Back here in New Zealand I’ve just been taking my kitchen cupboards apart trying to find a small fitting that seems to have dislodged itself from my pressure cooker – rendering it redundant. Has left me pining for the roving repair-men of India whom I know could sort out my conundrum in a flash.
Come to think of it I’d also like it if these guys graced my neighbourhood with their presence sometime soon as I have an imminent guest so would like an extra pillow and my vaccum cleaner’s been playing up so I just need a cheap broom to get me through to when I manage to have it fixed.
And the gas bottle needs changing soon so would be good if I could SMS this pair to drop by and sort things out. Plus with all the great tomatoes in season I need my knives sharpened so would be timely if the other dude rolled up round now as well.
India’s micro-entrepreneurs contribute to a culture of distribution which is liberated from fixed locations playing a vital role in conveniently providing items of regular consumption at relatively affordable prices. Not limited to informal enterprise, such delivery networks are also utilised by corporates from utility providers to Coca Cola – encompassing both motorised and non-motorised options to service challenging locations from densely populated urban neighbourhoods to rural villages.
Mumbai entrepreneur Deepa Krishnan (who oriented me for my recent Dharavi ethnographic research) comments:
“… Indian consumers are probably the most demanding in the world. We want – no, we insist – on superior service, tailored to our needs, at little or no cost. This of course, is a daunting prospect for anyone supplying anything to the Indian market. But sellers who can understand this mindset and who can tailor their products and services to it, are the ones who will succeed and thrive.”
My buddies over at Box Design + Research in Delhi partnered with John Thackara a while back to compile a rich-media archive of bicycle dependent commerce: Velowala – for the Biennial of International Design at Saint Etienne. [Illustration by Tenzing Dakpa] Alongside a diverse collection of examples they comment:
“The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital.
It is special because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized,
last-mile service delivery.”
In the not-for-profit realm Worldbike highlight how bikes can transform lives – connecting the poor to markets, schools and clinics via their Mobility for Good mantra. Of particular interest is their project at the Kibera slum in Nairobi to develop bike-based technologies and business models that empower local entrepreneurs to earn a living while simultaneously helping address the local garbage problem. Partnering with UN Habitat and local support groups they are devising a system to collect and transport waste from individual dwellings to central deposit sites, where it can be sorted for recycling and disposal. Elsewhere ColaLife proposes that Coca Cola open their distribution channels to transport compact ‘aidpods’ containing items like water purification tablets and oral rehydration salts. Through piggy-backing on Coke’s extensive mobile networks in less affluent countries, ColaLife would aim to contribute to a reduction in infant mortality, improve maternal health and combat prevalent disease. [Images via Worldbike + ColaLife]
But of course there are ways of impacting issues of poverty via commercial endeavors too. Indian industrial heavyweights Godrej look set to use mobile enterprise networks to reach their customers at the base of the pyramid with their affordable, compact refrigerator. Others entering this space of for-profit solutions aimed at meeting needs of the economically challenged are Tata with their Swach water filter and the French multi-national Schneider with its domestic lighting systems under the In-Diya brand. Given that these companies will need to consider the entire product ecosystem in ensuring access to goods, fittings and service of their offerings – one would imagine they will all be including mobile enterprise in their supply chains to reach customers in both dense and dispersed locations. [Image credit: Outlook – India's New Retailers]
You can check out more images on my Mobile Enterprise set on Flickr. Meanwhile back at home… I’m looking for a new craft project that gets me off the computer – maybe a visit from this guy could help?
Related articles:
Mobile Enterprise + Mobile Phone
Mumbai’s Pavement Purveyors (CNN)
A quick spot of cross-posting from my recent interview with Anil Gupta which featured on Design Observer this week.
Anil Gupta serves as senior faculty at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) from where he champions the recognition, respect and reward of those who are knowledge-rich yet economically poor.
Alongside consulting global development agencies he formed the Honey Bee Network in the late eighties which nurtures and cross-pollinates grassroots knowledge, creativity and innovation. Via various platforms stemming from the network – scouting, documentation, validation and dissemination of innovations are pursued while seeking to catalyse knowledge into feasible products and sustainable enterprises.
Meena Kadri
How would you describe your mission across your many initiatives?
Anil Gupta
To enhance the inherent creativity of grassroots innovators, inventors and eco-preneurs while exploring a new paradigm for poverty alleviation that celebrates inclusive development. We focus on devising a knowledge network from village to government level while overcoming the constraints posed by language, literacy and locality. We also facilitate the documentation and cross-pollination of traditional knowledge across India.
Meena Kadri
How do you see these endeavors playing a role in reducing poverty?
Anil Gupta
Most models of development are centered on what the poor don’t have rather than what they have. Some position the poor at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but this does not equate to a lack of knowledge, values and social networks. I prefer to see the poor as a provider than a market — with their limited material resources driving knowledge-intensive, informal innovation. Through providing incubation and development support, patent and intellectual-property-rights assistance, marketing advice and microventure funding, we seek to support the creativity that already exists at the grassroots.
Read the complete interview at Design Observer.
Mitti Cool cookware by Mansukhbhai Prajapati, from Gujarat
Gas-powered iron by K Linga Brahman, from Andra Pradesh
Pressure-cooker coffee maker by Mohammed Rozadeen, from Bihar
Related posts:
Mumbai Markings Enhance Service Design
Mumbai’s Pavement Purveyors (CNN)
The latest Bollywood box-office hit 3 Idiots takes a light-hearted but relevant stab at stereotypical Indian attitudes of education, status and success. The endearing comedy has become the highest grossing national film to date while breaking records for an Indian cinema release in the US, Australia, South Africa and beyond. Noteworthy has been its sustained national marketing strategy which has included online gaming, social media engagement, collaboration with prominent retail chain Pantaloon and the use of its
All is Well theme song by insurance giant Reliance.
I was intrigued by the less lofty and more streetwise use of advertising space on the back of rickshaws across the country – in the form of a sticker which promoted the film while playfully affirming the taxis’ legal capacity of three passengers.
Those who have watched the film already will know that its lead trio are far from idiots. And neither were its marketers who had their workers apply the stickers at petrol pumps – the only place where rickshaws come together between serving the far reaches of urban locales. The drivers had no idea of the nature of the upcoming film but the one pictured above told me that when they mentioned it featured Amir Khan in a comic role that he knew it would be a winner.
Given its spirited celebration of improvised ingenuity, challenging authority and following one’s passions – all packaged in an accessible format for mainstream Indian audiences –
the film definitely fires at full capacity.
Related Articles:
Bollywood Poster-wallahs
Backview Bollywood (Flickr)
Over the last few years I have headed to Ahmedabad’s Old City to shoot the celebration of the vibrant kite festival when locals turn their heads upwards to a sky filled with millions of kites. Here’s a cross-post from my recent contributions to the REculture blog which explores global recycling, repair, reuse and repurpose – particularly by entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid.
In the past I’ve ignored plastic kites at the annual Uttarayan Kite Festival in Ahmedabad. But this year, through my REculture-lens, I paid more careful attention and found that many of the plastic kites are made of printer’s waste from a variety of packaging. Graphic designers and printers amongst you will know how much waste is created in getting prints just right – with numerous mis-registered and colour test sheets being discarded. Such sheets are bought cheaply in bulk from packaging printers and delivered to workshops in Jamalpur which specialise in the re-cultured kites.
While purists turn their noses up at them in favour of skillfully crafted paper kites – those with less money buy these plastic kites because of their lower price, relative robustness and staying power on the battlefield.
And as we’ve seen elsewhere, the re-culture approach doesn’t stop at the product itself. I found a kite vendor on the road-side at the popular Dilli Diwarja kite market that was selling the kites, plus had fashioned a paper-weight from an old brick wrapped in scraps of the plastic packaging sheets. “Free!” he announced as he grinned proudly to onlookers while I photographed his ingenious dual purpose advertising ploy.
Related articles
Uttarayan Kite Festival, India (Flickr)
High Flyers of Gujarat (Guardian: Kite Maker Interview)
Earlier this month I spent time in Delhi with my old pal Arti Sandhu, putting up or exhibition Overlap at the Mocha Arthouse. Arti and I have been intersecting across the globe for a decade now – in New Zealand, India, Hong Kong and the US. Sharing a fondness for hand-rendered, vernacular artforms, we conceived the show around our varied perspectives of Indianess – touching on the desi and diasporic, the traditional and typographic alongside language and locality.
My own work included two series which I designed and had executed by sign-writers in Ahmedabad and exhibited previously at the Glasgow School of Art. The English of India series came from noting that visitors to India are so often surprised by the amount of English one encounters – on the street, peppered through films and even in remote villages. I aimed to capture the localisation of the global spread of English through the flair of local sign-writing.
The second series, Bollywood Soul – A Vernacular Walk of Fame playfully created a set which displays divas and heralds heros of national cinema, employing local portraiture and typographic styles commonly used to decorate rickshaws. I collaborated with a local legend who earns his living painting rickshaw mudflaps from his roadside ’studio’ – who committed his brush to rubber shoe-soles for the project.
Arti grew up in an Army family which meant she covered a lot of ground in India from a young age. A love of drawing and customising her barbie to look more Indian led her study fashion at NIFT in Delhi and later in the UK. Since then she has lectured globally and is currently an assistant professor of Fashion Design in Chicago. Her artworks explore identity and migration and provide insightful perspectives on the eccentricities of the modern and mundane in India and abroad.
On annual visits home to India Arti began to notice the idiosyncratic qualities of everyday life which she had previously taken in her stride. She drew on these observations to create the ‘A’ is for Akshar series in which she re-visits her motherland and language while providing a visual commentary on India through the lens of a migrant.
Exploring cultural baggage and excess baggage, Arti’s Mahila Moments series is inspired by Madhubani folk art. Here she delves into the dilemmas of modern day India, fashion and migration with a love for line, pattern and repetition. Reminiscent of Ganjifa playing cards, the series crosses borders of locality and globalisation in an interplay of what Indian womanhood has come to mean at home and abroad.
Included in the exhibition was a large format poster by New Zealand-based graphic designer and typographer Anton Hart. A few years back he landed up in Bombay on a work sabbatical. Like many before him and many to come, he was smitten. But the touristy tabernacles of Agra and Rajasthan were not what caught his eye. Instead he was enraptured by the truck painters of Bombay and farther afield. His Horn Please typeface and ornaments are a tribute to their flamboyant creativity.
The show Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic is hosted by the good folk at Box Design & Research and will be up at Delhi’s Mocha Arthouse, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj through February, 2010. And check out the type animation for the Arthouse by my former student and flash-master Abishek Ghate.
Related posts:
Viva Vernacular
Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
I first photographed the work of French street artist C215 in Paris in 2007. This week here in Delhi I hit the streets of Karol Bagh to see if I could find any remaining examples of the works he produced in the vicinity late in 2008. It proved to be an ambitious task which led to many alley-way adventures.
Christian Guémy (aka C215: self portrait above in Delhi) resides in Paris where he has developed his distinctive street-art style. Armed with a Masters in Art History from Sorbonne and an arsenal of aerosols plus painting paraphernalia, he hits the streets with persistent zeal. He has taken his skills further afield to Casablanca, Dakar, Jerusalem, Sao Paulo and beyond, alongside gallery showings in Paris and London. He has collaborated with the Norwegian Children at Risk Foundation (CARF) to raise money for their projects in Brazil – where he also visited to give workshops to local youth and make his mark in surrounding favelas.
Back here in Delhi I located a handful of C215’s works which have survived. One old woman in a poor neighbourhood recalls “They brought so much energy to our area with children all crowding round to watch this strange foreign-type painting just for the love of it.”
Guémy gifted some works on paper to various locals plus stencilled t-shirts for young onlookers and boxes for shoe-shine boys. He fondly remembers one shy girl whom he gave a framed work – indeed she was too shy to be photographed by me with the piece but was happy to take it down from it’s proud perch in her tiny home and let me capture it being held by a neighbour.
Along the way I encountered frequent examples of Indian vernacular flair – from rickshaw decorations to juice stall signs – showing that creativity is alive and well in this crowded corner of Delhi… both local and imported.
Related posts:
Street Art International (Flickr)
Street Art Gets Behind the Wheel
Visitors to India are frequently enchanted by the spirited decoration of trucks which traverse the nation. We are immediately drawn to the quaintness of English phrases like Horn Please which are commonly emblazoned on the rear of commercial vehicles.
However we often miss the assortment of Hindi phrases – the most common of which reads Mera Bharat Mahan (मेरा भारत महान) meaning My India is Great. This patriotic declaration was popularised by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in his campaigning efforts to evoke a spirit of modernity across the nation. It went on to become a favoured proclamation of Indian cricket fans. The slogan prevalently graces the tailgates of trucks which cross state and cultural boundaries in a diversely painted salute to national pride.
Sometimes the sentiment is translated into English…
And other times things get a bit jumbled…
Related posts:
Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
Street Art Gets Behind the Wheel
One can find ample instances of mobile phones enhancing the lives of those on low and unpredictable incomes at the base of the pyramid across the world. Today I came across a small yet active example of the advantage of mobile connectivity in the context of my current research endeavors at Dharavi in Mumbai.
Jan Mohammed runs a knife-selling and knife-sharpening enterprise, which he operates from his bicycle, to service the Dharavi-Mahim-Sion area. He conducts business by going door to door in these neighbourhoods and often parks up in one of the busy marketplaces during evenings. Since buying a second-hand mobile phone he has been able to attract the business of local restaurants and caterers who provide bulk sharpening work and have become regular clients via the accessibility his phone assures.
The aspect he likes best about his phone is the prepaid payment method. Having a wife and five children back at his village in Uttar Pradesh means that he makes frequent calls home – but when he is low on money and hasn’t topped up his phonecard he can still receive calls ensuring business. In fact he had just last week paid to replace his knife-sharpening grinder so had no money left for phone credit, yet was still able to receive a lucrative call from a wedding caterer to sharpen 75 knives.
Knife-wallas elsewhere in Dharavi who conduct business without mobile phones.
Related articles:
Pavement Purveyors (Flickr)
Tuned-In
Last week in Mumbai someone kindly explained to me the custom of putting wall tiles of gods from different religions along street facades. They’re positioned at pissing height – and act as a perfect deterrent in a reverent nation.
What do laundry and lunch delivery have to do with my favoured intersection of communication, culture and creativity? Well, in the case of Mumbai’s Dabbawallas and Dhobi Ghats – quite a lot. Via their respective coding systems, both enterprises are able to track items within their service chain to ensure accurate delivery.
The Dabbawalla service entails collection of freshly prepared meals from the residences of suburban office workers from vast reaches of the city, delivery to their workplaces and the return of empty lunch boxes (dabba or tiffin) to its original home – all for a reasonable monthly fee. Delivering over 200,000 lunch boxes each day to workers who have diverse eating habits (often governed by religion) requires an accurate system – especially as each lunch box commonly passes through the hands of at least six men, in quick exchange, on its path from home to office and back again. Most tiffins are collected by bicycle, sorted into destination groups, then carried together on trains and cycled to the offices of their respective customers. In between they are commonly carried on hand pushed carts and large head-balanced trays – all while jostling with chaotic Mumbai rail and road traffic.
With low literacy being an issue for some of the 5000 dabbawallas, they have devised a coding system using colour, symbols, numbers and a few letters which is painted on the lids of the tiffins to indicate the train lines, hub points and destinations at both ends of the delivery cycle. Each part of the marking can be understood by the relevant dabbawalla as the lunch box exchanges hands through the service chain. In the case that a lunch box gets on the wrong path, the code allows it to be set back on the right track – yielding only one mistake per 6 million deliveries according to economic analysis.
The Dabbawalla’s have been operating for over a century and the business continues to grow at a rate of 5-10% per year. When I asked about the effects of the economic downturn I was told with a smile that “the stomach knows no recession.” Their innovative localised system has been studied by business schools worldwide and covered by international media including the New York Times. As a brand strategist I also note an additional factor that contributes to their iconic status in the city: the dabbawalla’s signature Gandhi cap. This further serves as a recognition device between workers at busy exchange points and failure to wear one attracts a fine from their registered co-operative association.
The Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat is the world’s largest outdoor laundry which processes three quarters of a million items daily from households, hospitals, hotels and schools.
With articles to be washed, dried, starched and pressed coming from distant neighbour-
hoods to this central location – they have also developed a coding system to track and assure accurate return. Many customers dispatch their laundry to local hubs which send in bulk orders to Mahalaxmi. Each laundry hub attaches their articles with a scrap of cloth bearing a code penned in indelible ink – indicating the short-form name of their hub and their total number of articles over the recorded individual item number.
Workers in both systems are proud of the value that their services provide to the megacity. Together they exemplify the virtues of bottom-up innovation and entrepreneurship at play in this densely populated urban centre. Most dhobis and dabbawallas are migrants to the city – but in the words of 65 year old dhobi walla, Jan Mohammed [pictured above]: “There’s no city like Mumbai.”
Related links:
You can see and read more on my Flickr sets of Dabbawallas and the Dhobi Ghats
and I have upcoming pieces on both services being broadcast on Radio New Zealand.
