engINdia

The purpose of this post is to showcase an effort by a few students to put together some small technical projects that can provide affordable technology.

As the website says - engINdia is an online resource for student engineers. On this site you will find numerous projects and challenges that face people in rural India. It all started of as a collaboration between 6 students from the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). They had a six week expedition to Pabal village in Maharashtra (India) where they had several discussions with the local community trying to understand the problems they are facing. The result of these discussions was a list of projects aimed towards providing affordable solutions to the everyday problems faced by these villagers. These are projects on diverse subjects such as drinking water, waste management, energy, education etc. For each project, they try to answer how will the local community use the proposed solution, its economic benefits, its relation to the local environment and available resources that can possibly be used for the solution. I dont know the current status as to how many of these projects are currently undertaken and what is the benefit they had provided to the local community. In words of one of the members of the expedition community - Pooja Wagh (taken from her article here) - "Perhaps the most important lesson that I took away from Pabal was that the people there are not ignorant villagers waiting for engineers from MIT to come and help them solve their problems. They are people who think logically about the inefficiencies in their lives, brainstorm innovative, practical solutions, and apply very effective technologies to increase their productivity."