Professor Anil Gupta: the Founder of Honey Bee Network, World’s Largest Platform for Grassroot Innovators

Over the past three decades, the 59-year-old management Professor Anil Gupta has been giving voice to thousands of unsung innovators across India and other parts of the world. He emphasizes on innovations that improve our ordinary life and believes that the most innovative and powerful ideas for fighting the adversity and poverty don’t come from the giant corporate research labs but from the strong desire to deal with them with courage and positive attitude. To initiate his idea, he began the Honey Bee Network and started visiting the whole country, sometimes on foot with colleagues, in search of the struggle of common people. The journey that he started in mid 80s still continues and he’s come across a vast range of innovations and thousands of grassroot innovators. Through the Honey Bee Network, he’s revealed approximately 25,000 revolutionary inventions – the bicycle-mounted crop sprayer, A device for climbing coconut trees, water walking shoes to walk or skate across a lake, a micro-windmill battery charger, electric paintbrush that never needs to be dipped in a paint can, a hoe powered by a bicycle and many more to deal with the hassles of daily lives. Over the years, he has been successfully promoting the inventions that aim at agricultural reform. Some of such inexpensive but impactful inventions include a makeshift seat to let coconut harvesters rest high up in trees, a more dynamic strain of peppers, a hollow spear to make a hole in a field and drops in seeds.