasm, I drew up a list of topics and started to blog.  After three weeks however I was running out of steam; Killu had got busy with other projects and my blog had failed to draw a single comment from any followers; what’s more, I was out of ideas.  I realized that I didn’t have enough content to write a business book and that’s when the idea of a novel was born – why not write a work of fiction instead?

One of my passions is music; I play the cello.  At the time I was playing continuo cello for a production of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”’ with the La Jolla Renaissance Singers, a madrigal group.  Our conductor, Bill Propp, gave a fascinating pre-concert lecture in which he divulged that in the original story from the Aeneid, Dido doesn’t quietly fade away after singing her famous lament “When I am Laid in Earth”. Instead, after Aeneas deserts her, she builds a pyre from the weapons he left behind and then leaps on to it and burns to death.  I was struck by the story and this was the seed from which the premise of the Phoenix mystery developed.  In my novel, “Daughters’ Dilemma”, the heroine, an archaeologist, stumbles upon the secret of the Phoenix – that the legendary bird is somehow embodied by famous women leaders of history, first Dido and then Joan of Arc, and ultimately Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, all of whom perished in the flames.  In this way my book about women scientists and their careers took on elements of the mystery stories beloved of my youth and acquired an Indian setting.  The section in Cambridge and the concept of letters between a mother and daughter have some autobiographical elements too. Other themes include the many references to birds and also the descriptions of food, which extends to recipes in the back.  You could say that this book contains many facets of, and takes inspiration from many elements of my own life and experience.

I spent about six months researching the book before I started to write; I read thick tomes on modern Indian history, Egyptology, and Joan of Arc.  Writing the book took just over a year, mainly at times when I was traveling on business; I was re-employed by then and working in Business Development which afforded me many opportunities to travel.  Most of the writing was done on long plane journeys and in hotel rooms away from the distractions of home.  I worked out the plot first, as painstakingly as a strategic plan, and then developed my characters.  When the book was complete, I started to contact literary agents, and after receiving some interest, hired an editor, Beverly Trainer, to work with me to polish up the manuscript.  I also attended the La Jolla Writers’ Conference, where I gained some helpful feedback and suggestions for the book, and spent some more time on a more substantial rewrite. 

It’s very satisfying to see the fruits of my labors in print; not only have I created a personal legacy in “Daughters’ Dilemma” but I’ve also learned a tremendous amount about writing and publishing in the process.  I’m currently working on three additional book projects: “Boda Tales”, a set of short stories that paint a picture of contemporary culture in Uganda from the perspective of a motorcycle taxi driver; “Governor and Genesee”, a novel about intersections in the lives of people in a community; and “An African ABC”, a children’s book intended as a fundraiser for a home for street children in Uganda.  I like to think that the varied and multicolored strands of my life and interests entwine to produce their own unique DNA, which in turn spawns my writing.

Janet White is an author, scientist, musician and mentor living in San Diego, California, USA.  She recently published her first novel “Daughters’ Dilemma”, which is available from Amazon.

Kerosene: still a burning issue in Africa

By

Kristine Pearson
CEO Lifeline Energy

Lifeline Energy is a non-profit social enterprise that provides on-demand access to education and information to vulnerable populations.  Lifeline Energy designs, manufactures and distributes solar and wind-up media players and radios for classroom and group listening. It also provides clean energy LED lights to support night-time learning and women’s empowerment.

Lack of access to radio and reliance on poor quality batteries are other forms of energy poverty. Dependency on disposable batteries along with firewood, kerosene, charcoal and candles – energy sources of the poorest – all contribute to environmental degradation and poverty. Since 1999, 500,000 of our radios and media players have provided learning access to an estimated 20 million listeners, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kerosene use by the poor remains a perilous issue across the developing world.  Renewable energy products and services are making in-roads, however, kerosene is still the primary light and cooking source for much of Africa, where Lifeline Energy mainly works. 

Kerosene dousing dreams in sub-Saharan Africa  

Like many girls in Africa, Rose’s dream is to become a teacher.  The shy grade six student revises her homework at a rickety table in a tin shack in a Nairobi slum. A kerosene lamp fashioned from a can of bug spray called a koroboi in Swahili, allows Rose to study for just 15 minutes a night.  The light is inefficient and dim.  The fumes are noxious; the smoke ‘scratches’ her eyes.

In the morning she ‘spits up black’.  She hates kerosene not only because it stinks and makes her feel tired and ill, but because six years ago her younger brother tipped over a koroboi, catching the house on fire killing her mother, father and brother.  To 13-year-old Rose, kerosene is the smell of death.

Unfortunately, stories like this are all too common in Africa.  Exposure to kerosene retards economic progress, poisons children, causes deadly fires, horrific burns and injuries, and death.  This fuel is silently destroying the lives and livelihoods of countless women and children across Africa.

With nearly 900 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 80% have no access to electricity.  Much of the population straddles the equator where it gets dark at night and light in the morning around 6:30 each day.  In addition, many African houses are rough hewn from mud or aluminium and poorly ventilated. Seeing inside is difficult even in daytime.  People don’t use them at night for fear of the dark, snakes, or being attacked.  Of the options available for lighting – kerosene, candles, firewood and batteries – kerosene is the most common.  And because it’s for household use, it’s a woman’s fuel – and woman and children bear the brunt of energy poverty.

Nyeri, a 32 year-old former teacher from Kenya’s Great Rift Valley barely survived the fire that started when a koroboi’s flame caught her skirt. She was eight months pregnant.  Living in a rural area, it took hours for her to be transported to a hospital, which was ill-equipped to deal with life-threatening burns.  In agonizing pain, Nyeri prematurely gave birth to a boy. Having no way to nurse the baby because burns covered half of her body, the baby died.  Badly disfigured, when she was well enough to return home her husband divorced her, kept custody of her children and banished her to her parent’s faraway homestead.  When Nyeri’s parents passed away she was plunged into destitution and now depends on hand-outs to survive.

Masquerading as a benign fuel

There are an estimated 1.4 billion people globally who live without reliable access to electricity, and an additional 1.2 billion who live with intermittent electricity.   If you’re reading this, then electricity is likely the flip of a switch.  The life threatening and profoundly challenging energy issues that the poor deal with every day have until recently been consigned to the periphery.

Wikipedia portrays kerosene as a” diverse and relatively harmless fuel, used mostly to power jet-engine aircraft and rockets.”  Although it briefly glosses over the fact that “at one time” it was widely used in lamps and lanterns, it woefully fails to illustrate the scale of its use in developing countries. It is sold to you and me in a sealed bottle with “caution” and “highly flammable liquid” on the label.  Oil companies and African governments do little to educate consumers on how to use it safely or warn of its perils.

It’s sold informally in market stalls and is bought and stored in disused Coke, water or liquor bottles.  Women even buy it in flimsy plastic bags. 

In South Africa, based on surveys and hospital records, between 1996 and 2001, it was estimated that 80,000 children ingested kerosene per year and 40,000 children developed chemical pneumonia from drinking it.  It’s further estimated that 4,000 children died.  This number has been reduced given South Africa’s aggressive electricity drive over the past 10 years.  That said, what about the rest of sub-Saharan Africa that has nowhere near South Africa’s current 70% electrification, the highest rate on the continent.  The numbers could truly be staggering, but no one knows.  No one is counting.

Celestine, a 12-year-old girl in Rwanda told me that she swallowed kerosene a few years ago believing it to be clean water, something she’d never before seen.  Further, she said that she worries what internal harm was caused by the incident.

What I didn’t know at the time was that kerosene could leave her with lifelong heart problems and respiratory ailments. She is lucky to be alive. Kerosene is a low-viscosity hydrocarbon – which means that Celestine could have choked to death on the fluid or suffocated from the fumes emanating from her belly.  According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, drinking kerosene can cause chemical pneumonitis, which requires several days or weeks on a respirator in a hospital and can become a lifelong, debilitating condition.  African mothers have told me that they give their children milk to drink, if they have some.

Spilling it on the skin can be equally as hazardous.  Women have proudly told me that they rub kerosene on their children’s heads rid them of lice.

Controlled kerosene fires recently undertaken by South Africa’s Paraffin Association revealed that it takes just two minutes for temperatures to reach 1000 degrees C and eight minutes for a corrugated tin shack to burn completely.  For shacks close together, it’s easy to understand why a fire spreads quickly. What chance do emergency services have, even if they are available?

With all the horrific outcomes caused by kerosene perhaps the most heart-breaking are burn injuries.  In South Africa alone, an estimated 15,000 children survive serious burn injuries every year.  This figure does not include the many fatalities or anyone over the age of 12.  Such statistics, however, are hard to come by even in South Africa.  If data were collected over the whole of Africa, this number would surely be staggering.

Burns are the worst type of injuries in terms of trauma because they are both excruciatingly painful and deforming.  Severe burns cause major harm to motor skills and development.  At present South Africa is the only African country that can deal with large numbers of burn injuries. Chris Hani Baragwaneth Hospital in Soweto, houses Africa’s most comprehensive burn unit with just 26-beds.  According to the hospital, most children admitted to the burn unit are under the age of nine.

The Johannesburg’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, claim injuries cost an estimated $US1 million in that city alone. Burn victims usually require multiple surgeries.   Add medical care to the cost of emergency services, loss of time, loss of assets and loss of a house by people who have no insurance, the true cost of kerosene use can never be calculated.

Hundreds of thousands of families have stories to tell like those of Rose and Nyeri who have suffered heart-breaking loss due to kerosene. They suffer in silence under the radar screen and no one is tracking them.  These stories should no longer be ignored or just accepted as unfortunate.  They should be seen as an outrage to the dignity of the human person.

Energy poverty and the gender bias

Since 1999 I’ve headed a non-profit social enterprise called Lifeline Energy.  Over the past five years while in the field in various African countries, I have spoken with hundreds of poor and vulnerable women and children about their household energy use and expenditure.  What was reinforced with every group is that all technologies and the energies used to power them have a gender bias.  There are exceptions, but largely men are in charge of household security and buy batteries for their flashlights.  I knew from years of distributing Lifeline’s solar and wind-up radios that men also buy batteries for radios and tend to control listening access.

In sub-Saharan Africa, kerosene (or paraffin as it’s also known) is mostly a ‘woman’s fuel’. In rural areas a woman walks many miles to buy kerosene at the market. In urban settlements or slums, she buys it in as little as 10c increments or by the tablespoon - all that she may be able to afford.  Because of women’s work inside the home, they are constantly exposed to kerosene and its toxic fumes.

The result is that more than 1.6 million of the world’s poor die each year from the effects of indoor air pollution, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).  This is caused from both cooking and lighting. This photo I took in Rwanda illustrates that if kerosene from a tin can lamp can blacken a wall, it is doing the same to lungs.

All forms of non-renewable energy – kerosene, batteries, candles, charcoal and firewood – constrain economic development.  When added to cell phone charging, fuels for lighting and cooking, energy can consume up to 60% of household incomes in sub-Saharan Africa.  Women are subjected to a grinding cycle of abject poverty, one that is impossible to escape from if you’re spending big amounts on non-renewables.

While visiting rural homes I watched a mother nursing a baby next to a kerosene lamp. She didn’t realise that breathing it is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes, or that two-thirds of all lung cancer victims in developing countries are non-smoking women according to WHO.  One would think with its devastating consequences, kerosene related illnesses, burns and deaths would be tracked and monitored similar to HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB; however, this is not the case.  Well-known illnesses receive donor funding in poor countries whereas energy related illnesses are relegated to a footnote and fall into the non-communicable disease (NCD) category.

Safe kerosene education receives woefully inadequate attention from governments or the oil companies that sell it.  Comprehensive multi-media campaigns in local languages are needed to encourage women to take advantage of alternatives where they do exist and to teach users ways to limit the health risks and exposure where possible.  School programmes should feature energy safety as a mandatory part of the curriculum.

Education advances are severely hampered by the way students must do their homework at night.  Kerosene burns the eyes and throat, making it impossible to study for more than a few minutes.  A record number of children are entering or returning to school in sub-Saharan Africa, yet an unintended consequence is that children are potentially harming their eyes and lungs, and even risking fires and burns, in an effort to earn good grades.

Thrusting clean energy to the top of the international agenda

The health and economic consequences of prolonged exposure to kerosene are so grave that they infringe upon the basic human rights of women and children who have no other viable energy alternatives. It is recognized in Article 25 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family.”  Access to clean water has been singled out as a key factor that will determine the success of the Millennium Development Goals, which doesn’t even mention the word ‘energy’. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution declaring water and sanitation a basic human right, but not access to clean energy.

To propel access to clean energy to the forefront of the international agenda, I believe that it must be declared a basic human right.  Declaring access to energy a human right reorganizes the lens through which the issue is viewed.  It becomes not merely a goal or agenda item, but a substantial imperative to which every individual is entitled.

The UN has declared 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All. By launching UN–Energy, the UN states it is committed to ensuring universal access to modern energy services by 2030. It also aims to bring energy access innovation together with the correct policy to reach a global scale, developing and deploying new and appropriate solutions. These are important steps in the right direction and many ground-breaking initiatives are underway.  Progress on grid and mini-grid electrification projects has commenced, but they often take years to become operational with huge financial investments required.

Solutions already exist. Barriers to the effective delivery of modern energy services must be eliminated. Solar LED lights and supporting energy services, as well as energy-efficient cook stoves have already been developed for these markets. However, often steep duties, as much as 40%, and taxes or VAT varying between 12% in Botswana to 19.35% in Cameroon, making them unaffordable to the poorest.. With appropriate government oversight, reform of subsidies and duties, and equal gender participation in entrepreneurial initiatives transitioning from kerosene to renewable energy will create safer environments and economic opportunities.

Kerosene and energy access are pressing human rights issues that governments and the international community are obligated to act upon with expediency to end the on-going struggle of women and children forced to use kerosene. There are many problems in the world that are extremely complex and difficult to solve. This is not one of them. With the right products, appropriate distribution and access to finance for the poor, the use of kerosene and the energy poverty that it perpetuates can become a thing of the past.

 Profile:

Kristine Pearson is the founding CEO of the award-winning Lifeline Energy, a position she has held since 1999. An international social enterprise based in London and Cape Town, Lifeline Energy provides technology solutions for off-grid learning. Pearson gives voice to women and girls by speaking about and advocating for pressing energy poverty and education issues at UN, World Economic Forum and other global conferences. Previously, Pearson held an executive with a South African banking group and was a consultant specializing in the development of women in business.

Pearson is a Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum and served on the Forum’s Council for Disaster Mitigation and New Energy Architecture. Pearson was named by TIME magazine in 2007 as a Hero of the Environment. She serves on the Women's Leadership Board of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is a lifetime fellow of the World Technology Network and received the 2005 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award affiliated with the Tech Museum of Innovation in California. A graduate of the University of California, Pearson has attended Executive Education at Harvard University and the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University. She has travelled to more than 90 countries, 25 in Africa.

Design for India's Elastic Cities

Anab Jain

Co-Founder Superflux Lab

By 2030, 40% of India's population will live in cities. That's the equivalent of 590 million people, up from 350 million in 2010.

Clearly, the combination of internal migration and population growth will place a unique stress on India's urban infrastructure. Already, plenty of work has been done on the resilience of physical infrastructure: the channels of water supply, sanitation, and power. But what of the city's 'soft' infrastructure; the immaterial flows of data and social relations?

As plans for the digital augmentation of our cities gather pace, we find ourselves wondering how such schemes might be enacted in an Indian context. Given the complex, chaotic and often illegible nature of its urban landscape, and stepping back from the top-down masterplans of Masdar and New Songdo, what would a 'smart' Mumbai look like? What might it be like to live there?

Through the Superflux Lab, we have been attempting to answer this brief with a series of projects that highlight the rich depth of informal services in the Indian city. Ultimately, this will be a tool kit for the networked stealth economy; an environment where service providers operate as urban data nodes, demonstrating entrepreneurial savvy under messy, organic conditions.

This is the idea of an Open Generative City: exploring what it might mean to design services and applications with an emphasis on serendipity, resilience, and a diversity of experience.

Moving beyond ideas of the 'map-as-territory', our initial research has seized on case studies and symptomatic details. We have used rich ethnography to frame our design of 'smarter' soft infrastructure for a rapidly-urbanizing India.


The corner shop selling 'paan' also offers real estate services. Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/rohitrath, The barber offers bespoke 'stock market' updates during a normal service.
If one locates the Indian barber and his service network on the city's map, it might look something like this. He is a datum in the city, a node stretching to cover the nooks and corners of the world around him.
Similarly, if one mapped all these other 'wallahs and wallihs' – the men and women who offer informal services – moving about the city, creating mobile data nodes, the city's map might look something like this: You see how these various actors emerge as points of influence, rather than specific service providers. This could be a local map of soft services and networks, rich in meaning and value for the people who live there.

 Planners, businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers need to recognise the worth of these ‘informal’ networks and services. Though not always operating at the peak of efficiency, these networks are a lifeline of human stories and intangible value
– site of relational exchange, rather than simple transactions.
Photocredit: flickr.com/photos/oneeighteen
As part of this project, we lead workshops on Prospecting Near-Future Cities, guiding participants to explore alternative urban strategies and prototype designs, scenarios and ideas. The following images are from one such workshop held at Singapore's Lien Centre for Social Innovation, as part of the Young Foundation's SIX Programme.

Currently, we are working with planners, technologists and entrepreneurs to further explore this nexus of ideas. If you a;re a brand, NGO, or public institution with a stake in the future of open, creative cities, and would be interested in partnering on this project, we would love to hear from you.


Profile: Anab Jain Founder and Director of Superflux - an Anglo-Indian design practice: based in London, but with roots and contacts in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad. Born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, Anab founded Superflux in 2009. She has a proven track record in design, strategy and foresight for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations.

Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is the receipient of several awards, including the Award of Excellence ICSID, Innovation Award, Chicago International Documentary Film Festival and the UNESCO Digital Arts Award. Her experience and knowledge of design, futurescaping, emerging markets, new technologies and innovation has led her to be invited as a keynote speaker for conferences worldwide. Some of the conferences she has spoken at include PICNIC, WCIT2010, LIFT, SIGGRAPH, EPIC, Design Engaged and FuturEverything.
(Article is reprinted with Author's full permission)

The China Dream

Peggy Liu  

Chairperson 

Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE)

An NGO accelerating the greening of China for a healthier world

The China Dream initiative will re-imagine prosperity and reshape consumerism in China. The goal is to catalyze a new aspirational lifestyle that is innately sustainable for the emergent middle class in China.

The consuming class in China is exploding from 300 million today to 800 million in 2025. For this emerging middle class, the "China Dream" provides an alternative to the unsustainable conspicuous consumption lifestyle of the West.

JUCCCE, an NGO accelerating the greening of China, is the central convener of a growing cross-sector and global coalition of contributors around a three-year plan to reshape social norms through branding of a new lifestyle story and to guide consumer behaviour through policies.

The Need for Sustainable Consumerism In today‘s growing global marketplace, with its ever-diminishing resource stocks, one danger is obvious: demand is outstripping supply.

A worrisome statistic states that if all seven billion people on earth lived like the average
American, we would need five planets to support us.

Here‘s our conundrum: increases in living standards are tightly coupled with growth in resource consumption. China‘s push out of poverty is creating double-digit growth in personal consumption and putting the world on a path to resource devastation (let‘s call it what it is). According to CLSA‘s China macro economist Andy Rothman, ―Chinese consumers are spending freely. Unprecedented income growth is the most important factor supporting consumption.
Over the past decade, real urban income rose 151%, while real rural income rose 111%. During the period from 2005 to 2010, retail sales increased at an average annual rate of 17.6%.

Computer sales rose by a 15% Cagr during 2007-11. Fast
‐food sales rose 19% last year while sales of white goods rose 9% and cosmetics increased by 10%. China is the world‘s fastest growing market for everything from carbonated soft drinks (14% last year) to SUVs (100%).
As Group M‘s video ―n-holdable China‖points out, every three days, two new Starbucks
Open in China. In Beijing, the sales at one shopping mall reached RMB 6B (~USD1B) in 2011.
China is shifting from ‗ade in China‘ to ‗onsumed in China‘ and it is changing the world.

Strategy to achieve Sustainable Consumption: Randall Krantz, Head of Sustainability initiative at the World Economic Forum, says ―here are two parts to sustainable consumption, the production and supply of sustainable products and services, and the consumption and demand for these services. So far most of the business focus tends to be on the supply side.

This is much more within their comfort zone, and within their control. The demand side of the equation is a far more subtle play, yet promises the highest room for improvement for those that can influence and shape it.

The biggest levers towards reducing resource consumption are to drive radical increases in customer demand for sustainable products and to change the way products are used more efficiently. We need sustainable consumerism.

A social movement that changes society‘s attitudes toward consumption requires, however, the largest levels of collaboration of all the measures. The more types of stakeholders are required to collaborate, the harder it is to implement a change.
To be successful in changing social norms, we need a collaborative initiative such as the China Dream and a convening platform such as JUCCCE.

Corporate thought leaders realize that the increasingly constrained resources from which their products are derived reduce their profit margins.
2011 marked a step
‐increase in corporate interest to move beyond the supply chain to influencing consumer behaviour. The China Dream initiative is an actionable path towards this goal. Advertising and marketing agencies want to demonstrate thought leadership about the ‗ustomer of the future‘ to their clients. Getting involved in visualizing The China Dream gives them this advantage. The Chinese Government has set numerical ambitious targets for reducing energy use and environmental protection. China Dream Policy recommendations offer a set of easily implementable nudges and guides that help meet these targets. Chinese Citizens are looking for a different path to harmonious happiness. China Dream allows everyone to be a hero on the path to this aspirational harmonious lifestyle.
The Plan: JUCCCE is simultaneously launching two efforts: (1) Shape social norms by creating and seeding a visual lexicon for the new ―hina Dream‖ & (2) Guide consumer behaviour by introducing local policies.
Jonah Sachs, author of ―inning the Story Wars‖explains why reimagining prosperity is needed:
―wo of the biggest stories driving cultural development right now revolve around ―ationalism‖and ―onsumption‖these combine into the myth of the ―itizen as consumer,‖which was developed at a specific time for a specific purpose.

In the post-war years, America was faced with an economic crisis. We were all geared up to make lots of stuff, too much, in fact. Yet thrifty, war-weary people weren‘t buying enough of the stuff we were making. Marketers were called in to solve the problem, and they did, in a very clever way.

Consumption became the highest expression of individual liberty and national pride.

But, in the long-run, this new cultural myth of the ―itizen consumer‖creates deep anxiety and conflict. People end up building their identity and sense of self-worth around consumption.

The practical drawbacks are many—from out-of-control consumer debt, to declining levels of national happiness, to lack of environmental sustainability. But there are also big cultural conflicts as well.
To solve big issues, like sustainability and climate change, we have to give up part of our identity as the ―itizen consumer‖and find a new story.

But that level of change is extremely difficult for people on such a large scale, especially when the myth has been part of our national identity for so long…as long as we‘re basing our sense of social progress and self-worth on a bad story, we‘re going to keep facing problems in the future.
In creating the China Dream, standard ―ustainability‖vocabulary such as ―reen‖ ―ow
carbon‖ ―co-friendly‖ ―nvironmentally friendly‖is not used. Rather, the word ―ustainability‖is replaced by ―armony‖ Harmony is further defined by ―alance‖ ―low‖ and ―espect‖ These word choices are important because they resonate with Chinese culture and tap into deep traditional Chinese values.
China is in a position where it can learn from this mistake before the emerging middle class falls prey to the ―itizen consumer‖myth by creating an entirely different myth for China‘s middle class to follow— the ―armonious Happy Dream

The power of the China Dream initiative is that it is asking people to make a change as a matter of national identity, rather than as a matter of environmental consequences.

The ―hina Dream‖is more than a sustainable lifestyle- it is creating a national identity that overlays a 5000 year-old culture on top of modern realities. It is giving voice to the ―hina Dreamers‖-the newly minted 800 million middle class.

China’s 12th Five-Year Plan: Sustainability initiatives

Energy

:

Cut energy intensity by 16 percent per unit of GDP, increase non–fossil fuel energy sources from 8.3 percent to 11.4 percent of primary energy consumption.

Pollution

:

Cut carbon intensity 17 percent per unit of GDP, reduce sulphur dioxide and chemical oxygen demand by 8 percent, reduce ammonia nitrogen and nitrogen oxides by 10 percent.

Water

: Cut water intensity per unit of value-added industrial output by 30 percent by 2015.
Forestry:

Increase forests by 600 million cubic meters and forest cover to 21.66 percent.

Profile: Peggy Liu

Peggy Liu, Chairperson and Co-founder of JUCCCE, is an internationally recognized expert on China's energy landscape. JUCCCE is a non-profit organization dedicated to changing the way China creates and uses energy, because a green China is the key to a healthy world. JUCCCE is well-known for its effectiveness in carrying out system changing programs and for fostering international collaboration with China.

She is also an executive advisor to Marks & Spencer on sustainable retailing, a member of the World Economic Forum‘s Global Agenda Council on Sustainable Consumption 2012, an advisor to the Katerva Challenge for innovative climate change solutions.
She served as a member of the World Economic Forum‘s Global Agenda Council on New Energy Architecture 2011, and an energy adviser to the Clinton Global Initiative in 2008.

Peggy was honoured as the Hillary Step for Climate Change Solutions in 2012, a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment in 2008, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2009, the Hillary Laureate of 2010 for climate change leadership, a Forbes "Women to Watch in Asia" in 2010, a Huffington Post "Greatest Person of the Day" in 2011, a top 25 innovative business leaders of China Business News Weekly 2012.

In Chinese press, she has been recognized as a green leader on covers and in features such as Global Times (―Green Goddess‖, Beijing Tatler (―Green Miracle‖, Vogue China ("4 Women Who Will Change the World"), Psychologies (―10 Green Handkerchiefs award‖, L‘Officiel, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Rui Li, Southern People Weekly, Shanghai Daily, The Bund, 21st Century Herald, China Daily, QQ, Sohu.com.

Molecular Gastronomy in Harmony with Nature

Chef Homaru Cantu,

Owner of iNG & Moto Restaurant, Chicago

(Narrative from interview)

"Chef Homaro Cantu, a Portland native, began his culinary journey working in a local fried chicken joint. After high school, Chef Cantu enrolled at the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. During this time, Charlie Trotter’s cookbook became his culinary bible, inspiring the chef to open a restaurant of his own.
Chef Cantu mentions in his interview that if we step back to 50s and 60s, when science was flourishing – scientist were applying science to every other area we were in contact with, but not to food. Applying Alchemy to Cooking according to Homaro is a game changer – a problem solver that has lead him to create disruptive food products in his restaurant whose tastes are completely different.

Following graduation, Chef Cantu began to develop his own culinary style combining his passion for food with a techy approach to preparation and presentation; he became more determined than ever to open a restaurant of his own. In 2006, the 26 year-old Chef Cantu opened Moto Restaurant - popularly known as the "molecular tasting room." It was here where he became best known for his innovative approach to cuisine and developing new dishes."1

"By applying his culinary concepts of melding food with science, technology and art, Chef Cantu and his team were able to create a dining experience unmatched by any other. Chef Cantu views Moto as his laboratory, where using scientific elements such as liquid nitrogen tanks, class IV lasers and a hand-held ion particle gun make regular appearances in Moto’s kitchen. Since opening Moto, Chef Cantu’s edible menus and unique dishes have been celebrated by critics around the globe."2

After 7 years of trial and error, "Cantu and his colleague Roche went on to share with TED’s3 2011 audience the potential uses of "mberry" – the miracle merry that transforms the taste buds of cancer patients allowing them to enjoy eating food by counter acting the metallic taste of chemotherapy. In addition to the artistry and leap of creativity, the miracle berry tablets can address real world health issues."4 Charles Lee, CEO of a company, is providing mberry in US to Cancer patients going through chemo who are affected by the treatment’s side effects metallic flavor in food; using mberry tablets to normalize taste. Cantu said "mberry can help curb famine and hunger by enabling people to enjoy vegetation growing in abundance such as wild plants which are full of nutrients." The mberry tablets could also make it painless for people trying to reduce their sugar intake. Doctor Mike Cusnir from Mount Sinai Medical Center manages the oversight of this initiative.
Homaro explained during his interview, that he and Chef Ben Roche ate foil, metal, rubber and 1,000 other ingredients to study and understand the ability of mberry’s impact on the taste buds. According to him the miracle berry, a fruit containing Miraculin, muted the sour sensors on the tongue showcasing the sweet flavor. Instead of a sour-tasting lemon, a lemon tastes like delicious lemonade. Till this date they have distributed over a 10,000 doses of mberry to patients around the world.

Chef Cantu is committed to changing the way food is seen and coming up with healthy junk food such as donuts with no sugar. His iNG Restaurant’s brand stands for Imagining New Gastronomy – which is exactly what both Moto and iNG Restaurants serve on their menus. Watch Chef Homaro iNG menu in 7 minutes @ http://youtu.be/dT7EHf9yEK0
Profile: Chef Homaro Cantu
Homaro Cantu is an inventor, entrepreneur, chef, and molecular gastronomer. He owns and operates Cantu Designs Firm in Chicago, Illinois, United States as well as Moto Restaurant in Chicago. Chef Homaro Cantu is an internationally recognized chef in the new era of postmodern cuisine known as, molecular gastronomy. He is considered one of America’s most daring chefs and is pushing the limits of taste, texture and technique in a stunning and futuristic fashion.
1 Chef Homaro Cantu bio
2 http://www.kevineats.com/2009_05_01_archive.html 3 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dailydish/2011/03/culinary-adventures-with-homaru-cantu-and-ben-roche-at-ted.html
4 http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9046984.htm

Providing irrigation access to farmers in West Bengal

Dr. Aditi Mukherji,

Senior Researcher, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), New Delhi Office

Aditi Mukherji is the first ever winner of Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application given by the World Food Prize. In this article, she tells us about her work which won her this award.

I started working on groundwater and irrigation issues in 2001 when I joined the IWMI-Tata Program in Anand, Gujarat. As a part of that work, Dr. Tushaar Shah of International Water Management Institute and I designed a survey of groundwater users in South Asia and the survey results surprised me. I realized that groundwater economies in eastern India were very different from the dominant discourse of scarcity and over-exploitation that we generally hear about from rest of India.

This made me curious and I wanted to understand the role of groundwater in agrarian economies of eastern India better. Therefore when I got the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge in 2003, I decided to work on socio-economic and policy, institutional issues in access to groundwater in West Bengal. I have been working on agriculture and groundwater issues in West Bengal since 2003 and the award is in recognition of my several years of work in the state.

Based on my research, I found that after showing high growth in mid 1980s and early 1990s, West Bengal’s agricultural economy slowed down. In recent years, it barely registered 1% annual growth. Groundwater economy contracted too. For example, as per the Minor Irrigation Census, number of groundwater wells declined from by over 1 lakh from 2001 to 2007 – entirely unprecedented in India. This is a paradox given that the same minor irrigation census shows that in 80% of the villages, groundwater is available within less than 10 m and that groundwater levels recover sufficiently after the monsoon season due to high rainfall and alluvial nature of the aquifer. Yet, farmers found it difficult to pump water from aquifers for their crops. Why was this so?

I found that most important problem that farmers were facing in West Bengal was high energy costs for pumping groundwater. This was because of their dependence on diesel pumps and that fact that diesel prices have been increasing quite rapidly since early 2000s. In West Bengal, only 17% of all pumps are electrified, against a national average of over 60%. In states like Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh etc., over 70-90% pumps are electrified. Electrification of pumps would have been an easy solution, especially since West Bengal has been an electricity surplus state for a long time now.

However, I found that farmers faced two main difficulties in getting an electricity connection. First was the Groundwater Act of 2005 which required all farmers to get a permit from the groundwater authority before they could apply for an electric connection. This process of getting a permit was fraught with red tape and corruption. And then, even if a farmer managed to get a permit from the groundwater authorities he would then have to pay the full capital cost of electrification of tubewell. This included cost of wires, poles and transformers and often would come to Rs. 1.5 lakhs and more – much beyond the capacity of most small and marginal farmers owning less than half a hectare of land. So, to sum up, high diesel prices and lack of electrification was the twin problem facing farmers in Bengal.

Basically, the real constrain was getting electricity connection. So, we suggested removal of permits system in all blocks where groundwater situation is safe. We also suggested rationalization of capital costs of initial electrification, but at the same time recommended that metered tariffs for use of electricity must continue. We also suggested that MGNREGA funds should be used in a targeted manner for excavation of ponds in districts with alluvial aquifers for better groundwater recharge. The government has accepted most of these suggestion.

On 9

th November, 2011, vide an administrative order, the Secretary Water Resources changed the law whereby farmers residing in safe blocks and wanting to install pumps with less than 5 HP would no longer require a permit from groundwater department. Similarly, the electricity utility (WBSEDCL) has also come out with a circular saying that farmers would have a pay a one-time fixed cost for electrification and this cost will be around Rs. 10,000 or so. They will of course then continue to pay metered tariff. Here, let me emphasize, that West Bengal has one of the best agricultural electricity governance regimes in India. Here, majority of electricity pumps are metered and farmers pay high electricity bill for pumping groundwater, which in my opinion is a good thing. It sends the right price signal.
With both these policy changes in place, it is expected that farmers will have easier access to groundwater, will be able to intensify their cropping systems, earn better livelihoods and emerge out of poverty. Together these have the potential to drastically change the nature of agriculture in West Bengal and usher in a second Green Revolution. The state has 7 million land holdings, of which 5.6 million are less than 1 ha size and therefore belong to small and marginal farmers. Thus the possible implications for agricultural output and poverty reduction of these two policy changes are tremendous. These policies are also replicable in much of eastern Indian states of Bihar and Assam with similar hydro-geological conditions. By providing timely, adequate and reliable irrigation, groundwater helps in reducing poverty.

Profile of Aditi Mukherji:
Aditi Mukherji is a senior researcher at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and is based at IWMI, New Delhi office. She has a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Cambridge. She specializes in institutions and policies of water resources management and works on groundwater management, energy-irrigation nexus and management of public irrigation systems in South and Central Asia and in the Nile Basin. She has edited two books and has published over 40 research papers in journals and edited books.

She was the Associate editor of Hydrogeology Journal from 2005 till 2010 and regularly peer reviews articles for a number of other journals including World Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Agricultural Water Management, Irrigation Science, Journal of Environmental Management, American Journal of Water Resources, Energy Policy, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Ecological Economics etc. She is currently an executive committee member of the Permanent Consultative Committee on Groundwater set up by the GEF and FAO. In 2012, she received the inaugural Norman Borlaug award for Field Research and Application given by the World Food Prize Foundation. Her work has been widely covered by the media and she has been interviewed by all leading newspapers in India as well as by the BBC, Le Monde and National Geographic on issues related to irrigation and water resources management.