Anil Gupta stared at his audience—many of them students of IIT Powai who will design complex technological systems—and asked them why, until quite recently, no technological idea was found so women did not have to carry pots of water on their heads.

“Why did it take 2,000 years for the solution?” he asked. And he himself answered. It was because designers had simply not bothered to find the solution, which is quite simple: a jacket with hollow spaces for the water. It saves the woman from the cervical problems caused by keeping a pot of water on her head for the duration of her walk from a distant well in Rajasthan to her house.

A group of engineering students, challenged with the problem, thought of the water-bearing jacket. But would they have bothered of their own accord, Gupta wondered. He was delivering a talk on the inaugural day of TechFest, IIT-Bombay’s sci-tech festival which will end on Sunday.

Or why IIT students, who use bicycles to go round their huge campus, did not come up with a bicycle attachment that generates enough electricity to charge a mobile phone. (In fact, he said, a rural resident has invented this attachment. Being the executive vice-chairman of the National Innovation Foundation, Gupta has seen plenty of innovations.

The Foundation, floated by the Central Ministry of Science and Technology, identifies technological innovations and inventions and promotes them. It helps the inventor, who is often poor and ill-educated, to market his invention and patent it. In its sixth year, it has documented 51,000 innovations from 454 of this country’s 594 districts.

Most innovations are from rural areas, manifestations of ‘jugaad’ at work. ‘Jugaad’ is the Indian improvisational tendency of tinkering with machinery to increase its work capacity. Like the ‘jugaad’ of 65-year-old Saidullah of Bihar, who’s modified a bicycle to travel on water and land.