New Delhi: The four-day annual technical festival of the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IIT-Madras) namely ‘Shaastra 2011’ will be held from September 28 to October 4, 2011. The fest will focus on saving the environment and empowering people in rural areas to do the same. Registration for the event ends on September 12, 2011.
The Shaastra Social Innovation Challenge is expected to have a direct influence on rural India. It includes designing a solar cooker in order to substitute the traditional wood-based cooking and designing a fully self-directed robot that can separate municipal waste. The robot will be required to among plastic bags, food waste, metals and glass, for the contest.
Tejas Balasubramanya, member of the public relations and media team of Shaastra 2011, said that the problem statements undertake a technical socio-centric issue, which poor rural people in India are suffering from. The best designs will gain entry to the Climate Healers Global Challenge and stand a chance of being field tested in rural Rajasthan.
In addition, the winners are likely to get recognized by the Ministry of Urban Development and National Waste Management Council and the United Nations Development Program. Colleges across the nation will participate and compete with each other in order to see who can make the biggest difference to their campuses by making them more sustainable. The projects cover themes such as energy, water, waste management, social media and awareness, and community
Moreover, on the basis of number of projects completed and their difficulty level, the top six teams will be invited to Shaastra for the final round. Apart from a hefty cash prize, the winning teams will also attend an environmental training and certification programme by the Copenhagen Communique, the Federal Ministry of German Research and Education Initiative. During the fest visitors can view the demonstration of products of research projects being taken up by various departments and teams at the institute. The expo will be an interactive idea with a display of prototypes and will have researchers explaining the details to interested students.
