Meeting Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) needs by engineering sustainable solutions

The world's population has surpassed 7 billion just recently, while our natural resources are depleting at an alarming rate. On one hand, we celebrate life and on the other, we see global warming, poverty, pollution, illiteracy degrading the quality of life. Advances in technology bring out the stories of drug discovery which saves millions of lives and also the development of missiles arsenal which takes away thousands of lives. It is said that we shape our technologies; thereafter they shape us. The core purpose of new technological innovation and excellence is to benefit humanity and at the same time, it is said that the existing consumer problems cannot be solved with old technologies. Most scalable, sustainable, price-sensitive solutions need advanced and emerging, cutting-edge technologies to solve the myriad problems of Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). In this paper, the authors have mapped the human needs as described by Maslow with the aspirations of BOP population as propounded by Prahalad and how they are inter-related. This mapping has been illustrated with few case studies, one for each level of Needs Hierarchy, which are mostly the result of a literature survey of theme papers presented during IEEE Indicon 2011 Conference having the theme `Engineering Sustainable Solutions'. These case studies elucidate how few innovations and technological solutions in rural India have been able to meet the needs of human society under BOP and make their lives better. Today technologies are not only serving the affluent needs but the basic needs of society and at every level of Needs Hierarchy.