AFTER bringing innumerable grassroots innovations to light, the innovation guru from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Anil K Gupta, has begun mapping young minds in our engineering colleges. At any given time, India has about six lakh engineering students who spend six months in their final year on a project, which is supposed to be on a problem of relevance to industry or society. But nobody knows what happens to these projects once they are completed.

Often interesting problems are not put before students. The problems of small industries can be posed to students and good projects can be put to use. But no information is available on such projects. Websites of engineering colleges don’t even have a summary of these projects.

The Society for Research and Institutions for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions or SRISTI, founded by Gupta, has set up a unique portal — www.techpedia.in — to map the minds of technologyoriented youth in India. So far, summaries of 104,000 final year engineering projects by more than 300,000 students from over 500 colleges have been pooled on the website. The database was created in six months mainly through the efforts of student volunteers led by Hiranmay Mahanta of Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat. The goal is create a national platform for encouraging students to work on real life problems of small and tiny industries, the informal sector and grassroots innovators.

At least one percent of the projects 1000 out of one lakh done every year have the potential to be developed into a product, feels Mahanta. Techpedia can also act as a technical database which students, faculties, and researchers alike could refer to. The portal promotes a relay or kho kho model of project development so that students can build upon each other’s ideas.

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