Thursday, July 10, 2008

Idea # 4 - The Village Potter

Before I begin - Am just "reporting" here -

A few months ago, i met this guy - An Indian, born and brought up in the US. He had returned to India to do social work for a year. He is my age ( young !! ) and had travelled to a village, about 250 km west of Chennai, India. This village was in the middle of hilly terrain and hence, a trip to the grocery / vegetable store takes more than a day. And none in the little village could afford a refridgerator. Result - The food that people ate usually was devoid of vegetables and most of them were undernourished.

His solution - Low cost "refridgerator".

He designed a "system" that would lower the temperature inside the "system" by 10-15*C compared to the outside temperature.

The System - 2 pots : a large and a small one. The smaller pot is placed inside the larger one and the space between the two is filled with sand. Sand is always kept watered. The resulting evaporation through the pores in the pot caused the cooling and lowered the temperature inside the smaller pot by 10-15*C .

Since the cost of this "system" is just Rs.80 , all the household in the village could afford this system, store the vegetables and eat healthy food.

and.. the village potter is having the time of his life!

(P.S. I meant to write this one months before - but completely forgot about it. Thanks to Abhi for the link to Guy's blog, where he had written about the pot idea ! )

3 comments:

Alpine Path said...

A true entrepreneur! And so ingenious too :)

Mohan said...

Hey KK, not sure if you have also mentioned about this guy Mohammed Bah Abba. Check out this link. http://www.rolexawards.com/laureates/laureate-6-bah_abba.html

Karthikeyan (KK) said...

@ Alpine - Spot on. This guy did this to help people in the village :)
@ Mohan - Yes, have read about Mohammad. Infact, that triggered me to write this post. I met this guy before i read about mohammad. But i forgot to write on this.