Innovation Exhibition (NIF) – Sattvik Food Festival 2018

An Innovation Exhibition is organised at the venue by National Innovation Foundation – India (NIF) and Gujarat Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network, West (GIAN) to bring forth the grassroots creativity before the visitors. Apart from popularization, this exhibition also serves as a platform to obtain feedback on selected technologies from the visitors. This feedback is then used while discussing the value addition plan of the technologies so as to make them market/user friendly. This exhibition also gives some innovators an opportunity to sell their products directly to the customers, get their opinion and thus improve the product. This exhibition has become quite popular among children as well because it showcases many innovations of students. Many other interesting ideas of creative kids and other grassroots innovators are also displayed as posters. These serve as a great motivation for the visitors, as a result of which many decide to support the cause voluntarily to the best of their ability and time. Many a times, technology clearing house, is also organised at the venue where presentations on potential technologies are made before entrepreneurs and investors so that they can pick up technologies of their interest for taking to the market. While much success has not been achieved through this initiative, we have remained hopeful. The innovation exhibition at the food festival also serves an apt opportunity for NIF for knowledge dissemination through newsletters, booklets, posters and pamphlets.

The technologies exhibited by NIF during Sattvik 2011 included milking machine, bed sheet squeezer, house fly catcher, bud chipper, tree climber, domestic sugarcane juice extractor, water cooler, animated t-shirts, embroidery machine, crutch with shock absorber, modified hand pump, walker with adjustable legs, travel bag with folding seats etc. NIF also displayed seeds of some farmers’ developed improved and high yielding plant varieties of crops like pigeon pea, paddy, gram, cardamom, ground nut, bean, wheat guar, moth and kabuli chana. GIAN West also facilitated the installation of the improved wind mill for salt manufacturing at the venue with the help of three students from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Many such wind mills have been installed near Pipavav in Bhavnagar. The salt produced using these windmills was also made available for sale to the visitors.