Jamshedpur : Known for their innovative prowess, the technocrats of National Institute of Technology NIT-Jamshedpur, located at Adityapur, has come up with low cost LED bulbs desgined to spread light at rural areas.
The students comprising Deepak Kumar, fourth year Metallurgy, third year student Vaishnavi Chilkuri and production department student Sujit Kumar, have also started training for helping villagers to make 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 of 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 every guidance from our head of the department. We have developed low cost LED bulb and now implementing Unnat Bharat Abhiyan by training rural people to manufacture and market energy-efficient LED bulbs under Aarunya. Priced between Rs 45 and Rs 50, they are cheaper than the ones costing Rs 85 each that the government supplies domestic consumers through post offices,” he noted.
As part of the initiative training sessions are being organised at different villages. ” The response has been overwhelming from the villagers. 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 students Rs 40,000 as seed money to train villagers.
NIT spokesperson Deepak Chowrasia said the college would help students in every way to make the project a success. “LED bulbs are efficient and last long. If all goes well, trained villagers will earn a steady income.”
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.