Uddhab Bharali wanted to be a mechanical engineer. But before he could get a college degree, his father developed asthma and could no longer work.The youth decided to start manufacturing plastic bags to support his family. But the machine he needed cost $12,500, five times what he had in savings. So he built his own.
Twenty years later, he has invented 65 machines designed to do everything from peel garlic to extract the fleshy seeds from pomegranates. Orders -- and appeals for new inventions -- have poured in from as far away as Los Angeles."After I made that first machine, I knew I could do anything," said the diminutive 42-year-old, who still lives in North Lakhimpur, a modest town in India's remote northeast."Now there are a lot of problems people want me to solve."

The effort has had a few big successes.
A penniless cotton farmer in Gujarat state eight years ago invented a machine to extract cotton from unopened bolls, a tedious task women and children had long done by hand. Gupta's innovators network -- a constellation of Indian projects and institutions designed to fund good ideas -- invested $15,000 in developing the technology; today, it is patented in the United States and India and earning its inventor a half-million dollars a year.Another product, an herbal eczema cream developed with input from nine Indian herbalists and traditional healers, has had sales of 300,000 tubes since its launch on the Indian market nine months ago, Gupta said.

New twist on old ideas
A tree-climbing device, fashioned by a coconut harvester in Kerala state, is now sold across India and used as far afield as the United States by biologists studying trees. The device tightens around a tree when a climber steps on it, creating a stable platform."We've sold technology on all five continents," said Gupta, a gray-bearded, soft-spoken professor.Still, turning a good idea into a marketable product remains a challenge. At a recent inventors workshop in Imphal, part of an isolated region near the Myanmar border beset by more than a dozen small-scale insurgencies, a share of the devices on display turned out to be things already invented, including an inverter, designed to store electrical power for use when the power is out.Other participants, many of them with minimal formal education, took old ideas -- like hatching eggs in a temperature-controlled machine -- and worked out ways to achieve them using local materials, such as kerosene lamps instead of electrical power."This is science of the people, by the people and for the people," said Mahendra Sharma, a deputy secretary in India's Ministry of Science and Technology, as he walked among the exhibits.But plenty of ideas were new, including Uddhab Bharali's electric pomegranate de-seeder, which he devised after kicking a pomegranate across the floor in frustration and seeing the seeds fall right out.His sleek, silver machine, the first in the world to extract pomegranate seeds without crushing the casing -- he says -- can process 18 pounds of pomegranates in five minutes. But to improve the volume to make the machine marketable, he needed to get to a ton a day, he said. That would cost $20,000 to engineer, a challenging amount for a poor man to raise in India.

Funding unleashes innovation
"Many people have ideas but no support to turn them into entrepreneurs," said Sidique Siddiki, 18, an Imphal high school student at the conference. "If they can get support, India will develop."Slowly, India's government is realizing that the country's poor might be not just consumers but producers of good ideas. Since 1998, the government has given prizes of up to $24,000 for top inventions, and the president in recent years has handed them out personally.Gupta's network has helped the most promising projects with commercialization grants of $250 to $20,000 and with assistance in patenting the devices or processes.
That has helped spur a flood of grass-roots innovations, from bicycle-powered washing machines and drill presses to new varieties of cardamom, a bulletproof vest made of chewed wheat -- the inventor let the Indian army shoot at him wearing it -- and an amphibious bicycle capable of pedaling through streets and across rivers or flood zones.In a few cases, there's more creativity than the government might want. In the forests of northeast India, scientists at the conference said, insurgents have figured out that by concentrating urine in a particular type of soil, they can produce ammonium nitrate -- a key ingredient in gunpowder.