HYDERABAD: Ranked among the Forbes top ten rural innovators, Chintakindi Mallesham today finds himself at crossroads to find funding for his dream project – the Asu machine project that shares the load of handloom weavers and makes their work faster.
Just when he was about to give it up, crowd-funding platform FuelADream stepped in to raise funds for him. With an aim to raise `3,50,000 by the end of this month, it has so far raised `35,000. Will his project see the light of the day?
“Funding of rural innovations take a long time as it not many tech savvy Indians relate to it. But we believe that people will see how 20 Asu machines can help 20 families and around 80 people indirectly. Not many know that the machine can change the dynamics of the weaver’s lives. Girls, who were previously detained at home to help their parents to weave, now get to go to school because the machines takes care of their work. It is a promising project and we hope it will get the funding by the January end. CSR (corporate social responsibility) experts may find it interesting and impactful,” says Ranganath Thota, founder of crowd-funding platform
FuelADream. The campaign titled ‘Mother of all Inventions’ began on November 29, 2016.
Mallesham remembers seeing his mom do the Asu in the traditional Pochampalli silk saree. Asu is not an easy job as it involves moving one’s hand around semi-circularly arranged pegs or frames, for each saree. This is a painstaking process and it takes about five hours to finish one saree manually.
By the end of the day, after working on two sarees, she would complain about shoulder and elbow pain. The only thought in his mind then was, ‘how can I reduce the pain my mother is going through? He felt the need to invent a machine that would make the Asu job simpler. His machine has helped people in his community go about their job with much less effort and make more sarees at the same time. You have to move your hand a record 9,000 times along those set pegs for each saree.
Being a sixth standard dropout did not help either as people were hesitant to give him loans. He says, “The project was funded by me initially. But after a certain stage, there were a lot of expensive parts that needed to be fit in the machine. When I used to approach people for loans, they wouldn’t help me out as they were sure I would default at repayment. A few people then gave me loans. They used to hound me by coming home every day.” The 4-year-old then moved to Hyderabad and work as a daily wage labourer.
“I have sold more than 850 machines till date.” But he has something to add to this, “The people who have bought my machines were all weavers who were well-off. The Government told that they would provide subsidies, but have not taken any step towards it. Every Government right from the Chandrababu Naidu Government has been promising subsidies, but nothing has materialised,” he rues. Awards and accolades have followed him for his invention. He was given the Amazing Indians Award, 2016 by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi.