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Ahmedabad The Morbi municipality has ended up with a huge saving on streetlight repairs after tying up with a local engineering college. The students of Lukhdirji Engineering (LE) College were pressed into action and it was found that they could fix each light at less than a fifth of the initial estimated costs.
Girish Sariya, chief officer of the municipality, said the town has 10,800 streetlights that use tube-lights. These were installed a few years ago. But, the electrical circuitry of thousands of these lights developed problems very soon, plunging more than half the town’s streets in darkness.
Officials initially thought the shortage of maintenance workers would mean they have to replace at least 4,000 of these streetlights, with each costing Rs 950 - a whooping Rs 38 lakh totally.
A local MLA approached the 60-year-old Lukhdirji Engineering College and sought its help, which the college responded to as part of the Industry Defined Projects (IDPs), a concept promoted by the Innovation Sankul scheme of Gujarat Technological University (GTU), to which it is affiliated.
Final-year electrical diploma engineering students were pressed into action. “Replacement of all those streetlights is not necessary. Our student can fix it by repairing the starters, chokes or wiring,” said LE College Principal Professor P C Vasani.
When the batch of 50 students calculated the cost of this assignment, they found that each streetlight would need only Rs 200 to get back on track and light the streets, Professor R U Tiwari, who is leading the project, said the estimated savings for the municipality could reach Rs 18 to 20 lakh.
Professor Tiwari said they made the students work on batches of three or four, with each team fixing the choke, replace the starter, rewiring the cables or testing the finished products by turns so that they could learn every aspect.
So far, the students have fixed more than 500 lights. Municipality workers took these off and deposited them at the community hall, where students go after their class to work on them. Upcoming examinations and Diwali holidays may slow down the work, Professor Vasani said, but would resume after the break.
For Sunil Parmar, one of the students, the project has offered two benefits: “We study a lot of theory but we hardly get scope for practical training. This project has helped us a lot in gaining practical knowledge,” he said, adding he has worked on about 50 lights over the past seven days.
“Besides, we are getting certificates for this project, and if we will do good, the municipality said they may offer us temporary jobs,” he beamed. |
