What's cooking in his lab?

A potter who failed Class X is creating innovative appliances such as refrigerators and pressure cookers from clay

He has made earthen pots with filters so powerful that they turn cola into water. He has made a refrigerator that runs without electricity. He has fashioned inexpensive non-stick griddles from clay. Named by Forbes as India's most powerful rural entrepreneur in 2010, Gujarati potter Mansukhbhai Prajapati has spent his life inventing innovative kitchen appliances.

"Initially I thought the products I invent would make rural kitchens more efficient. But over the years, I've realised that they have a greater scope," says Prajapati. Today, of the 30,000 fridges he has sold, only 3,000 were bought in rural areas. The rest sold in cities. Clearly, eco-friendly and energy-efficient appliances have a market not only in resource-poor areas but also in cities.

Prajapati represents India's huge, untapped intellectual potential and what it can achieve, given timely support. A school dropout from a modest, rural family, he is now recognised the world over as a scientist par excellence. It all began when Prajapati flunked his Class X examination. "I had no money to start a business, but didn't want to work for someone else," he says. Eventually, he set up a pottery business with money he borrowed from a local moneylender. "This was my family's traditional craft, but right at the outset, I wanted to do things differently," he recounts.

In 1989, he modified a machine that enabled him to make 600 clay griddles a day, as opposed to 100 a day he could make by hand. The business took off modestly, but Prajapati's fertile brain was already hatching fresh ideas. "As a child, I, like everyone else, drank unfiltered water from the village pond. I began thinking of how to incorporate a filter inside a traditional clay water pot, the matka," he says. His filter matkas began making waves as he demonstrated how they could turn even cola into a watery liquid. Just when things were going smoothly, the massive earthquake of 2001 destroyed most of Prajapati's stock. "A local paper ran a picture of all my broken water filters with the headline 'Broken fridges of poor'," he recounts.

The caption, instead of getting him down, got him thinking how he could really make a 'poor man's fridge'. After much trial and error, 'Mitticool' was born. Based on the principle of evaporation, the clay fridge is cooled by the continuous dripping of water along its sides. As it evaporates, the inner chambers are cooled. "It is cool enough for milk to stay fresh for days and has space to store fruit and vegetables," Prajapati says. With the help of Anil Gupta of the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), Ahmedabad, Prajapati launched Mitticool in 2005. It became an instant hit - its maintenance costs were minimal and the fact that it ran without electricity was a boon for locations where power was in short supply.

At this time, Prajapati had debts of Rs 19 lakh. "Without initial backup, I had to borrow money to work on my fridge prototype," he says. The recognition from NIF came at the perfect juncture. "The timely grant of seed capital enabled me to bear the financial burden," he says. By 2007, Prajapati's reputation as a scientist had been validated by an award from the then Indian president, A P J Abdul Kalam. "Because of NIF I also received a lot of exposure and participated in exhibitions in India and abroad to showcase my works," he says. This assistance gave him the confidence to keep innovating and in 2009, he came up with a clay pressure cooker. "Although it takes as much time as a normal pressure cooker to prepare the food, it retains more nutrition and the food tastes much better," says he. In 2010, the National Geographic channel hailed him as a NatGeo Eco Hero.

"However, by this time, my family had become quite sick of me letting all our money flow like water for my inventions," he laughs. But come to think of it, this isn't a laughing matter at all. The fact is that the biggest hindrance to innovation in Indian handicraft is the sheer cost of researching and developing prototypes. "When I was developing the prototype for my non-stick clay tawa, I broke 150,000 tawas just trying to get it right," Prajapati recounts.

Organisations like NIF are doing their bit to encourage grassroot innovations, but more needs to be done to keep the spirit of innovation alive, he says. "I feel that the government should support inventors like me, for what we do benefits not only us but the whole society," says Prajapati.

Meanwhile, the Class X dropout is enjoying the irony of being invited to speak in several Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management as well as TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences. "Last year, I was even awarded the title of professor by Gujarat Technological University at IIM Ahmedabad. Imagine!" he says. The humble potter has certainly come a long way - an inspiration not only for other barefoot engineers and scientists from villages, but also for the government and funding agencies to invest in rural talent.

To learn more about Mansukhbhai Prajapati and his inventions, visit www.mitticool.in
Next fortnight, the story of a small micro-credit company that has used the peer-to-peer lending model to put a human face to poverty