Industrial and market driven tech are specifically designed to be consumed by a small % of population (say 10-20% in India) that can afford the technologies. Such technologies are mass produced for achieving low production cost and hence high profits, but they operate on the basis of long chains of mineral extraction, processing, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, consumption, waste generation and disposal. Each of the members of this chain have significant undocumented, unchecked ecological, social, economic, regional, state and political consequences, which remain hidden from public and media view. The key factor that is behind the success of mass produced industrial technologies is the minimal diversity practiced by mass monocultures residing in close proximity to in densely populated urban areas.

For the remaining 80-90% of the population industrial tech does not work due to many factors. High diversity of needs varying as per geographic, social, cultural and economic layers creates the major hurdle. The potential consumers having similar needs are also small and thinly spread across large rural areas, often lacking good and reliable transport systems. Sales and repairing networks are also limited in rural areas, thus limiting the acceptance of technologies. Each tech solution needs significant investments in designers and engineers, R&D process, production, and so on and thus solving for ‘small people’ is not profitable for small or big companies.

For those people who can’t afford industrial technologies, their needs mostly remain unmet. Alternative ways of technology practice have significant scope to be revived. Just a few decades back, such local small scale technology production chains were ingrained into communities, makers co-existing with consumers. But these tech cultures have almost been obliterated now. Each locality, each micro-environment has specific needs which can’t be catered to by distant engineers, designers, scientists, manufacturers, who all work for heavy incentives in return, making conventional tech and tech culture practice ineffective in rural areas. With no tech or technologists available to meet local needs, most rural communities are forced to migrate, or imitate mainstream tech cultures with their problematic environmental and social disaster footprints. Or they are forced to settle down with meager or second hand tech, their communities and societies deteriorating day by day against the onslaught of the technically superior populations and their cultures.

As an alternative to conventional practices of technology, there are many technologists and organizations who take interest in solving local unmet technical needs. However good the intention, the external urban trained technologists come with inherent biases and significant powers over the locals to bulldoze local understanding of needs, priorities, and expectations of solutions. After creation of solutions, the remote innovators are not available often for the much needed evolution or maintenance of their innovations. The technology innovation and production knowledge is not fully retained in the community after the innovators move out, which leaves a big gap. Such tech interventions are at the risk of becoming ends in themselves without adding healthily to the day-to-day functioning and cultures of the target community. Having observed and practiced such interventions over a span of about 1.5 decades in various contexts, I no longer think we external designers/innovators are good solution makers to needs of communities and localities where we don’t reside in, where we are not living in close day-to-day proximity to either the problems or the target end-users of our interventions.

So, what is a good tech intervention for a technologically under-served community? Here are some thoughts under the banner of people’s tech that we are thinking about:

1. Creating a good technological ecosystem where makers, innovators and users co-exist (living together, not as seasonal external visitors) in geographical proximity, share common resources, common adversities and thus innovate and consume collectively.
2. Tech absorption depends significantly on enhancing or maintaining social value, rather than just purely utilitarian benefits. The proximity of local innovators to local subcultures would therefore perhaps make better innovations that are in harmony with the social landscape.
3. Creating skilled makers and repairers of tech who form the basis of tech innovation ecosystem, the core idea here being that a good repairer is a good potential innovator.
4. Building local awareness of pitfalls of modern tech based mainstream societies in terms of environmental and social costs. Also building local awareness of local oppressive political structures (intersectionality) and how conventional tech enables these to proliferate than be eliminated. We hope in return that local informed and aware innovators, from intersectional spaces, could then perhaps lead in the correct use of tech to reduce inequities.
5. Creating technologies which are intuitive, where former users become the innovators and hackers for the next generation of the tech product. This is essential so evolution of technology lives in parallel to the evolution of the community. Low-cost, low fidelity, locally manufacturable (mostly), intuitive by design and use, are some of the key words that describe such technologies.

How to build a people’s tech movement?

For building a local active innovation eco-system and good tech literacy, we could go about many ways. I share here one such path:

1. Connecting with local communities and NGOs, surveying and creating an unmet needs list that we can share across NGOs, colleges, governments and other stake holders.
2. Networking with local jugaadu people, makers, engineers, industries, etc to recruit their help.
3. Training and working on live local examples where we could carry out the people’s tech process of identifying problems, studying them, coming up with solutions, testing them all by community participation. There could be 2 paths to such explorations:
   1. Build basic demo prototypes in urban workshops and show to community if the solutions work and are favorable. If community accepts it then make the technologies locally with local innovation potential in mind. This process however has some limitations in terms of expected final outcome of forming autonomous tech innovation groups within local communities, but this is the practical way to begin with it seems.
   2. Brainstorm with local makers, come up with locally made and thought about prototypes, test it locally. This is the best way, but its difficult as without a working example of the process or most parts of the process, local acceptance of the process will not be very effective.
4. Making tools accessible and teaching repair and jugaad to fellow participants. Practice ‘reinventing the wheel’ and ‘repairing the wheel’ as effective learning processes.

As the Chinese proverb says “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” is very apt in this context. Local innovation and tech making abilities are necessary in every community for its welfare and resilience to changing weather, climatic conditions, economics and socio-political needs.