Questions for Santosh Ostwal

By A.A.K. | MUMBAI

SANTOSH OSTWAL, husband and father of two, lost his apartment in 2001 after quitting his job in Pune to solve an engineering problem he'd been thinking about for twenty years. Today his solution – a mobile-phone adaptation that triggers irrigation pumps remotely – is saving water in India and helping more than 10,000 farmers avoid several taxing, dangerous long walks a day. I talked to Mr Santosh for a podcast earlier this year, but it's worth digging back into the transcript now to help explain the Indian concept of jugaad, an inspired kind of duct-taped ingenuity that employs only the tools at hand.

In 1981 Mr Ostwal, then an adolescent, visited his family's village near Pune during his summer vacation. Every midnight, his 82-year-old grandfather (who had lost a leg to gangrene and walked with a stick) would walk a mile to switch on the water-pump to ensure that his oranges were ready to ship the next morning. Since the water and electric supply were erratic (and allocated to the industrial belt during the daytime), he would make up to ten such trips a night. Mr Ostwal felt a deep desire to help his grandfather, but couldn't do anything about it as a student.

Seven years later, after completing his engineering degree, he visited the village again. The problem had not gone away. He suggested to the farmers that a remotely controlled switch might make their lives easier, and was surprised to hear their reactions.

I will tell you one wonderful thing. Farmers were not accepting this as a problem of theirs. They would tell me that this is routine work for us and our sons. Why do you worry so much? Walking a couple of miles daily is no big deal. What other work do we and our sons have? Let them work hard and appreciate the food that they get at the end of each day!

He was aghast with the explanation but let it pass, since he had a far more measurable problem to deal with. He did a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

There are 3.1 million official connections of water pump sets in Maharashtra alone. The all-India figure is more than 1 billion. While farmers didn't mind too much with the drill of walking up to the farm to switch on their motor pump sets and then head back home, I found that there was a strong resistance to walk back all the way to the farm to switch off their pump sets. A lot of water and electricity would be wasted. A 5 HP motor which wastes 4 to 5 hours of water daily not only consumes upto 1000 litres per day, but also results in soil erosion which decreases the yield… And then in that 15 day period for me, I decided, ‘Yes. This is my career and I am going to make my career in irrigation automation. That's all.' This was in 1991.

He started with a $2 alarm clock. The farmer set a time, and the sound of the alarm fed into an interface that signaled the coil of the pump's starter. It was a user-friendly technique, but the alarm could be set only once; the farmer still had to walk to his fields to switch the pump off. Mr Ostwal would scooter to the fields himself at midnight and take out his multi-meter and oscilloscope, and he began to win the farmers over. But every new jugaad was met with a stern warning from the farmer:

If you mess up, you have to pay up. I've got to water my sugarcane yield this night. If something goes wrong with my pump, you'll have to bear the cost of my loss.

During the day, Mr Ostwal observed farmers, conducted workshops and gathered feedback. And his wife took the night shift in the workshop.

My wife is an electronics engineer. She used to assemble all the things in our bedroom. I used to play the things all over the day on the farm. She used to work during night. I used to come home at midnight or 2 or even 3 o'clock. She would ask me, ‘Tomorrow morning which tool do you want to take away with you?' In my sleep, I would hand over some modifications to her and tell her to make that prototype in time for my early morning visit at 6. And my wife did it at 3 o' clock in the morning with two kids beside her – one is of 3 years and the other of one year.

In 1998, he abandoned the alarm clock and considered a remote control that would use a radio frequency allocated to him by the ministry of communications. He first had to convince the ministry that his remote control was not capable of deploying a bomb and that he could be trusted with it. But this demanded a hefty investment, and he had to acquire licences to operate the technology, which cost up to 50,000 rupees. And then in 2001, running out of money, he realized that the solution didn't have to be that expensive.

For about 9 months, I was not having any bread and butter at all. Me, my wife and my two kids… I was driven out of the house by the house owner and really came on the road in 2002. I was unable to fuel my innovations anymore. Sustainability was totally finished. But (at the time) thanks to mobile phone technology, one fine morning of Ganesh Chaturthi in 2003, I thought to myself, ‘why do I have to go for these licenses? Why can't I try the same technology by using wireless connectivity of the mobile phone? I immediately tried the same technology with wireless connectivity of the mobile and surprisingly, I can tell you within 15 minutes, I got the result using the bulky Motorolla T 180 mobile ha ha ha! So instead of investing in a license, I piggy-backed on the wireless connectivity of the mobile phone. And since the day was Ganesh chaturthi, I chose the name of my service as ‘Ganesh' which over time was changed to ‘Nano Ganesh,' as the mobile phones kept getting smaller in size.

At the awards ceremony in Barcelona this year of Nokia's mobile innovation contest, Mr Ostwal showed a live audience how he could control an electric pump in front of them using a mobile phone in Pune. Nano Ganesh won the grand prize in the contest's emerging-markets division, which drew around a thousand applicants. The device is now being used in Egypt and Australia. Mr Ostwal has incorporated as “Ossian Agro”, and is talking with venture capitalists and trying to find a sustainable revenue model. He admits that his product cannot be patented, and he invites as many players as want to join the market, so long as they are not in it only to make money.

One reason why he cracked this problem, says Mr Ostwal, is that his own family farms, and he's spent more than a decade observing farmers and their routines. Perhaps the urban engineers didn't see this problem because they didn't face it themselves in their walks of life. Trained as an engineer, Santosh Ostwal may actually be a humanitarian.

… initially farmers would laugh at me or sometimes were afraid of me because I would do all experiments, but now my wife who has helped me all throughout gets adoption offers. There are families which want to adopt her! Can you believe that! Haha, I am lucky!