E-Paper
Indian women on top at invention
Several women from India bagged top honours
If men brought the Green Revolution to India, a woman might just bring in the "Evergreen Revolution".
Seema Prakash of India won a prestigious award for that promise in London Thursday. She was among the Top Ten at the Female Invent 2003 Awards ceremony.
The international awards ceremony, which incorporated the Global Special Recognition Awards for Inventive and Innovative Women and also the British Female Inventor of the Year Award, were presented with the support of several international groups.
Among hundreds of proposals, what caught the eye of judges were tiny glass bottles Prakash brought, with something like green beads in them. These were the seeds of the Evergreen Revolution, or saplings rather.
They were in fact cloned saplings. "We are taking cells from good plants, cloning them and producing a new breed of plants," Prakash told IANS. So that the cells of the best cardamom plants have been cloned to yield something like two kilograms per plant in place of the usual 50 grams per plant.
And so with bananas. Prakash has worked at two biotechnology institutions she set up in Bangalore to produce bananas that yield as much as 65 kilograms per plant.
All from those little bottles of what has come to be called Glass Bead Liquid Culture Technology.
"The Green Revolution took care of hunger," she says. "This revolution can take care of nutrition, because it can do so much to make sure people have enough food with good nutritional value."
Indian women were right there on top at the invention awards. Elah Shah who lives in London won an award for using ayurvedic medicines in new combinations to treat skin disorders. "I have patented my medicines and sent them to King's College, and they have found the results to be amazing," she said.
Shah has treated over 12,000 patients, and she is now attached to the Edgware General Hospital in London.
The much-celebrated Rama Anand from Delhi also won an award for turning old tyres into furniture. Rama Anand is now looking for joint venture partners in Britain to market her products and her ideas abroad.
"I have taken out patents in 117 countries," she said.
Behind these Indian women beginning to get recognition at international awards is Chaya Srivatsa, founder of the Guild of Women Achievers in Bangalore.
It is this guild that proposed the names of the Indian women inventors, and which is working to promote the achievements of Indian women at home and abroad.
"It is time we began to have our own national awards for women inventors," Srivatsa said. Her guild plans to work with the Central Social Welfare Board in New Delhi towards setting up similar national awards.
In all, 20 women from several countries were among the award winners at the ceremony that also featured a catwalk. The catwalk showed that women could be models, and also model inventors.
