3 Review(s)

As India turns 75, Innovating India unpacks 100 ideas that transformed a young democratic republic into a complex and thriving nation of a billion-plus people. With compelling urgency and the lucidity of a skilled narrator, Dinesh C. Sharma writes of an India newly independent in 1947 after the British colonial powers left it to its own destiny, of its subsequent wavering journey through the decades all the way to a raging pandemic and of the small and big innovations that paved the way for India. In doing so, he turns on their heads prevailing notions of innovation often propagated in a galaxy of books on the much used and abused narrative of jugaad that romance the idea of how the ‘poor’ innovate to get by. Very often, a bulk of the writing heavily focuses on technological, novel, IT or digital solutions and disruptions alone, most of which fizzle out as one-time wonders. Sharma does the difficult job of writing about the disruptions that revolutionized the way things were done in a particular sector and context.