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: The Honey Bee Network was incubated by Anil Gupta at IIM Ahmedabad in 1988. The Network uncovers and documents grassroot innovations from rural and small town India. It tries to spread the knowledge and helps the inventors get a fair economic reward for their creativity.

In the last 20 years, Honey Bee has documented in its online database more than 70,000 inventions by innovators in rural India. These include a cotton stripping/plucking machine, a manual milking machine, a coconut tree climbing device, a garlic peeling machine, a device to draw water from wells, herbal remedies, a cowdung powered cellphone

charger, a plow and weeding device that can be attached to a motorcycle, a low-cost cellphone-based switch for household appliances and farm pump sets, a beach cleaner made from an adaptation of a groundnut separator and a walnut peeling machine, among others. The Network has filed for more than 142 patents and more than 20 have been awarded.

Honey Bee gathers ideas by staying in touch with people in rural India. Apart from a continuous stream of ideas that now walk in through the door, the Network conducts Shodhyatras every six months. Basically, a group of networkers led by Gupta travels through selected parts of rural India over several weeks, meeting people, uncovering innovations and recognising and rewarding inventors.

Several companies have come forward to license some of these innovations and commercialise them. The Network thus is able to disseminate the innovations while protecting the intellectual property rights of the inventors and ensuring that they get a financial reward.

So how did the Network come about? Gupta was working in the area of agricultural economics and rural development at IIM in the mid eighties. He spent a lot of time in villages talking to farmers to gather data for his research studies. He would publish his research papers and travel all over the world to speak at conferences. However, he was always plagued by a sense of guilt — he was doing all this but the farmers who gave him the knowledge were getting nothing out of it. He wanted to rectify this.