Speaker 1: Pushkin, I may have Higgins and this is solvable interviews
Speaker 1: with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the
Speaker 1: world's biggest problems. So you know that here unsolvable. We're
Speaker 1: used to having guests who are taking on huge challenges.
Speaker 1: But our guest this episode, Shashy Bulletsoir, is not content
Speaker 1: with just one solvable. He has three. The first is
Speaker 1: electricity access. Today a billion people around the world don't
Speaker 1: have access to electricity, and that number is expected to grow.
Speaker 1: My first solvable is coming up with mechanisms to make
Speaker 1: sure those billion people have electricity. The second is it's
Speaker 1: not electricity that matters, it's what people do with it.
Speaker 1: One of the most important things people can do with
Speaker 1: electricity is refrigeration. Can say perishables, if they're growing fruits
Speaker 1: and vegetables, they can store them and take them to market.
Speaker 1: They can store sensitive pharmaceuticals. Off the seven points some
Speaker 1: billion people in the world, almost a third don't have
Speaker 1: access to refrigeration. I would love to solve that problem.
Speaker 1: The third is the dignity of sanitation and tilets. Today, again,
Speaker 1: over a billion people in the world do not have
Speaker 1: access to clean sanitation. Whether it's its home, whether it's
Speaker 1: in cities where human waste just gets it dumped into
Speaker 1: local waterways. One of my soluables is making sure everybody
Speaker 1: in the world has a decent sanitation waste treatment. CHARGI
Speaker 1: is the CEO of the Institute for a Transformative Technologies
Speaker 1: in California. Its mission is to use technological breakthroughs to
Speaker 1: transform global development, improving access from millions of people to sanitation, food,
Speaker 1: primary healthcare, and electricity. Now, the potential to harness technology
Speaker 1: to create solutions to economic, social, and environmental challenges is massive.
Speaker 1: Anybody with even a passing interest in tech or artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence has probably had that giddy feeling about these huge
Speaker 1: opportunities for developing countries to skip stages that took other
Speaker 1: nations years to get to. And it's totally true that
Speaker 1: frontier technologies today are better, cheaper, faster, and more scalable.
Speaker 1: They're even easier to use than ever before. But technology
Speaker 1: also presents an array of challenges that need to be
Speaker 1: handled with care. And Shashi Bullus where it walks that
Speaker 1: balance beam quite beautifully. He grew up in India and
Speaker 1: he believes his countrymen there should have the agency to
Speaker 1: solve their own issues, and that's a huge part of
Speaker 1: his philosophy today. He passes it on in his work
Speaker 1: in India as well as in Kenya and Nigeria. She's
Speaker 1: work at the Institute for Transformative Technologies focuses on solving
Speaker 1: problems for people living in poverty by using technology, and
Speaker 1: he hits on three solvables in this discussion, but the
Speaker 1: one he gets down and dirty with is sanitation. The
Speaker 1: World Health Organization reports that almost two point three billion
Speaker 1: people worldwide still do not have access to rudimentary sanitation facilities.
Speaker 1: Almost half of India's people don't have toilets at home.
Speaker 1: A good sanitation system can prevent environmental damage caused by
Speaker 1: untreated sewage flowing into rivers, and it can also stamp
Speaker 1: out the terrible health risks associated with open defecation, like
Speaker 1: infectious diseases, under nutrition, and even increased vulnerability to verbal, physical,
Speaker 1: or sexual violence. So there's loads in this conversation with
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, let's get into it. What's your kind of
Speaker 1: point of entry, the kinds of things you're interested in.
Speaker 1: Growing up in India, one of my most distinct memories
Speaker 1: is that we'd have foreign tourists when as foreign typically
Speaker 1: I mean white tourists would come. I live very close
Speaker 1: to Islam, so they'd come take pictures with the poor kids.
Speaker 1: I wasn't myself particularly poor, but lived around them. Then
Speaker 1: they'd go off to their ashram, the yoga retreats and
Speaker 1: so on, and it's very curious what brought them there.
Speaker 1: And when I asked them, they said away here to help,
Speaker 1: which as an Indian kid, made me feel like, wow,
Speaker 1: we must be so incompetent that we can't help ourselves.
Speaker 1: And you know, as I go back to India, now,
Speaker 1: some of the kids just died, right, it's never never
Speaker 1: made it to adulthood. Others did find, but they did
Speaker 1: find on their own. And so this idea of as
Speaker 1: an Indian, I have to do what I can to
Speaker 1: help India became very important to me. At the same time,
Speaker 1: I realized that only Pakistanis can help Pakistan, only Kenya
Speaker 1: can help Kenya, and so it became very important for
Speaker 1: me to have the sense of local empowerment, that we're
Speaker 1: all global citizens and global poverty is a global problem.
Speaker 1: But it became extraordinarly important for me to work in
Speaker 1: the context in which you're finding really good people in
Speaker 1: country and working with them to solve local problems. Describe
Speaker 1: how you got drawn into the kinds of problems you're
Speaker 1: now How did you get interested in those particular issues.
Speaker 1: A few years back I was invited to start and
Speaker 1: institute at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley to
Speaker 1: use the R and D might of the National Lab
Speaker 1: system to address problems related to poverty. And what I
Speaker 1: immediately realized was that this whole technology for good space
Speaker 1: is full of hammers looking for nails. Hey, I've got
Speaker 1: the stabulist technology. Let me go solve problems with them.
Speaker 1: And typically these result in technologies sitting on jobs. They
Speaker 1: make for great media splashes, but otherwise don't really go anywhere.
Speaker 1: So we launched a very ambitious study we call the
Speaker 1: fifty Breakthroughs. Essentially, what are the fifty most important technologies
Speaker 1: required to solve poverty over the next twenty years, and
Speaker 1: our job is to get them to life that fifty
Speaker 1: or some significant subsetup. Yeah you have this list of fifty, Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit more so criteria about what
Speaker 1: it takes to be on the list. What we did
Speaker 1: was methodically went through every major problem that effect poor
Speaker 1: food security, health, education, human rights, gender inequity, digital access, electrification, water,
Speaker 1: and so on, and essentially said, many of these problems
Speaker 1: actually will go away with good policy and good infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But there is a sub class of these problems, so
Speaker 1: which a new generation of technologies is required. Those elogies
Speaker 1: currently don't exist. What are dose Yeah, And then, as
Speaker 1: we did in mapping, we said, well, some of these
Speaker 1: technologies may come to life on their own simply because
Speaker 1: of market forces. So a low cost smartphone, for instance,
Speaker 1: today you can get a fifty dollars smartphone, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure pretty soon you can get a twenty five dollars smartphone.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, you have problems that are so complex,
Speaker 1: problems that don't have strong enough market forces, like a
Speaker 1: milliaria of vaccine. So what we do is we've taken
Speaker 1: a class of problems in the middle where you don't
Speaker 1: have to spend fifty million dollars to solve it. You
Speaker 1: can solve each one with two to five million dollars.
Speaker 1: We also categorize these problems on the basis of commercial interest.
Speaker 1: If this is a problem in which a global company
Speaker 1: can make money solving, chances are it's going to fix itself.
Speaker 1: Again like the smartphone. So that's further that's exactly, so
Speaker 1: two dimensions. Really, one dimension is how complex is it?
Speaker 1: The other dimension is what's the commercial attractiveness. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: it's if it's commercially attractive to global companies like like
Speaker 1: g or Apple, problem is going to be solved. On
Speaker 1: At the other end of the spectrum, there are problems
Speaker 1: it's simply are not financially viable. So a lot of
Speaker 1: things related to human rights, for instance. So we again
Speaker 1: focused in the middle where we said, look, there are
Speaker 1: companies based in Kenya, based in Pakistan, based in India.
Speaker 1: They actually would love to build financially sustainable businesses with
Speaker 1: these technologies, but they don't currently invest the R and
Speaker 1: D to bring those technologies to life. So what we
Speaker 1: do is we take philanthropic money, figure out a way
Speaker 1: to make those technologies to life, demonstrate the financial and
Speaker 1: business viability of these technologies, and then work with those
Speaker 1: companies to launch businesses. So let's start with refrigeration. Walk
Speaker 1: me through. I know nothing about it. My notion about
Speaker 1: refrigeration is a five hundred dollars plug in refrigerator. It
Speaker 1: seems to me at first plush, how on Earth. Would
Speaker 1: you make such a thing practical for a very, very
Speaker 1: poor community. So let's talk about refrigeration in two stages,
Speaker 1: first the electrification, then refrigeration for electricity. The current paradigm,
Speaker 1: at the historic paradigm has been let's build these large
Speaker 1: electric infrastructures, let's have fossil fuel based generation and turn
Speaker 1: the switch on. When we started looking at the electrification problem,
Speaker 1: we realize that if you're a far flung village, it's
Speaker 1: very hard to extend the grid to where you are.
Speaker 1: You have to build what's called a solar minigrid. And
Speaker 1: in India we did some math in terms of the
Speaker 1: three years back, what is the cost of a solar minigrid,
Speaker 1: what is the translate into in terms of per month
Speaker 1: utility bills, and what can people pay If a family
Speaker 1: is earning three to five dollars a day, which is
Speaker 1: not a typical for the average Indian household, the cost
Speaker 1: of electricity with a solo minigrid was twice what people
Speaker 1: can afford to pay. In addition to that, if you
Speaker 1: want to build a solar mitigrate in a village of
Speaker 1: a thousand people, you'll take you two or three months.
Speaker 1: So our mission became can we reduce the cost by
Speaker 1: fifty percent and can we dramatically reduce the installation time.
Speaker 1: So we sought out the three or four people who
Speaker 1: consider it to be the leading experts in the world
Speaker 1: from the developing world, and over the course of two
Speaker 1: and a half years, we built such a system and
Speaker 1: almost on the one one of the questions we asked
Speaker 1: ourselves as great, if you build this technology, who will
Speaker 1: take it to market? And there was one company that
Speaker 1: jumped out Data Power. As you know Data as a
Speaker 1: huge conglomerate in India. They have presence in multiple sectors.
Speaker 1: They are also a company that is a long history
Speaker 1: of doing the right thing, investing in social businesses, thinking
Speaker 1: about profit only as an afterthought, and electrically ality is
Speaker 1: not going to be widely profitable, even if you go
Speaker 1: to Switzerland or Lichtenstein. So they're thinking was can we
Speaker 1: get a company that has staying power that can whatever
Speaker 1: we design procure the stuff using massive economy. The scale
Speaker 1: has the respect of the government and communities around the
Speaker 1: country so that they'll trust them to do the right
Speaker 1: thing and can really move the economic muscle. Put in
Speaker 1: hundreds of million dollars to do this at a massive scale.
Speaker 1: So we brought them to the table in twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: and as of late eighteen, we had built the system
Speaker 1: to their satisfaction. So as we speak, we are in
Speaker 1: the process of launching what would be the largest electrification
Speaker 1: event in history. So they've agreed to do ten thousand villages,
Speaker 1: twenty five million people. We're actually talking about this same
Speaker 1: project in another episode of Solving. So it's lovely how
Speaker 1: these two things dovetail. I'm cused the scale of this.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about one of these solo It's costs
Speaker 1: how much I'll give you a cost in terms of
Speaker 1: per what for a full system which includes the panels,
Speaker 1: the batteries, electronics, and the one to two kilometer grid
Speaker 1: plus smart meters. It costs a dollar fifty per what.
Speaker 1: So for a village of thousand people, it's about forty
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars. Oh wow, that takes me as an
Speaker 1: incredibly low number. It is. It is affordable, but still,
Speaker 1: you know these are very poor people, right, we still
Speaker 1: have to make the math work. So the flip side
Speaker 1: of this is energy efficient appliances, right, because you could
Speaker 1: have electricity at whatever costs you have them at, but
Speaker 1: if you if your appliances are consuming much more than
Speaker 1: they should, your monthly bills go up. Right, So that's
Speaker 1: where energy efficient and affordable refrigation comes in. If people
Speaker 1: were to use an existing fan, in existing run of
Speaker 1: the mill fan, they'd pay much much more than they
Speaker 1: can afford. Certainly, if they would use an existing fridge,
Speaker 1: let's say, let's see got used fridges for one hundred bucks, right,
Speaker 1: there's no way they'd be able to afford electricity. Therefore,
Speaker 1: there's no way they'd be able to afford refrigeration. Do
Speaker 1: these ideas, what are the chances they all trickle back
Speaker 1: to the developed world? For example, you have this modular
Speaker 1: mini solar grid. Why if I'm a rural community in
Speaker 1: North America somewhere, is there a point at which we say,
Speaker 1: can I have that thing that you've already installed in India?
Speaker 1: Does it move the other direction? It can? I don't
Speaker 1: believe the minigrids themselves will, because we're optimizing them for
Speaker 1: people who went three to five dollars a day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so that comes with certain limitations. In the US,
Speaker 1: for instance, people are willing to pay a lot more
Speaker 1: than that. And so I'm sure some version of these
Speaker 1: technologies will come back. There's one that I'm particularly excited
Speaker 1: about that that I'm quite certain will come back. Remember
Speaker 1: we talked about waste treatment. Do you know that earthworms
Speaker 1: love eating human poop? Terms out that one of the
Speaker 1: problems we work on a scanentation and waste treatment, sewage treatment,
Speaker 1: and we had concluded that it's going to be impossible
Speaker 1: going forward to build out that kind of sewage treatment
Speaker 1: for a billion plus people to billion plus people around
Speaker 1: the world, and composting toilets currently in the West are
Speaker 1: ridiculous expensive, ridiculously complicated. Turns out that earthworms actually like
Speaker 1: human waste. But if you simply take a drum of
Speaker 1: earthworms and put human waste in it, built around because
Speaker 1: the matter is so dense, a few British scientists you
Speaker 1: put if I had a I'm not sure I understand this.
Speaker 1: So let's take two tanks. One tank has cowdang. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the other tank has human waste. Cowdang is a lot
Speaker 1: less dense. This is a lot more fibrous material, so
Speaker 1: the earthworms will define in that tank. In the other tank,
Speaker 1: human waste is significantly more dense, right, so they just
Speaker 1: cannot breathe it's not an aerobic process. So some scientists
Speaker 1: in a couple of British universities, I think well Ower
Speaker 1: a decade back, had figured out that if you create
Speaker 1: a layered system, and the way this layered system manifests
Speaker 1: itself in the toilets rebuilding is imagine. Imagine you have
Speaker 1: a tiny outhouse. You're in a village. You have a hut,
Speaker 1: and outside that hut is an outhouse that's let's say
Speaker 1: four feet by four feet and you know, seven feet tall.
Speaker 1: Right behind it is a drum that's three feet in diameter,
Speaker 1: three feet in depth. The bottommost layer is just rocks
Speaker 1: that you'd find locally. Then you've got gravel, which you
Speaker 1: can also find locally, and then sand, which some variation
Speaker 1: of it you can find locally. So that takes up
Speaker 1: about twelve to eighteen inches. Right, then you've got a
Speaker 1: three or four inch layer of the earth rooms and
Speaker 1: some sort of organic matter. Right, So that is the
Speaker 1: digestion mechanism for the toilet. How much do you think
Speaker 1: something that that would cost. It's one kilogram of earthworms
Speaker 1: twenty five bucks. In my drama, I have how many worms?
Speaker 1: One kilogram of worms? Let's say it's a thousand words,
Speaker 1: thousand rights. And I would ask a totally naive question.
Speaker 1: If you start with a thousand worms, how quickly do
Speaker 1: you have more than a thousand worms? Does the population
Speaker 1: sort of multiply? Do they self generate more and more worms? Well,
Speaker 1: the thing about pretty much every species except humans is
Speaker 1: the optimis the population based on the resources I see. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what happens is if you don't use the toilet,
Speaker 1: the population goes down. You can go almost six weeks,
Speaker 1: two months without using the toilet at all, right, and
Speaker 1: even after that the eggs state doornament. So once you
Speaker 1: start using it again, the population grows. So, yes, you've
Speaker 1: got about a foot and a half of available space. Right.
Speaker 1: So let's say a family of four is using this
Speaker 1: toilet with the tiny dram. How long do you think
Speaker 1: it takes to fill up? Longer than one would think?
Speaker 1: Is my answer? Very astute. Yeah, it takes eight years
Speaker 1: to fill up. Because what the worms do is they
Speaker 1: there's obviously law of conservation of masks. They convert a
Speaker 1: lot of it into into C or two, which is
Speaker 1: much better than methane, which is what would happen ordinarily,
Speaker 1: and then they chew up the stuff into tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: little particles, and in the process they destroy ninety nine
Speaker 1: plus press into the pathosions. So essentially it gets washed
Speaker 1: away into the soil. But you wouldn't drink it. But
Speaker 1: if you drank it, drank the affluent, nothing would happen
Speaker 1: to you. Wow. Wait, So what happens is the waist
Speaker 1: goes in the top is it and it filters down? Correct?
Speaker 1: And where are the worms? Are they throughout the base
Speaker 1: or are they? Why is it that the presence of
Speaker 1: this base diminishes the density of the waist. One thing
Speaker 1: it allows the worms to do is they can they
Speaker 1: can spend time wherever they want. If it gets too
Speaker 1: dense above, they can go below. The second thing is
Speaker 1: that by adding these layers you're dramatically increasing the surface area.
Speaker 1: So as the waist filters down, the biofilm gets depot
Speaker 1: a very very large surface area. So whatever pathogens the
Speaker 1: worms don't kill off die off in that process? Is
Speaker 1: the drum in the ground and the and the waste
Speaker 1: is going directly into it? How is this configured? Imagine
Speaker 1: the typical commode and usually in the context you work
Speaker 1: and it's it's a squatting toilet. Right, you have the
Speaker 1: little u pipe that goes from the commode and then
Speaker 1: it dumps under the ground into this drum. Oh see
Speaker 1: the drum is buried. Yeah. Yeah. The point is after
Speaker 1: eight years you might have to revisit this, but in
Speaker 1: the medium to long term you install this and it's
Speaker 1: no must not us. You're not digging up the drum
Speaker 1: at any point. Or that's correct. Yeah, we have run
Speaker 1: into some problems. So two years back, India had horrible
Speaker 1: monsoon range and in one of the villages the worms
Speaker 1: drowned simply because there was two feet of standing water
Speaker 1: for a couple of weeks. So things like that can happen.
Speaker 1: How do you know when all your worms are drowned?
Speaker 1: Does it start to back up? It starts to smell.
Speaker 1: One of the really good things about these toilets is
Speaker 1: that there's no smell. They're't of lives. In fact, most
Speaker 1: of the users they don't care about the pathrision destruction value.
Speaker 1: What they care about is, hey, wow, I can have
Speaker 1: a toilet that doesn't smell. How can it not smell
Speaker 1: simply because of the biological process here right, So I
Speaker 1: have this video that I love showing essentially it's a
Speaker 1: camera in one of these drums, and it's over the
Speaker 1: course of twenty hours, and if you just look at
Speaker 1: the footage at normal speed, you don't see anything. What
Speaker 1: you do notice is that a couple of hours after
Speaker 1: somebody defecates, the stuff disappears. If you significantly increase a speed,
Speaker 1: what you see is that the earthworms are doing what
Speaker 1: earthworms do, which is they're rolling the soil over right.
Speaker 1: And so as a result of that, within two hours
Speaker 1: after somebody defecates, the stuff is actually already better than soil.
Speaker 1: How widely has this system been deployed in India? On
Speaker 1: one hand, it is the most widely said linked to
Speaker 1: alet technology for the four On the other hand, it's
Speaker 1: a tiny number. It's like seven thousand or so, and
Speaker 1: we've been figuring out one of two directions to going.
Speaker 1: Turns out that there's a much larger scale version of
Speaker 1: this that we've used for treating raw sewage so as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, and a lot of cities in the
Speaker 1: developing world, which is just dumps into local water wagement
Speaker 1: and that causes all sorts of problems from esthetics to
Speaker 1: health and so on, and so in the city of Pune,
Speaker 1: which has a bunch of such sewage pipes. We've tapped
Speaker 1: into one of them and have a larger scale version
Speaker 1: of this earthworm. Larger scale, how big is it? You know,
Speaker 1: it's the size of half football. Can you do this
Speaker 1: at any scale in principle yes, My sense is that
Speaker 1: as it gets larger, rather than simply growing it, we
Speaker 1: may just have to go through your So what's happened
Speaker 1: to the word? It's doing very well. So that is
Speaker 1: actually the thing we're most excited about right now, simply
Speaker 1: because now you can go into a city and over
Speaker 1: the course of a year build out the sewage treatment
Speaker 1: infracturate a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the cost probably
Speaker 1: one temper the cost of what cost you if you
Speaker 1: if you built a conventional system. If you compare this
Speaker 1: in the West, suppose you were going to build out
Speaker 1: a sewage treatment down the road from where we are now.
Speaker 1: Is the ratio the same one tenth or is it?
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm curious about the kind of state of
Speaker 1: the art Western style sewage facilities. What is the what
Speaker 1: are the costs of those compared to something like this.
Speaker 1: I couldn't give you a dollar number for that, right
Speaker 1: but if you just look at the components of the cost, right,
Speaker 1: so the earth worms kind of grow themselves, meaning that
Speaker 1: you just have a large ditch with sewage and there
Speaker 1: are thems that reproduce. The rest of it is almost
Speaker 1: zero infrastructure, So you've got no concrete. You know, if
Speaker 1: you go if you walk into a typical sewage treatment plant,
Speaker 1: you've got lots of power. You've got pumps because the
Speaker 1: way we treat waste right now of the area them
Speaker 1: there the ways, right, so none of that is required.
Speaker 1: It runs on a tiny solar panel just to pump
Speaker 1: the stuff, and the rest of it is just the worms.
Speaker 1: So the amount of land is the same, but you're
Speaker 1: not spending anything on motors and pumps. You're not spending
Speaker 1: anything on large concrete structures. So this is one that
Speaker 1: you expect to move from that could well, you think
Speaker 1: be popular in more developed countries. It could be. It
Speaker 1: could be. So give you an example of something that
Speaker 1: came up which I would love to explore. I don't
Speaker 1: know if the current regulatory environment allows for that. In
Speaker 1: the state of Alabama, Lounges County, it's a largely African
Speaker 1: American community, the rates of worm and round worm infection.
Speaker 1: They're comparable to the developing world, and the sanitation infrastructure
Speaker 1: there is non existent, and the state of Alabama is
Speaker 1: just not bothered to build it out, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of the old septic tanks they just dump into
Speaker 1: the soil there. A place like that is perfect for
Speaker 1: this kind of setup. Obviously, given that the US is
Speaker 1: much more of a litigious society than India is, we're
Speaker 1: actually much more careful about liability protections and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth, and it's not yet clear what the
Speaker 1: regulatory environment is, so composting toilets and a lot of
Speaker 1: and turns out in the US, it's a county by
Speaker 1: county thing around the country. So some counties are fine
Speaker 1: with it because they don't have a large enough population
Speaker 1: and most of them live off grid anyway, and it's
Speaker 1: just an alternative to septic tanks. But other counties are
Speaker 1: much more stringent about it. But if that switch flips
Speaker 1: where counties, particularly rural counties, recognize that this is a
Speaker 1: much more environmentally sound way to do things, with the
Speaker 1: appropriate checks and balances to make sure we're not polluting
Speaker 1: the ground and polluting the waterway is as suspect something
Speaker 1: like this could be very very interesting. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you do an Internet search, you'll find that there are
Speaker 1: some people living who already do something of the starting Yeah.
Speaker 1: One last question that has to do with scale. It
Speaker 1: sounds like you guys have lots and lots of good ideas,
Speaker 1: and these ideas have lots and lots of potential, But ultimately,
Speaker 1: of course everything is going to depend on your ability
Speaker 1: to scale. Is to where they make a meaningful difference.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about how you think about
Speaker 1: the scaling problem. If I wanted to put one of
Speaker 1: these toilets in every Indian village that needed one, what
Speaker 1: would have to happen. I don't believe startups a set
Speaker 1: up a scale. If you go back to the example
Speaker 1: of Data Power, the reason we brought them on board
Speaker 1: is that for a startup like ours, a small organization
Speaker 1: like ours, if we were to reach two hundred villages,
Speaker 1: that would be unprecedented scale. Data Power wouldn't think of
Speaker 1: two hundred is even a starting point for them, ten
Speaker 1: thousand villages as a starting point. So our belief is
Speaker 1: that the best way of scale is to have a
Speaker 1: company like that that's hungry for this for this market,
Speaker 1: that is respected by the government, that has a good
Speaker 1: track record and has a staying power. As it happens,
Speaker 1: there's another Tata company that we've been working with. It's
Speaker 1: called Tata Projects, which is an infrastructure company. We're talking
Speaker 1: to them about possibly scaling up this toilet and this
Speaker 1: sewage treatment business. It's not nearly as mature as the
Speaker 1: Tata Power conversation is. But I suspect if you if
Speaker 1: you go around the world in a number of emerging
Speaker 1: economies Kenya and Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and
Speaker 1: so on, there are companies that are much better position
Speaker 1: than outside entities to scale and our job is to
Speaker 1: find who they are. If they're not interested, that kind
Speaker 1: of that ends the deal right there. But if they are,
Speaker 1: we bring them up. But this is from from the
Speaker 1: perspective of someone I taughta products. Is this actually a business?
Speaker 1: I mean there's says is the you can the idea
Speaker 1: of installing these and presumably being paid by the local
Speaker 1: municipality or whoever it is that actually translates into something
Speaker 1: that could be conceived of as a large scale business.
Speaker 1: It would have to be a large scale business in fact,
Speaker 1: because it's a low margin business. Yeah, it has to
Speaker 1: be a large scale business. In the toilets context, you
Speaker 1: may recall that the multi government in India launched this
Speaker 1: sort of universal toilets initiative and that was going to
Speaker 1: be the vehicle for us to do this. Unfortunately, in
Speaker 1: that program it ended up being a numbers game more
Speaker 1: than anything else. So we've decided to pull back from
Speaker 1: that a little bit to wait for that dust to settle,
Speaker 1: meaning that because the government was giving one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy five per household subsidy to build toilets, and so
Speaker 1: lots of households took one hundred and seventy five dollars
Speaker 1: built something that kind of resembled a toilet, but the
Speaker 1: user rate is not very high. And in an earthworm
Speaker 1: based system, if people build a toilet and don't use it,
Speaker 1: the earthworms die. Yeah, So what we're waiting for is
Speaker 1: pretty soon we believe that in the country like Indiana,
Speaker 1: a bunch of countries around the world, open defecation is
Speaker 1: or will soon be a thing at the past because
Speaker 1: it's if nothing else, it's a matter of dignity and
Speaker 1: it's a matter of security. So people will want Aspirationally,
Speaker 1: people will want clean toilets, and so this is we
Speaker 1: believe it's perfect a position for that. Yeah. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: has been fascinating. Thank you, Thank you so much. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I never thought i'd learned that a kilogram of earthworms
Speaker 1: cost twenty five dollars, but I will certainly be repeating
Speaker 1: that fact. The way Shatterly tackles these huge, almost existential
Speaker 1: challenges with such great detail, it's really important. I think
Speaker 1: he says himself that technology and artificial intelligence cannot alone
Speaker 1: solve global poverty. It all depends on the context and
Speaker 1: the existing structures. Bringing this holistic viewpoint is something a
Speaker 1: lot more tech people could find helpful. Oh and the
Speaker 1: electrical minigrids Shashi mentioned to Malcolm, they're actually the subject
Speaker 1: of our next episode of Solvable. Ashvindale will tell us
Speaker 1: more about the incredible ways they can transform lives and communities.
Speaker 1: Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation,
Speaker 1: with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and
Speaker 1: Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is
Speaker 1: Neia LaBelle. Research by Sheer, Vincent engineering by Jason Gambrel
Speaker 1: and the great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed
Speaker 1: by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine,
Speaker 1: Julia Barton, Carly Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You
Speaker 1: can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller
Speaker 1: Foundation dot org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go
Speaker 1: solve it.