Techies-to-be innovate for rural India

The scale is immense: every year,an estimated Rs 450 crore is raised and spent by students to organise these techfests,where on average students from as many as 50 to 100 colleges take part. Among the major ones taking part are the IITs—Kharagpur,Bombay and Powai—and the NITs at Rourkela,Durgapur and Surat,besides VNIT Nagpur,and TKM College of Engineering in Kollam,Kerala.

The “My Innovation” competition at the recent IIT-Kharagpur’s techfest Kshitij had a poster that listed six common rural problems ranging from energy poverty in villages to water scarcity and transportation issues to shelter requirements. The challenge was to build solutions for them. Entries were judged on parameters like necessity of the technology,the size of the rural population that could be impacted,and cost.

Participants Spandan Dey of MIT Bishnupur and Shiv Kumar Agarwal of Jadavpur University built a Rs 10,000 baby-incubator to rival the over-Rs 1 lakh incubators used in hospitals. The problem they identified was this: “Of the 27 million babies born in India each year,a million or so die in the first four weeks,accounting for nearly 25 per cent of the total 3.9 million neonatal deaths worldwide.”

At Sardar Vallabhai National Institute of Technology (SVNIT),Surat,the annual fest is concentrating for the third time on “low cost innovations that could replace existing,expensive technology,” said coordinator Bhavik Gattani. In Kerala,students of TKM College of Engineering,Kollam,are busy preparing for their annual fest CONJURA 2011,where the main theme is “Engineering Innovations: Empowering rural India.”

Anil K Gupta,senior professor at the Indian Institute of Management—Ahmedabad,who has received at least a dozen invitations to attend such projects due to his work in rural and grassroots technologies,says while the momentum of innovations for rural India is picking up,there is a lot to be done. Gupta says there has been little interest from outside the student community and even among student innovations,many don’t take off for want of further research and development,the cumbersome procedure for patenting and eventually,marketing.

A non-profit collective managed by Professor Gupta—www.techpedia.in—has been scouring for these innovations and trying to rope in more college techfests to hold competitions along the same lines. Hiranmay Mahanta,who heads the collective,says there is reason to cheer. “From Kerala to Kanpur,Durgapur to Gandhinagar. teams of five from 100 colleges means 500 students will be cracking several issues in a single event. Multiply this by 20 events,” he says. Adam Halliday