Despite the dire need of going for renewable energy, rural areas face their own challenges to opt for solar energy. The installation of solar panel comes costly for a rural household and the design of conventional solar water heater is not suitable as the rooftops of most houses are not flat. Observing this difficulty faced by the villages in North Karnataka region, students of Basaveshvara Engineering College, Bagalkot have come up with a design that adapts well to the rural setting.
The proposed solar heater is hexagonal in shape with a tank at the centre. The water moves down through the pipes that are painted black. Once the water gets heated, the mechanism pushes it back in to the tank. “The equipment, which is low cost, can be lifted with the help of two or three persons and kept wherever the rays of sun are dense,” informed Shankar, a member of the team that participated in Srishti , a State level engineering students project exhibition held at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Kumaraswamy Layout, Bengaluru. Students belonging to varied fields of engineering from across the State took part in Srishti, organised by Akhila Bharatiya Vidhyarti Parishat (ABVP).
Another project that was modelled to address survival issue in the arid regions of Karnataka was borewell rescue operation. The current mechanism that is deployed to rescue babies stuck in tubewells is to dig another parallel tubewell which takes about 40 hours for the operation to be complete. In order to minimise the time and burden of the rescue operation, students of Bellary Institute of Technology and Management have developed a prototype using selfi-stick which acts as a helping hand to lift the baby vertically from the tubewell. “This might take from 20 minutes to 4 hours depending on the width and disturbances in the tubewell,” said Shreyas Antin, one of the developers of the idea.
The team from KLE Technological University, Hubballi had thought of drones as aiding agents in emergencies caused due to road accidents. “When accidents occur in remote locations, it not only takes a long time to know about the mishap, but is difficult to treat passengers medically. To address this, we have come up with a drone that gets automatically activated once the accident occurs and carries pay loads depending on the requirement at the site,” stated Gagan B.T. of the five-member team.
Bhaskar M.B. of BMS Institute of Technology and Management proposed a model that makes use of electronic waste as a construction material in building rigid pavements. “Replacing coarse aggregates with E-waste ceramics not only reduces the pressure on landfills but preserves natural resource and prevents water and air pollution that would result due to blasting and mining of rocks,” he added.
The exhibition which hosted such innovative projects was a platform for not just final year students but all engineering students to showcase their application skills and ideas that propose to address pressing issues around us. Students from semi-urban and rural areas showed more involvement and commitment towards innovation than their metropolitan counterparts, whose ideas looked superficial in comparison.
Apart from the exhibition that saw participation from 100 colleges, Srishti also had allied events such as art and design contest, contest that tested environmental awareness of students and KIN (Knowledge Innovation and Nationalism) talks by successful youngsters across the country.
If live sculpture, product design, print making and other related activities were part of the art contest, poetry and dialogue on nature and sustainability were conducted under Parisara Prajne, a campaign for environmental awareness. KIN talks were aimed to connect knowledge, innovation and nationalism by presenting success stories of young leaders who are working in the fields of science, health, sports, spirituality and business across the country.
