“I had one experience where a shopkeeper said to me that I wouldn’t be able to explain what we needed and that I should instead send the boys from our college,” Aanchal Saxena, a member of the only all-girls team in Asia to compete in the upcoming Shell Eco Marathon in Singapore said.
The competition, to take place later this month, brings together undergraduate teams from across Asia to race their prototype energy-efficient cars.
One of these is Team Panthera, a group of 15 students from the Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women, in Delhi, all between 18 and 21 years of age.
“A major amount of pollution comes from vehicles,” Manupriya Vats, team captain and driver for Team Panthera said. “And that’s why we thought of this car that will give very good mileage.” “Our country is still dependent on gasoline [petrol]. We aren’t into electric cars too much,” the 21-year-old Ms. Vats explained. “So we decided to take gasoline and get high mileage from it to reduce the carbon footprint.”
But the journey to create the electronic fuel injection prototype, made with light, mileage-friendly materials hasn’t been easy. Not only were shopkeepers unhelpful, even sponsors declined to work with the girls team. “Generally, a shopkeeper is supposed to say whether he has the component we need or not, but When we go, the shop staff ask why we need the part, what we are going to do with it. We have to explain everything to them,” Ms Vats said.
“At sponsorship meetings, there were people who did not trust our ideas,” said Ms. Saxena, 19, who is in-charge of publicity. “We were rejected on the basis of the fact that we are girls.”
Finally, sponsors
In the end, the team got sponsorship for development and the upcoming trip, from Modern Industries and Oriental Bank of Commerce. The struggle didn’t end there, though, with most of the ₹17 lakh cost being borne by the team members themselves.
The car, named Iris 2.0, is a single-seater, three-wheeled prototype weighing 45-50 kg with a one-foot ground clearance. Despite its 35cc engine, it touches 55 kmph and is expected to run 300 km on a litre of petrol.
“The shape and size of the car has a huge bearing on its aerodynamics,” Ms Vats said. “And aerodynamics plays a very important role in fuel efficiency. So we cannot have a lot of ground clearance.”
“Weight plays a very big role in the increase in mileage,” Ms. Vats explained. “In the industry, usually steel and its derivatives are used to build vehicles. We are using aluminium, which is not yet used in the industry to make cars and we are also using carbon fibre which is nowadays a very good replacement for glass fibre. It is very light and very, very strong.”
While the outer body of the car may not be conducive to Indian roads, a lot of the inner mechanism—most of which the team has kept under wraps—has been developed by the team themselves, and, they say, can be adapted by companies to commercial cars.
“We have changed it from a carburettor engine to electronic fuel injection,” Ms Vats explained. “Electron fuel injection increases the mileage dramatically. A carburettor is a mechanical device and so you cannot control the fuel going inside after a limit, but when computers come into the picture, then you can just program everything to every detail.”
For the last two months, the team has been waking up early in the morning and working on their car from 10 am to 10 pm, missing classes and attendance all day, something their college is not giving them exemption from. And that’s another disadvantage the girls have over the boys’ teams also representing India in the competition.
“We have this time limit, we cannot work after 10 pm,” Ms Vats said. “Our parents of course get worried and keep calling us. But a boys team, they can spend their days in college, and after 5 pm they can work on their cars till even 2 am. That’s not an option to us. And we cannot go to markets after dark, after 5 pm. All we can do is work indoors.”
However, despite the struggle to even be taken seriously by vendors, sponsors, and sometimes even their parents, the team of young women is still keen to pursue their dreams of working in mechanical engineering and developing a breakthrough design that can truly make a difference to pollution levels in the country.
In the meantime, they are also busy spreading their message of determination and strength.
“We have learnt a lot in this project, and we decided not to keep it to ourselves, so we went to schools, both government and private, and talked to the girls there and told them that if they truly want to do something, then they can achieve it. People cannot govern what we want to do,” Ms Vats said.
“That is what has been the driving force of this team throughout,” she added. “Despite all the negativity we have gone through, we have always had this thing that somehow we have to prove ourselves.”
