IIT-Delhi announces competition seeking solutions to rural problems

NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 11: The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi has recently announced the first design competition for its students to identify and suggest technical solutions to address technical challenges faced by the rural population.

The competition named "Rural Innovative Technohunt – A technical challenge to identify rural problems and suggest solutions" will seek to address problems from various themes like agriculture and animal husbandry, village industries, education, health, energy resources, water & sanitation and other relevant areas.

Prof. S. K. Saha, Coordinator and Principal Investigator (PI) of RuTAG at IIT Delhi, said: “The concept of RuTAG club was introduced few years ago at IIT Delhi in order to expose the students to the technical problems or challenges at the grass-root level. In a way, it was a movement for “Connecting Engineering Minds with the Society.”

The competition is open to all the students, staff, and faculty of IIT Delhi.

The competition will be held in three stages: 1) Concept submission 2) Detailed design and 3) Prototype development.

The teams selected for stage 3 will be provided funding of up to Rs. 50,000 for prototype development in case the product is hardware. After developing a working prototype, the teams will be required to test it and submit a report.

If the product is software, the teams will be required to submit a functional software with required GUIs (Graphical User Interface), test the software for realistic situations and submit a report. The teams in Stage 3 need to give a demo of their prototypes on April 20, 2019 during the Open House of IIT Delhi.

Winners of Stage 3 will be awarded a certificate of appreciation along with a plaque. They may also seek a seed grant up to Rs. 2.0 lakhs per project from the Design Innovation Centre of IIT Delhi to carry their idea forward.

The RuTAG will also facilitate rural – social internship to the winners of Stage 3 in reputed organisations, Institutions, Universities and Companies in India and abroad. The registration for the design competition has started and the last date of submission of concept note is Dec 31, 2018.