Prashant Gade, Founder, Inali Foundation, Recepient Of The Social Service Award (SSA) For RY 2021-22
I started the Inali Foundation in 2015, and it was registered as a non-profit in 2018. Nearly 4000 hands have been distributed and we have been collaborated with a lot of NGOs and awarded by many corporate and industrial bodies in the country.
More than 45,000 people in India lose their arm every year. Nearly 85 per cent of them who cannot afford a solution. Most prosthetic arms range from Rs 8-15 lakh. It is really unaffordable in a country like India.
My story began when I was 12 years old. I was close to my grand-father. When he passed away, I went with my father for the last rites. There, my father took his clothes off in the last moments, and I was very shocked. I asked my mother about it after returning home. My mother replied, “That is the truth of life. You cannot take anything with you when you die.”
That made me think. My grand-father had struggled so much to buy a good house, earn well, and yet, when he died, he couldn’t take anything with him. I started searching for the purpose of life. I was only 12 years-old but I began looking for the answer to the purpose of life, and what do I want to do? Why do I want to study and get good marks? I never got the answer to this.
My grand-father used to tell me stories about great warriors and kings who did a lot for society. That is how I got a certain sense of healing people. He also told me a lot about engineers and how they could do a lot to bring about change to society. So, I decided to go for engineering after my 12th. It was my dream as my grand-father used to say ‘Engineering mein aawishkar hote hai, aawishkar ki baatein hoti hai’ but the day I reached the college, I found nothing of that sort. It was more about how you will score; how will you pass and get a job… nothing else.
I started getting frustrated. I still remember when I was in the second year, I approached a senior who was exhibiting his project in the final year, and I asked how the project worked? He said, “I don’t know, I bought it from somebody else and I am going to do the same thing when I am in my final year.” I was shocked and hurt.
I started a lab called Curiosity Lab where I taught my juniors and seniors how to make robots. During the third year, I started getting more frustrated with college. I decided to drop out and continue my work at Curiosity Lab. For a while, it went well, and I thought maybe teaching would give me the answer to my questions of what the purpose of life was, but I started getting frustrated by teaching as well and I left the lab.
By now my parents got irritated and they sent me to Pune to my elder brother so that I could get a good job. I started surfing on Facebook and one day, I found a lab that was looking for a person with a basic background in robotics. I thought it was a good idea to work in a lab, so I applied and got the job. This was in 2015 and I earned about Rs 5000 but it was close to me and I loved to work in the lab. While working in this lab, I got an opportunity to join a course called Fab Academy. This was a course with the Centre for Bits and Atoms at MIT, Boston but to complete the course you had to have a project. Like every kid I was searching for a project and one day I got a chance to meet a guy named Nicholas. He was from France and had lost his right-arm in an accident. But instead of crying he made a robotic arm for himself. He was a car painter.
I was amazed at the way he had made a robotic arm for himself, and I thought this is good and I should do something like this. At that point, the thought was to complete the project; nothing for society or anything but to get graduation done. So, I started working on the robotic arm and one day while I was working, one of my professors came to me and said, “Why don’t you go out and meet somebody who needs this prosthetic arm?”
That was the first time I met a seven-year-old girl named Shreya, who was born without her upper limbs. So, she didn’t have limbs from the shoulder down and that was the first time I saw a kid without limbs. Mostly, what happens with us when we see people without limbs at traffic signals, begging for money, most of us give them a certain sum of money to help them feed themselves for a day or so, or maybe we say ‘May God Bless Them!’ and leave. But I don’t know why, when I saw this girl, I thought I would give her two prosthetic arms. So, I went to a company and asked for two prosthetic arms for a seven-year-old for which the company sent a quotation of Rs 24 lakh, that is, Rs 12 lakh per arm.
The age of the girl was seven and what did the arm do? Open and close, nothing else. I started thinking how an arm so expensive can perform just two functions. Apart from that, the girl would need a different arm every year as she was growing. I don’t think in a country like ours, any parent could afford Rs 24 lakh every second year or maybe every 7 months. So, I decided to find out how many people might need them and found out that nearly 85% of people who lost their limbs were still living without a solution. The reason was affordability. These 85% were those who worked in factories as labourers and lost their arms. Now, somewhere, I felt this would give me a purpose.
I called my parents and told them that I wanted to leave my job and the course and give my full time to making affordable, prosthetic arms. My parents replied that this was not my age to do something for society, and that I must first earn something for myself. But, for me, I think age was just a factor. Every single day, I got the same thought that I should do something. I left the job and course but, again, my parents enrolled me in another course so that I could get a job.
I never went for the course. Instead, I sat in the hostel and worked on the prosthetic arm. In 20 days, I came up with a design. I didn’t have enough money to make the arm, so I put the arm on a crowd-funding platform to raise money. It didn’t go well but an NGO from Rajasthan saw the crowd-funding and called me to Jaipur. They asked to see the design. Without telling anyone, I went to Jaipur and showed them my design. After a three-hour meeting, they gave me a grant and told me to come back with seven different designs that they could test on their patients.
Now, on the one hand was a dream that I wanted to follow that could give me a purpose, with this foundation. On the other hand, there were my parents who wanted me to take the course and get a job. Here is what I actually did – I clicked a picture of the cheque, saying, ‘I know I am going to upset you by not completing what you want me to complete but it is better to upset you than to blame you that I failed because of you.’
My father replied, ‘Whatever happens in your life from now on, you will be responsible entirely.’ Thus, the new journey began. I shifted to Jaipur, I rented a room in the outskirts as I didn’t have enough money, I walked about 10 miles a day to save my bus fare. I used to go to the NGO and try different hands on patients.
I created arms for about Rs 50,000 to Rs one lakh but every time I went to the director of the NGO, he would say we cannot afford it. So, after five months, I was left with a little money of which, if I ate twice a day, I would not have been able to pay the rent. So, I ate once and paid my rent. During the sixth month, I went to the director and asked him what he could afford. He replied: $100 (approx. Rs 7000). I was shocked, as we were talking of a hand which cost nearly Rs 12 lakh and how can you ask for an arm which is 7000? But there was no turning back. I decided to take up the challenge.
So, if you talk about people from the middle class, our mothers tell us one thing, every time: ‘Jitni chaadar hai utna hee pair failao’. Now I had to make something which would cost Rs 7000 and I did not have money. But I had a badminton, rubber band, a toy JCB and a hot water bag. It was about how to do more when you have less.
I started looking for locally available things. For everyone else, the JCB toy car is just a toy machine but, to me, the lever looked like a finger. I started thinking how we could convert the same mechanism to make a finger. In Jaipur, I saw a lot of toy shops where they used lots of strings to make toys dance. I realised that the human hand came with a lot of muscle, and you pulled one string to bend the finger. Most prosthetic arms had small motors inside them which did the same thing. They were expensive, so, I decided to use the mechanism and I converted the muscles in strings using some threads. Here, again, I didn’t have strings, so I used a badminton racket, pulled all the threads out of it and put them inside the arm that I made and connected it to the motor. When the motor winds, the strings move and the fingers close, there is a rubber band behind that which helped to pull it back.
The most important thing in an arm is the skin that helps us to grab different objects. But when you talk about expensive prosthetic arms, they have silicone tips over it through which they can grab the objects. I realised that the hot water bag which my mother had given me had good grip. I cut it entirely and placed it on the fingers. Twenty days later, I went back to the director and the arm that he had asked from me in $100, I created it in $75. He was shocked that I had made it. I was happy from within, but, as they say, if life was so easy, we wouldn’t value things. The director came with another question: you have made the arms but how will you make them in bulk? They were going to give me a hundred patients. I didn’t have machines and neither did I have the money to get one. I was sitting in the NGO and thinking that this was the end, when suddenly, something happened in front of me which changed the entire view of my life.
Two people were sitting in front of me, cracking jokes and laughing. Suddenly, somebody called one of them and I realised that the person hadn’t walk, but crawled in. I realised at that moment that I have everything in my life. If a person who has lost both his limbs can be laughing and fighting, why can’t I? I thought to myself that I am not giving up. The same moment I received an email from a professor in the US. I had posted videos of some patients on YouTube and this professor saw the video and sent an email to invite me to a conference on bio-medical devices. I was not going to miss this opportunity.
I went to the US, gave a talk and a lot of people liked the design and many came forward to offer help. I said I don’t need money, but the situation is that I need machines to help people. At that time, I didn’t know about Rotary but these people from Rotary who came to attend the conference gifted me 10 machines.
So, I came back with those machines, started the Inali Foundation and, till date, more than 4000 people have been benefitted. I started this journey with a complex question of ‘what is the purpose of life’, and I think I got the answer!
A beautiful incident happened for me, a lady came to our place to get a prosthetic arm and after getting the arm she started crying. I asked her, “What happened? Did you not like the arm?” She looked at me, and said, “Ab main apne beti ke baal banaungi!” So, it is a very small thing, but for a mother to do a certain thing, is important and emotional. It gave me purpose. When my mother had told me that you can’t take anything with you, I now realised that the purpose of everyone’s life is to give back to society.
The idea was to not stop at that moment but to create more advanced prosthetic arms for people around the world and which can be operated in different ways. With certain technology, just by thinking of moving the hand, a person will be able to get the hand moving. This is an advanced version of the prosthetic arm that may cost more than Rs 2 lakh, we created it in Rs 50,000 with the goal of creating different versions to help different people.
Our aim is to impact 10,000 people every year, establish 16 rehab centres across India – currently we have three at Pune, Hyderabad and Madhya Pradesh to do certain skill empowerment courses with people with disability. We have received the Infosys Social Innovation Award, James Dyson Award, NASSCOM Social Innovation Award and we were also featured on Kaun Banega Crorepati.
Last women’s day we worked with Mi to provide 500 limbs to girl children. We called it Shakti Har Haath! It is still going on.
We did a campaign on Milaap. Our work is based on donation, we did crowd-funding and we went out to ask people for funding. We got more than 15 million views on the video and created awareness.
Why is it called Inali Foundation?
It is the name of a person who never quit on me, who believed in me and said, you do whatever you want to do, I am with you. And she believed when no one else did. So, this name is devoted to her.
Do you work with specific Rotary clubs?
We work with RC Juhu and Lions Club. The crowd-funding and we do a lot of CSRs for certain projects. Currently we are a team of 30 people. We make nearly a thousand arms every year.
TO WATCH PRASHANT GADE’S MOVING TALK, CLICK HERE