Innovation as a moral imperative

BOOK REVIEW

- AMRITESH MUKHERJEE

Every morning, across India, thousands of hands descend into darkness.

Sewers don’t clean themselves, though we live as if they do. The infrastructure of our comfort — drains, manholes — functions on that oldest hierarchy of all: Caste. Manual scavengers, belonging to communities marked “untouchable” for millennia, breathe toxic fumes so we don’t have to think about what happens after we flush. Infections, respiratory collapse, cardiovascular damage, death — they’re the terms of employment. On paper, manual scavenging has been illegal since 1993. In practice, it remains India’s open secret, a violence so routine it doesn’t even register as violence anymore.

Rashid, Vimal, Arun, and Nikhil decided to take matters into their own hands. In 2017, they founded Genrobotics with a robot called Bandicoot, a machine capable of cleaning 10 manholes daily without human exposure to toxins. But manual scavengers saw the robot as an existential threat. The founders’ response was to redesign the implementation model, so manual scavengers could become robot operators, their expertise retained while the risk disappeared. The solution has been deployed across multiple states and municipalities. This is what Raghunath Mashelkar and Sushil Borde call More from Less for More: Innovation that doesn’t choose between efficiency and justice.

We live in a country of contradictions. Gated communities with imported marble sit kilometres from settlements without running water. One India orders groceries via app, another India walks hours for drinking water. Can technology do anything to bridge this divergence? Mr Mashelkar and Mr Borde say yes.