villages as source of creativity and innovations

In India, Villages are conceptualized as sink and not as source of ideas, innovations and entrepreneurial initiatives. The work of Honey Bee Network over last 16 years has demonstrated the potential Indian villages have in terms of generating new innovations as well as utilizing traditional knowledge for survival. Just because an entrepreneurship model has not emerged as yet converting these innovations and traditional knowledge into enterprises at a large scale (though GIANs have done it successfully at small scale), it does not mean that such a model would not emerge. It will require some basic rethinking in our philosophical and ethical basis of conceptualizing rural transformation. President Kalam’s vision of PURA (Providing Urban Facilities in Rural Areas) is one such transformative step. There are several others that we need to build upon. The agribusiness potential through horizontal as well as vertical networking at the level of knowledge systems, institutions and cultural platforms remains to be harnessed. The contribution of science and technology in shifting the production function frontiers, i.e., technological benchmarks has to be recognized as one of the fundamental steps in this transformation. Let us go the villages and treat them as source of innovations.