Publish in : The Hindu Businessline

In a bid to archive projects produced by six lakh technology students who pass out of engineering and other colleges each year, Sristi (Society for research and initiatives for sustainable technologies and institutions) in association with the Honey Bee Network has launched a portal known as Techpedia.

Within six months of the launch, Mr Hiranmay Mahapatra and his team of five under graduates have collected one lakh projects and provided linkages between the academic projects and real-life industrial problems. All six students are from non-premier schools of the country.

“In many ways, it is a testimonial to the India that we fail to acknowledge, the India beyond the IITs and IIMs,” says Prof Anil K. Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and founder, Sristi.

“A five percentile difference between those who make it to the premier institutes and those who don't, does not alter the ability of the student in solving real-life problems in any way. If you look at all the major innovation breakthroughs of the country during the past decade, IITians were not involved in them, be it the Tata Nano or Chandrayaan. After a point, the talent from the premier institutes becomes uni-dimensional. We need to encourage the talent rather than going after the names alone,” he says.

In April this year, all the industrial problems collected by Techpedia will be posted to final-year students, who will choose to work on some of them. One of the innovations, for instance, is a low cost vacuum automated blower for women who pick tea leaves in hills and suffer health problems due to constant lifting of hands against gravity.

Some of these projects will be displayed along side others of National Innovation Foundation at the Mughal Gardens at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi from March 11 to 14.

This is the first time an exhibition is being organised on presidential grounds anywhere in the world, says Prof Gupta.