The word innovation – even disruptive innovation, is common jargon in business talk today. But how supportive are we of that spirit in Goa?
As Goans, one of our failures has always been that we are prisoners of dreary dead habits. Innovations and out-of-the-box ideas are not only shot down, but more often than not, are suppressed at source. Every now and then we read about college students making a breakthrough ideation in Goa. Just the other day, four students of Goa Engineering College devised a helmet that would not allow a two wheeler to start if its wearer was under the influence of alcohol. Sayish Sancolcar, Mandar Komarpant, Shaunak Kudchadkar and Rahul Harmalkar need all the kudos for this stupendous feat. I am sure there are ideators – and lots of them in Goa, who are toying with concepts that are unheard of. I am equally sure that they are spending hundreds of hours failing at what they aimed to achieve, and rising again to go after it. After all, the patron saint of innovation, Thomas Alva Edison reassuringly told the world, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
A few years ago, research by Natalie D’Silva, a student of Dhempe College of Arts and Science, Miramar, had led to the discovery of a means of power generation which would also help clean up cities. The research was based on the method of harvesting electricity with the help of microbes, generally bacteria, which feed on biomass for their respiration – better known as Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) also known as ‘Bacterial Battery’. I may be ill-informed, but I haven’t heard about her, at least in local media, of late.
It is not surprising that, as a people suppressed by colonial dictats and political upheavals, we were always short of showing our stripes in the world of innovation or even for radical thought. But with the world changing, don’t you think that we should create support systems where whatever little innovative thinkers that we have in Goa, get feted, honoured and funded by the state or institutions? It would be a shame to see that most of them will only get featured in the local papers and media and slowly their discoveries will fade into oblivion.
How many innovators – those learning at our technical and engineering institutes, are being made aware of their talents? How many of them know that their ideas have to be protected under various intellectual property laws? How many of them have been given the blanket of security to just go ahead and innovate and stay assured that the state shall look after them? So here you have a talent pool of people, who grab people’s attention only when some reporter happens to spot their discoveries at a science fair. Or if they are lucky to migrate out of the country to more conducive research-oriented countries. And then we cry ‘brain drain’!
The greatest casualty of our petty political and apathetic governance over the last two decades has been the fact that we have alienated our best brains. And a lucky few have managed to show their talents on better and greener pastures – but unfortunately, not in Goa.
There has been no greater equalizer in the recent history of the world other than the internet. It won’t be ludicrous if one says that it is a level playing field across the globe today – and when it come to ideas, geographies do not matter. But at the same time those ideas have to be generated by humans – us fallible homo-sapiens. And as great artists thrive on attention and fussing – propelling them to perform better, I think it is time that we did the same to our innovators, as well.
It’s not a secret that most educational institutions in Goa are mired in administrative and petty politics among academicians. And the loss is entirely of the ideators.
Maybe it is time for industry to step in. And the benefits could be a two-way street. The innovators do not need crumbs thrown at them. They want respect, attention and top dollar coming their way. And why not?
(Harshvardhan Bhatkuly is a lawyer & writer)
