Atanu Dey, chief economist at Netcore Solutions in Mumbai and author of the Rural Infrastructure Services Commons (RISC) model and Reuben Abraham (right), director of the Cornell/ ISB Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab at the Indian School of Business make a case for developing urban strongholds instead of attempting to develop all the villages In India.

As they postulate:

India has a choice of futures, say, in 2030. Will the majority of Indians continue to live in 600,000 small villages engaged in near-subsistence agriculture or will they be in living in 600 well-planned vibrant cities (or 6,000 towns of 100,000 population, for that matter) working in non-agricultural sectors and enjoying a rich social and cultural life?

A shift from a rural agro-based economy to a urban oriented industry based economy with its attendant cultural shifts is by no means a new phenomenon. It has happened with regularity in the economic development of many parts of the world. In the case of India, things are made more complex by a history characterized by a traditionally poverty stricken population at the village level and the sheer enormity of size. Imagine that 700 million Indians live in the villages - almost equivalent to the entire population of Europe in 2005 of 728 million!

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A chance meeting in a coffee bar at the University of Sao Paulo led scientists Gehrard Ett and Gilberto Janolio to create what would become the Latin-American leader in fuel cell technology. Today, Electrocell is ready to launch the hydrogen economy in Brazil.


The offices of Electrocell are deceptively minimalist at first glance. Hidden away in the margins of the São Paulo University campus, one would not expect the grey concrete walls of the Technology-Based Incubator Center (CIETEC) to house a company that considers itself to be one of the forbearers of the hydrogen economy revolution in Brazil. Yet this is exactly the venture Gerhard Ett and Gilberto Janólio embarked upon when they brought their respective projects teams together to form a fuel cell manufacturing and commercialization business in 1998.

Gerhard recounts with a nostalgic grin how the company that today is a Latin American leader in fuel cell technology was created due to a chance meeting of a chemical engineer and a battery systems expert in the CIETEC coffee bar – this humble lounge was where Gerhard and Gilberto realized they both had the fuel cell experience and the technical knowledge necessary to enter the nascent hydrogen energy sector.

One of the main advantages of Electrocell is its team’s extensive experience in the technical aspects of fuel cell production and application, as evidenced by the huge amount of handmade technologies lying around the fuel cell office which can range from cell test kits to the occasional hydrogen powered bicycle. The team’s expertise lends them the ability to produce fuel cells that are equipped for a variety of purposes. Electrocell’s patented PEM technology is ideal for commercial use since, unlike with other fuel cell systems, all of the necessary parts and materials are widely available on the open market.

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Guest blogger Patrick Donohue is the Founder of BRINQ and a Senior Consultant at Enterprise for a Sustainable World (ESW), one of a select group of business professionals working at the grassroots intersection of innovation, poverty, and business. He holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. This article first appeared in the BRINQ Workshop.

By Patrick Donohue

"Every time a shaman dies, it is as if a library burned down." - Mark J. Plotkin, PhD

The old caboclo woman stopped abruptly in her explanation of the plant in her hand and stared to the back of our group, at the tall, sun-browned, shirtless man who had just stepped into her garden. “Ele é índio?” the old midwife asked excitedly, “ele entende muito de plantas, ervas, remédios?!” The newcomer had been just about to snap a photo of the scene but the force of old woman’s reaction startled him into almost dropping his camera. He turned to my girlfriend Amber and me with a confused look, “What did she just say?”

I chuckled out loud and translated for him while Amber explained to the old woman that no, our friend Kenny was neither a “native” nor from the jungle, that he was originally from Hong Kong and - as an energy trader on Wall Street – Kenny’s particular knowledge of stocks and plants probably wasn’t quite what the old woman was hoping for. The midwife’s mistake was easy enough to understand though: a dark brown, muscular man with long raven-black hair, Kenny looked like a piece of history stepping out of the jungle. In fact, most of the people we had met during our weeklong tour of riverside communities had made the same mistake about Kenny’s heritage. What surprised me instead about the old midwife’s reaction was that even though practically a medicine woman herself - born and raised in the Amazon - she still seemed desperate to pump an outsider for his knowledge of local plants and medicines.

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Between all the travel and other goings on here, I haven't had my customary quiet time with Bloglines lately.  So I'll be going through my lists over the next couple days and posting up links and excerpts from the past week or two gradually.  Before we begin, however, don't forget that IBM's ThinkPlace Challenge is now open for your contributions!  Check out the press release for all the details, or just browse directly over to the ThinkPlace, register, and starting posting.

1. Ethan Zuckerman on "Ooh, Shiny!" and M-PESA:  Ethan, a Worldchanging colleague as well as the esteemed founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices, blogs over at My Heart's in Accra.  His post last week argues that journalists tend to fall victim to the "oh, shiny!" complex and therefore report tech stories without enough checking.  This leads him to pine after his lost sense of geekery - worshipping the shiny - in lieu of a more appropriate-tech spin on things.  In his words:

In terms of what distracts me, I think M-PESA and other mobile phone cash systems are pretty much the shiniest things I’ve seen lately. Then again, I thought Dr. Amy Smith’s work on making sustainable charcoal was the shiniest thing at last year’s TED, so perhaps I’ve lost my geeky sense of shiny and adopted some new appropriate technology criteria instead. (”Crunchy”? “Useful”? “Dull”?) But M-PESA makes me want to go out and start businesses, which is a classic shiny response.

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