Indian Companies Innovating On Products Aimed At The Poor

wsj.com:

For the farmer who wants to save for the future, one Indian entrepreneur has developed what is, in effect, a $200 portable bank branch. For the village housewife, a wood-burning stove has been reinvented to make more heat and less smoke for $23. For the slum family struggling to get clean water, there is a $43 water-purification system. For the villager who wants to give his child a cold glass of milk, there is a tiny $70 refrigerator that can run on batteries. And for rural health clinics, whose patients can't spend more than $5 on a visit, there are heart monitors and baby warmers redesigned to cost 10% of what they do elsewhere.

Such inventions represent a fundamental shift in the global order of innovation.

Read the whole story: wsj.com

Comments

[bynddrvn5]

Now that India has most of our jobs, Americans living in some of our growing tent cities could use these low cost products from India.

To help pay for these products we could start advertising on late night TV in India, to feed the hungry Americans. "For only a few rupees a year, you can feed this poor American child."

Ah, the new American economy - isn't it grand?

[Chipher]

Don't forget the poor US service workers! Indi.an tele-commuters in Mu.mbai have a solution for that!

[falco]

Wide open consumer market in India and China for corporations (already there with our jobs) to make a killing. They raped America, their motto is now "next". The transfer of wealth to the third world countries has little to do with empathy or the environment and everything to do with fresh markets to exploit. All under the guise of helping the people. Wake up America!

[RightWingMarine]

there was a need and a Capitalist found a way to meet that need.

I suppose we should demand that the workers be paid a living wage (whatever that is) with health insurance with dental and paid sick time. There should also be requirements that only people over a certain age should be free to work and excessive safety features should be required to be instituted. Also the employees should only have to work 35-40 hours per week and their living conditions should be the concern of the employer for some reason. Any additional labor performed after 40 hours should be at an overtime rate and all employees should be "voluntary" members of the union.

At the end of this if the owner of the company (the person that worked so hard to bring it from idea to products that may improve the standard of living for millions) should dare to take a large salary for himself then he should be vilified and hated by those that know how the rest of us should live.

[BowZam03]

Wow, so by your post you have no problem with slave wages, child labor, excessive hours and zero health coverage because the poor owner is trying to make the world a better place by making cheap stuff those same exploited workers could maybe afford? What a twisted Wal-Mart logic you have.

Why shouldn't an ethical business owner be concerned for the living conditions of his or her employees? What ever happened to the days when business owners were proud to provide a decent living to their employees and there was a reciprocal loyalty and respect between owners and employees? You would rather see the U.S. strip away all of those employee and consumer protections so we become another China or India?

[spinns17]

the walmart biz plan is going all over the world.work more, get paid less ,live better.do they have healthcare there ?

[spinns17]

this will make the slumdogs happy.

[Tenjikuronin]

That isn't a real word.....

[hypnotoad72]

So much for BRIC, if the only thing going on is the increasing of tensions between those very countries! :(

[FreedomCorpse]

cost reduction through manufacturing is 'innovation', oh like crippling american workers by outsourcing their jobs to foreign slave wage markets is 'innovation'.

[hypnotoad72]

And don't forget: Americans being compelled to train their H1B replacements:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Americans+train+replacements
(plenty of articles and gripes over that... rightly so.)

Question every stereotype. Pro or con.

[Chipher]

You can't really believe it, until Corporate calls you and tells you to start training your offshoring tele-commuter replacement. H1B ain't nothing, a couple 10,000s a year, compared to the 1,000,000s of 3W virtual services workers on the dark fiber pipeline.
Any job Americans can do on a computer, is going offshore on the Mu.mb.ai Express.

[totalliberal]

What a concept! Building something cheaper so consumers have a choice. Wonder if it will catch on? Can anyone think of a name for it? Maybe we should try it here.

[hypnotoad72]

Only if consumers have sufficiently well-paying jobs; not supplanted by credit cards (you know, what's been going on in America the last few decades: Wages stagnate or drop or are countered by higher costso f living and insurance, while wages go so low that it becomes nigh on impossible to sustain one's own self on them). The sources for the most mundane are readily obtainable anywhere..­.

But Henry Ford understood the concept... A "living wage"... being able to buy what one makes. Especially if one makes it good; as if doing things good is "acceptable" anymore, judging by scores of products everywhere­... (show me a stereotype and I'll break it in 2 attosecond­s...)

[totalliberal]

It was a joke dude.

[sposton]

Great! We need all this stuff as we get poor. We will buy it from India and pay in dollars created by borrowing. We will save so much money we might even be able to pay the interest on our debt. ;-)

[TXfemmom]

I refuse to pay a subscription for that link.

[Agent420]

I would not pay for that POS either!

[ibsteve2u]

lolll...ki­nd of insulting, isn't it?

Having to pay for something now under the same ownership as Faux News, which leads you to suspect that you'd be spending money on a pig in a poke?

It'd be like choosing to buy used cars at the dealership most famous for selling lemons.

[SeconLine]

Force people to live on next to nothing, and someone will come up with a better way to take what little they have.

[klondiker]

That's a rather cynical view, isn't it? A case could be made that it's exactly those kinds of innovations that will allow people to move up from "next to nothing". The cheap car can allow someone to drive his kids to a better school farther away. The cheap fridge can allow someone to sell homemade yogurt and earn a bit of cash. The cheap water purification system can enhance standard of living. And, so on and so forth.

Admittedly, all these changes are being made from within the over-arching capitalist system, without really changing the system itself, but you can't deny the material benefits people are reaping from this, who otherwise wouldn't be a part of the system at all.

[hypnotoad72]

True, the truth is in the middle...

It's just sad that "globalization", which implies "expansion", really means "migration" as it's American and other western countries' citizens who are suffering.

Not to mention this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Americans+train+replacements

[Chipher]

...except there's no infrastruc­ture...roa­ds, water, sewer, power lines ... then creating more gew-gaw gadgets and motorized rikshaws ahead of the infrastructure to support it, would be like Detroit building $200 SUVs before the US Freeway Program, or Sony coming out with 42" digital TV's back in the rabbit ear 1950's ... nowhere. If you've ever seen an alley in 3W with a jungle of electric lines ratnested together to the tenements, or a water pipeline all spiked and tapped and leaking, or sewage running in the streets, then how can anyone imagine the solution to lack of infrastructure is to create more cheap consumer schtuff?

Capitalism is a pandemic terminal cancer that will hollow out the Earth before it's done.

[FoonTheElder]

Like the Tata Nano, most of these Indian produced items are inexpensive because they are cheap productions that lack most of the safety features and quality that have been around for over 50 years. The Indians are also good at big announcements, but less so for delivering what they announce.

"Tata initially targeted the vehicle as "the least expensive production car in the world" — aiming for a starting price of 100,000 rupees or approximately US$2000 6 years ago, despite rapidly rising material prices at the time.

As of August 2008, material costs had risen from 13% to 23% over the car’s development, and Tata faced the choice of:
-introducing the car with an artificially low price through government subsidies and tax-breaks
-forgoing profit on the car
-using vertical-i­ntegration to artificially boost profits on cars at the expense of their materials industries
-partially using inexpensive polymers or biodegradable plastics instead of a full metal-body
-raising the price of the car

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano

[vippy]

Don't fear, pretty soon we will live like most Indians on the streets, too!

[Tenjikuronin]

Most Indians don't live on the streets.

[spinns17]

this is good to know .we might need these cheap things in a few years.but first we have to find a job to buy them.lol