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Stories of innovation in India tend to demonstrate a city-centrism of sorts. Innovation is linked to technological advancements in select 'developed' pockets and those are the most fervently repeated and reported stories in the mainstream. When there are reports on innovation at the grassroots level, the hegemony of urban forces continues as the researchers and people who weave the narrative continue to have urban origins and a detached, ill-grounded perspective on the actual conditions in the rural context.
A top-down model does not do justice to a domain which can significantly uplift emerging economies with problems around the scarcity and management of resources. Consequently, there needs to be more attention diverted to grassroots innovators and they should be integrated into any mainstream imagination of the economy.
As a group of researchers including Sonal H Singh and Bhaskar Bhowmick write in the November 2019 issue of the Routledge journal Innovation, there is a scarcity of literature on grassroots innovation and a lack of empirical studies which explore the conceptual boundaries of grassroots innovation. They note that grassroots innovators who are equipped with traditional knowledge and skills create local, bottom-up solutions for sustainable livelihood and the domain has potential for entrepreneurial opportunities.
This is a pertinent observation, as grassroots innovations are often marked by exceptional organisational acumen, deft deployment of available resources and an immediacy towards the local context. Inventions and developments at the grassroots level can radically boost an economy like India with its consistent race towards managing resources to provide for a gigantic population. A number of factors are crucial in this regard. The first change we require is an alteration in approach towards grassroots innovation. Urban investigators, critics and mediapersons must not operate with biases against rural and local communities and position them as people with creative and informed agencies who contribute importantly towards national growth and welfare. Similarly, any conception of grassroots innovation must not be superficial and focus merely on getting details but should be an attempt to understand and highlight the grassroots story.