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Then one day, while riding his bicycle to the hospital, Chandra ran over a nail, and his tire went flat. He wheeled his bicycle to a roadside stall, where the repairman was busy retreading a truck tire with vulcanized rubber. Once his bicycle was fixed, Chandra raced to the hospital and consulted with Sethi. Soon Chandra returned to the tire shop with an amputee patient and a foot cast. He asked the repairman if he could cast a rubber foot. "He agreed,'' Sethi says, "and refused to accept any money once he found out why we were doing it."
Rubber alone was not good enough; it shredded within a few days. It was only after Chandra and Sethi began to construct the rubber foot around a hinged wooden ankle--wrapping it in a lighter rubber (similar to a bicycle inner tube but flesh colored) and then vulcanizing this composite--that their invention succeeded. The resulting limb takes only 45 minutes to build and fit onto the patient and is sturdy enough to last for more than five years. Sethi says of his partner, "We had a lot of opposition from formally trained doctors. In a way, someone who's not so educated is much more free."
In 1971 Sethi felt confident enough about the invention to present it to British orthopedic surgeons at Oxford, who were impressed by the artificial limb's suppleness and durability. From 1968 to 1975 only 59 patients were outfitted with the Jaipur foot, but the use of the new limb spread outside India during the Afghan war, which began in the late 1970s. Russian land mines--some diabolically shaped like butterflies to attract curious children--caused thousands of injuries, and the International Committee of the Red Cross discovered that the Jaipur foot was the hardiest limb for the mountainous Afghan terrain.
Since then, countless land-mine victims in many countries have been fitted with the Jaipur foot. "Western aid agencies have helped millions of amputees, and they've found that they can't do it as cheaply as with the Jaipur foot," says Sethi. In India most of the 72,000 amputees wearing the prosthesis were migrant laborers injured while trying to hitch free rides by clinging to train roofs and windows. During their long journeys to the harvests, many of these workers slipped off the trains and were run over.
Much of the credit and many of the awards for the Jaipur foot have gone to Sethi; the two inventors have not seen each other since the surgeon retired from active medicine in 1981. Chandra works with a Jaipur-based charity, the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, which provides free artificial legs for the poor not only in India but in other countries too. He says he feels no bitterness over Sethi's greater fame. At his Delhi workshop, where he has been developing above-the-knee artificial limbs, Chandra points out a little girl whose leg was severed in a bus crash. "People said I would be a rich man if we had patented the Jaipur foot, but it's enough satisfaction for me to see the joy on that girl's face when she walks again." He adds, "I'm still learning from my patients. I haven't done anything yet."