Known for their innovative prowess, the technocrats of National Institute of Technology NIT-Jamshedpur, have come up with low cost lED bulbs, desgined to spread light in rural areas.
The students comprising Deepak Kumar, fourth year metallurgy, third year student Vaishnavi Chilkuri and production department student Sujit Kumar, have started training for helping villagers to make the best use of the technology.
They have formed a company Aarunya, meaning the first ray of sun, to train villagers to make low-cost lED bulbs, package and deliver them to the market.
led by Metallurgy department head Ranjit Singh, the students have also started training 20 youths, including five girls, from villages --Asangi, Bantanagar, Ichapur, Bondi, Krishnapur and Dundra -- to make energy-efficient and low-cost lED bulbs.
The initiative has been taken under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Unnat Bharat Abhiyan that aims to connect institutions of higher education, including IITs, NITs and Indian Institutes of Science Education & Research (IISERs), with local communities to address development challenges through suitable technologies.
Sharing his experiences team leader Deepak Kumar said that the ambitious programme has been started under mentorship of Ranjit Singh. “We have received guidance from the head of the department. We have developed low cost lED bulbs and now implementing Unnat Bharat Abhiyan by training rural people to manufacture and market energy-efficient lED bulbs under Aarunya. Priced between `45 and `50, they
are cheaper than the ones costing ` 85 each that the government supplies domestic consumers through post offices,” he noted.
As part of the initiative, training sessions were being organised at different villages. “The response was overwhelming. They were given tips on how to make diode, a semi-conducting device allowing current to flow in one direction, how to make it resistant, and what is the function of tungsten in an lED bulb. We taught them techniques of soldering. We want to spread its reach,” said Kumar. The NIT administration has initially given `40,000 to students as seed money to train villagers. The students also distributed kits to the participants.
Notably, NIT (erstwhile Regional Institute of Technology) is one of the eight regional engineering institutes established in the country in the year 1960. The Institute was fully taken over by the Central Government on April 1, 2003 and renamed National Institute of Technology.