IIT Roorkee, Japanese institutions team up for economic, environment research

NEW DELHI: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee is collaborating with Japan's Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and Keio University to implement a bilateral project to analyze the economic and environmental impact of the COVID 19 pandemic-induced reverse migration on the urban-rural continuum. The research is titled "Ecosystem centric rural revitalization: Bridging the urban-rural dichotomy toward post-COVID resilient recovery”, is funded by India's Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

According to a statement from IIT Roorkee, the research will focus on two selected study sites including Haridwar in India and Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. In connection with the joint research, a project workshop was conducted at IIT Roorkee today, June 27, 2022 to bring together experts and stakeholders to discuss the topic.

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"Urban and rural areas are strongly interconnected and failure to understand the strong linkages may affect the sustainability of the rural food-energy-water nexus. The proposed research will emphasize the policies adopted in India and Japan to support key economic sectors, making them resilient to disasters,” said Bijon Kr Mitra, IGES Japan.

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"The project will demonstrate the pathways of eco-system centric revitalization of rural areas through diversification of its economy toward decentralized growth in the post-COVID-19 era. There is no need to re-invent the wheel to find solutions to complicated problems but harness the learnings cross-discipline and cross-country to identify sustainable growth strategies," said Ajit K Chaturvedi, director of IIT Roorkee.