Building a living IT community in Mumbai
To support that community it would help to provide room for meetups (w. flip charts, white boards, or even a beamer, WiFi-Access, some beverages and some snacks).
I am willing to give free lectures covering topics from the fields of my expertise. Meetups will be in the evening hours and, even throughout the days on weekends, as that appears to be a time, where many locals actually have time to attend.
I want to support the local community to develop fast knowledge transfers to support the already active start-up scene, which is still faced with the obstacle of missing or underdeveloped skill sets in developers.
Banking for each and everyone - including the poor
The basic idea is to allow even those without checking accounts to send and receive money. It is essentially like mPesa or other solutions, but the things we are approaching in a different way will make a huge difference, when it comes to adaption rates.
For this to work, I need to make contacts with many people in the city and might even be in need to travel rather often than not to other cities within India, like Delhi, to meet and discuss with officials or representatives of banks or other commercial entities. This project will burn a hole in my pocket, as I already face the need to consult lawyers and FinTech experts, who are not always offering their help pro bono.
Here I already have a partner, who is willing to vest his time and knowledge to great extent. But he needs to work to make ends meet. I would love to also support him with small amounts of money, so the project could progress faster.
We already have a working prototype, it is just currently only working on very local networks, but we think that it will be easy to implement for real. So, we move towards a seed funding, but we need to be able to show more for that. Once, funding is secured, this project might be able to help me make ends meet.
Individual transportation going electric
Converting the fleet of vehicles in India away from combustion engines towards electric ones.
The case for Rickshaws is somewhat hindered by the fact, that these run on heavily subsidized CNG gas. However, the only vehicles that can not run on CNG/LPG gas are Motorbikes and Scooters. With that business case in favor of electric scooters and their heavy use for small order delivery it appears best to start with these and to come up with conversion kits for Rickshaws later.
If one asks for help, it is often granted, in some cases even for free. But still, as with other projects, this will include travel to meet those, who want to help and can assist. Further more I am expecting costs, just to get started, by for example, the need to acquire certain licenses and permissions.
I already met wonderful people at meetups in Mumbai and it seems that I will get a good amount of support as possible. These fine people are really willing to great lengths as they like the idea of being able to breathe in Mumbai again without particle filters.
Battery Factory
There are already companies in India producing electric cars and electric Rickshaws (Delhi) and there is also one in the process of preparing launch of an electric Scooter.
These and the growing number of micro grids to power villages by solar energy all require the best and most price efficient batteries available.
Only mass production of standardized batteries as is as well as batteries bundled in standardized modular battery packs can provide highly efficient batteries at low cost for all needs.
This factory, prior being part of the electric Rickshaw Conversion Kit project, quickly became a needed commodity. Hereby minimizing the economic risk as such factory does not need to depend on the business success of individual products as the conversion kit or scooters, but rather can scale up quickly to high output and remain at high levels.
This is a real old economy project per se, but can profit from newest developments in battery technology once all parties in need will recognize their gains.
Decentralized power generation, power from the people for the people
About 30% of rural areas in India still have no electricity. Having no electric power forces people to use gas and petroleum lamps at night and poses another barrier to getting access to phones and the internet.The idea is to provide communities with an option to have solar, wind or water power plants, purchased and financed together, so the community can install their own utility infrastructure. Given access to cheap batteries these micro grids could provide electricity at all times throughout day and night.
Small at first, they might even opt to connect to neighboring villages and, in turn helping to create a distributed and possibly failure resilient grid.
Mobile payments will ease the access to loans and financing and, electric vehicles could drive demand for electricity further.
This project requires a lot of traveling to rural areas, as it is important to build trust with the people and, their communities.
Acceleration of development in slums
This project is a good reason for me to move in there, even long before we actually start to draw the first blueprint for any building.
My dream here is to help Dharavi to grow into a green city, into a place, where each and everyone of us would also like to live. That way Dharavi would be a pilot and could become a role model for how we can help people in slums all around the world. With one success we can provide a blueprint for for others free to copy.
