A team of students at the Energy and Environment Protection Club attached to the VIT university here has bagged the first prize at the national level Tech Fest Green Campus Challenge (TGCC) organised by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay from January 3 to 5. The students who accomplished a maximum of 97 tasks also won a cash award of `30, 500.
In the event, 110 institutions from the country, including IITs, NITs, universities and engineering colleges, participated. Of them, 12 colleges were short-listed and invited for the presentation at IIT- Bombay. In the final round, the VIT team bagged the first position, with 4,938 points. Sir Padhampat Singhania University, Udaipur, Rajasthan, stood second with 4,093 points followed by Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, Gandhi Nagar, Gujarat, in the third position with 4,024 points.
“The activities were carried out under different domains, including energy, climate, air, sustainability, social outreach, green audit, food, waste management and biodiversity. It also included the use of social media, collaboration and creativity. Almost 70 per cent of all these tasks had already been implemented successfully at the VIT campus and, hence, our students were already in the practice mode,” Dr A Mary Saral, Professor, School of Advanced Sciences, faculty coordinator said.
Of the 150 students enrolled with the energy club, a team of 10 had represented the VIT university at TGCC. The aim of the TGCC was to focus on social initiatives in generating awareness and developing an inclination in the youth population towards the current social issues. It was an initiative to involve people in sustainable development and alert them about the effects of neglecting the situation. Green Campus Challenge had been designed with a vision of making campuses across India more sustainable and green and promote the idea among the college-goers in the country, she said. The tasks undertaken by the VIT team in the past six months had focused on applying practical solutions to the existing problems on these issues. This is where they were able to outsmart the other teams in the category of social outreach. As many as 15 camps had been organized to create public awareness on Palar river pollution and bio-diversity in association with the municipalities of Ambur and Gudiyattam, undertaking green campus initiatives such as conducting study on waste management, energy audit, working towards plastic free campus and rain water harvesting.
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