Building community-centric technology from the ground up

India has progressed in adopting technologies and policies for climate-sustainable development, focusing on renewables, energy efficiency and electric vehicles. However, climate adaptation and resilience pose complex challenges. As efforts in adaptation and resilience intensify across the globe, India also aims to leverage its growing technology and innovation ecosystem to address these issues, recognising that clean technologies in adaptation efforts will support sustainable growth.

AGNIi Mission (set up under the aegis of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India executed in partnership with Invest India) has conceptualised and executed various climate adaptation projects for India’s Himalayan Region in collaboration with Uttarakhand State Council for Science and Technology (UCOST), Government of Uttarakhand.^1-4 While the initiative focused on a specific region within the Indian Himalayan Region, it serves as a scalable model to propose new policies mechanisms for enabling better technology adoption for a robust and sustainable development.

Community-centric approach

Engaging with communities is of paramount importance and must be an integral part of any technology intervention initiative. As Nitin Maurya, head of the Dissemination and Social Diffusion Department at the National Innovation Foundation stated in a technical session organised by AGNli last year: ‘Climate change is a global phenomenon but it’s effects are felt mostly at local community level and hence the solutions have to be contextualised for perspective of the affected communities.’ At the outset, it is critical to identify precise problem areas and create a nuanced map of pain-points for the region through extensive community engagement. Further, it is essential to develop a clear understanding of operational intricacies such as local needs and conditions, and of user-personas that offer deep insights into the priorities, backgrounds and needs of decision-makers and technology users across multiple tiers, thereby increasing the likelihood of successful implementation. 

The efficacy of technological interventions is contingent upon their adoption by local communities

For instance, due to the vagaries of climate change, growing traditional crops in the Indian Himalayan Region is no longer viable and hence there is a need for climate resistant varieties or for farmers to switch to growing crops or plants more suited to the climatic conditions. At the same time understanding the demographics of the region becomes crucial – in the mountain regions of India, men typically migrate to the plains for better career opportunities so communities in these regions are made up of mostly women and the elderly. Thus, convening women and their self-help groups along with elderly and local civil society organisations was crucial for success. This collective approach is important to capture the priorities and insights of diverse stakeholders to frame precise pain points and prioritise the most important problems to be solved.

It is imperative for any initiative to start with understanding the needs and motivations of different stakeholder groups, for the technology adoption facilitators to tailor their interventions more precisely, ensuring that the technology adoption process addresses the concerns and priorities of all parties. 

Building technology stacks 

The efficacy of technological interventions is contingent upon their adoption by local communities. The intervention needs complementary technologies to come together and work in tandem. In order to address the multifaceted challenges that affect myriad associated stakeholders, a comprehensive Technology Stack approach is needed. This concept requires that interventions not only exhibit technical proficiency but also align with local contextual dynamics and presents a multi-tiered approach carefully integrating traditional methods with advanced technologies. A technology stack approach moves beyond single-technology solutions to create synergistic combinations of complementary technologies, ranging from advanced solutions to frugal and incremental innovations.

The idea is to collate the insights, information and data from all communities and associated actors and combine it with technology and sector expert’s inputs to build a simple grid of value chain within the existing domain and technology capabilities to address the challenges in each component of the value chain.  This allows for a more holistic and effective implementation of such clean technologies, addressing the complex and interconnected nature of climate change challenges.

For example, farmers’ needs are not limited to farming problems. AI-powered facial recognition systems for cows that use muzzle patterns to identify individual animals, can link the animals to extensive databases of health, breeding and ownership records. Machine vision solutions can monitor bee behaviour and hive conditions that can classify bees entering and exiting the hive, record characteristics such as pollen carried, and analyse data to provide insights on forage availability, colony health and potential pest infestations. Even frugal technology solutions like solar-powered silk reeling machines for sericulture or active packaging sachets to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables are extremely important. 

This holistic strategy aims to address livelihood resilience, optimise resource use and mitigate climate change impacts while fostering sustainable economic growth in the region. 

Test-beds for technology demonstration and interaction

While pain points identification, expert consultations and technology stacks are crucial, a technology must ultimately be placed in the hands of the people who will use it. Everett Rogers, in his work Diffusion of Innovations   emphasised that the perceived attributes of innovations influence their adoption rate.⁵ Demonstrating solutions in authentic on-ground settings is pivotal to their adoption and success. 

Testbeds help demonstrate these key attributes: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability to decision-makers and end adopters. In practice, this goes beyond mere demonstration of a technology and incorporates an ‘adaptive testing’ approach where technologies are iteratively modified based on stakeholders’ feedback, ensuring that solutions are optimised for local conditions to enhance their chances of wide-scale adoption. This adaptive approach can allow innovators to refine and adjust technologies in response to the practical reality, creating a dynamic and responsive technology adoption environment. 

The technology demonstrations organised by the AGNIi Mission revealed a heterogeneous adoption potential across the technological spectrum. This nuanced evaluation informed the development of tailored implementation strategies, addressing potential adoption barriers and optimising diffusion rates among diverse stakeholder groups. The AGNIi Mission’s initiative did eventually lead to the district-level administration creating a dedicated innovation fund to support procurement of select innovations like Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled soil testing and carbon detection kits amongst others. The collaborative spirit and technology orientation fostered by this initiative also led to other private efforts, one of which was the creation of the Himalayan Academy of Science & Technology (HAST). This is a network of academicians, researchers and innovators with a deep interest in the Himalayan ecosystem who contribute towards multi-disciplinary research and development in the region.

Implementing climate adaptation technologies is most effective when it involves collaborative ecosystems rather than isolated solutions. Direct interactions between stakeholders and innovators, coupled with on-site technology demonstrations, significantly mitigate adoption barriers. Establishing sub-regional financing mechanisms at block and district levels is crucial for piloting and scaling localised technological solutions. The initiative’s findings suggest that community-engaged test beds, involving both public and private sectors, could serve as valuable policy design elements. These test beds facilitate hands-on technology engagement, fostering trust and understanding among stakeholders and innovators. Moving forward, it is imperative to integrate technology adoption interventions into comprehensive climate resilience strategies. By leveraging local funding pools, collaborative research networks, and interactive technology showcases—while maintaining adaptability—policymakers can craft more effective and sustainable climate technology adoption interventions.