(Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran, Associate Professor of Marketing, IFMR Graduate School of Business, Krea University)
Bikes of Bijnor is an intuitive design-thinking work by an Indian administrative service officer aimed at public bike-sharing. The project was a Government officer’s out-of-the-box thinking idea with empathy to use hundreds of leftover bicycles of migrant labourers during the COVID-19 lockdown towards affordable and sustainable bike-sharing in the Indian town of Bijnor after compensating them.
The protagonist took measures to locate at least 100 owners of the leftover bicycles, compensate them, refit their cycles, and use those cycles to create an affordable city bike-sharing system.
This case study documents the intervention through the lens of design thinking and analyzes the impact on Health, Society, and Public Good. Frugal innovation through the Bikes of Bijnor project had a positive effect on public health by promoting cycling as a healthy lifestyle activity, had inclusion as a significant goal by making the use of services affordable for all sections of society and also contributed significantly towards sustainability as a substitute for carbon-emitting vehicles.
A version of this paper has been accepted for presentation during the Academic Design Management Conference at Delft, Netherlands in Aug 2024.
Keywords: design thinking, public good, ride sharing, sustainability, circular economy