In New Delhi today, the XPrize announced two new competitions: the $1.75 million Water Abundance XPrize and the $ 1 million Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety Xprize. Both new prizes are aimed at creating ‘moonshot’ solutions to problems felt more acutely in the developing world.
The Water Abundance prize, sponsored by the Tata Group and Australian Aid, which will be open for two years, will be won by a team which creates a technology that can extract at least 2,000 litres of water a day from the atmosphere, using renewable energy, at a cost of up to 2 cents a litre (approximately Rs. 1.3 at current exchange rates). The Women’s Safety prize, sponsored by Indian-American entrepreneurs and philanthropists Anu and Naveen Jain, will stay open for 20 months; it will reward a team that creates a solution that autonomously triggers an emergency alert to a network of community responders within 90 seconds, at an annual cost of up to $ 40 (approximately Rs. 2,672).
XPrize is an non-profit foundation that seeks to incentivise grand solutions to urgent issues by creating prizes that set audacious but measurable goals. In 1996, it launched a $ 10 million prize for a private entity that could make and launch a spacecraft to carry three people 100 km into space and back, twice within two weeks. Won in 2004, by SpaceShipOne, the prize can claim credit for catalysing the entry of private enterprise into space flight. The organisation has subsequently created and a number of other prizes in different areas. Currently active competitions include the $ 30M Google Lunar prize (in which an Indian team, Team Indus, is still in the running).
Zenia Tata, XPrize’s executive director of global expansion, spoke to The Hindu in Mumbai before the event, about the genesis of the two new prizes and their goals.
XPrize, she said, spent several months doing intensive research into six potential areas — water, waste, rapid urbanisation, connectivity, renewable energy (largely solar and energy storage), and micro-nutrient deficiency. “We gathered communities of experts — scientists, academicians, private industry, activists, people passionate about the issue, journalists — 100 to 130 people in each sector, and started doing interviews with them. Then we brought them to these ‘deep dive’ days, highly curated workshops I led in Bangalore, Delhi and Bombay. Some experts were working very much at the grassroots level, couldn’t even afford to come in, so we flew them in, because we really wanted a diverse group of people there.”
Water as a target area rose to the top of the list because of its impact in multiple areas: agriculture (85 per cent of India’s water usage is for agriculture, against the world average of 70 per cent), health, as an industrial and economic driver, as a political and social justice issue. “The water prize we’re doing now isn’t the only XPrize we’ll do with water,” Ms. Tata said. “From next year we’re going to be road-mapping the future of water.”
Describing the potentially prize-winning device as ‘rain in a box,’ Ms. Tata said, “Imagine this device, this technology, just sitting on top of your water tank on your building, taking water out of the air, gravity-feeding your tank, all day, all night. We’re hoping to incentivise all kinds of breathroughs, not just in dehumidification technology. [Solutions like this] can have impact at great scale, by kickstarting new markets the day after the prize is won, by making these devices rugged, affordable, for everyone to have.”
The choice of the women’s safety issue for a prize was led by the sponsor, Ms. Tata said. “Anu Jain is very passionate about it.” Women’s safety, she said, is a wonderful litmus test for safety in general. “But we didn’t design the prize with just women in mind. Our research revealed that there’s almost five billion people on our planet who don’t have access to a universal emergency access number. When a gap is created by governments — if they can’t keep people safe because they can’t afford the infrastructure — then it’s up to innovators to come up with a solution, and it’s up to communities, everyday people like you and I, to enforce that.”
There many app- and cellphone-based tools for women facing harassment, but that approach, Ms. Tata says, is limited by network coverage, and the hassle of being able to quickly activate an app in an emergency. The solution XPrize will reward should be highly affordable, inconspicuous, and work autonomously; it must work even with extreme low connectivity, where there is no visible WiFi or cellular signal available.
As important as the technology is the community aspect, Ms. Tata says. “We evolved to be in tribes, for safety. But today, in our communities, we’ve forgotten that. If something happens to a woman, what does everybody says? ‘Why did you dress like that?’ ‘Why were you out at 11 o’clock with a boy?’ ‘Why didn’t she see if it was the right bus to get into?’ All this nonsense dialogue, this noise that happens, that puts the onus of safety on the individual. We’re saying it’s time to put the onus back on society. We want to incentivise community response; [to get] people who say Not in my neighbourhood, This will not happen where I live, This will not happen where I work, This will not happen in my time, This will not happen in my country.”
Why are these prizes being launched in India? “For Indian innovators, it ups the ante a little bit when they’ve got to innovate on a world stage.” Ms. Tata said. “There’s a lot of innovation going on. ‘Jugaad’ is very much part of our culture. But ‘moonshot’ thinking [huge breakthroughs], is what Indian innovators now need to aspire to. Because that is what is really going to shift the needle on impacting the lives of a billion people, on truly moving India towards a more prosperous future.”
“We don’t have the hubris to believe that we can work on world-changing global issues just from Los Angeles,” Ms. Tata added. “We believe that you have to go out into the world to where these issues are most tangible, and more solvable on a grand scale. If you have a plan that can really have impact, where you were changing the lives of a couple of billion people — albeit it’s going to take a few years — that’s what we really want to aspire to.”
