Students of IIT Kharagpur working with the Gopali Youth Welfare Society pool in their resources to rush both essential goods and protective gear to the underprivileged in Gopali and neighbouring gram panchayats
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The fight against Covid-19 is an unequal war, and no one understands that better than the students of IIT Kharagpur. Several of them associated with the Gopali Youth Welfare Society, an NGO run by IIT Kharagpur students and faculty members with the support of locals, have come together to raise funds to assist around 2000 families residing in and around Gopali. With the assistance of IIT Kharagpur faculty, they have also been able to distribute thousands of masks to those who need it the most.
Many of these students are at home but have been unable to get their mind off the situation in Gopali. “The GYWS president, Mr. Mrinal Kanti Bhanja, is a local and he apprised us of the fact that many families in the area were not even being able to have a square meal a day. Many of them do not have ration cards, and so cannot access government help,” said Tanishka Aggarwal, coordinator for GYWS and 2nd year BTech student of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
The students pooled in money. Together with some contributions from the GWYS itself from funds that could not be spent as activities have remained suspended because of the lockdown, they put together a corpus of an amount above Rs 1 lakh. The money was ditigally transferred to the GWYS officebearers who, working with the Gopali Gram Panchayat, identified the beneficiaries and put together a team of 15-20 volunteers.
A week’s ration of rice, onions, potatoes, Nutrela and hand sanitizers was distributed by the volunteers to the 2000 families. Many of these families subsist by working for IIT Kharagpur. Some of these people work as ward boys in hostels, do the laundry or find employment as rickshaw pullers, domestic help within the campus or as labourers in the construction work undertaken by the Institute.
The students’ initiative has also ensured the distribution of 5,000 masks by GYWS in seven gram panchayats – Arjuni, Barkola, Hariatara, Khelar, Vetia, Kalaikunda, and Gopali. The masks were sourced from a production unit in Madhyamgram. Prof. Bhaskar Bhowmik of the Rajendra Mishra School of Engineering Entrepreneurship and Prof. D.K. Maiti of the Department of Aerospace Engineering have been key facilitators in the process. While Prof. Bhowmik helped source the masks from Madhyamgram, Prof. Maiti arranged for their transportation through the assistance of the Frank Ross unit in IIT Kharagpur.
Prof. Bhowmik said, “My friends, Ms. Mausumi and Mr. Sanjay Dasgupta, who are residents of Princeton, New Jersey, are engaged in various philanthropic activities globally and actively participating in various COVID 19 fundraisers. Through our various conversations, they decided to set up a mask production unit with the help of their friends, Mrs. Runa and Mr. Kaushik Ghosh in Madhyamgram. This also helped employ 6 unemployed tailors from that area. They have donated the first 5000 high-quality masks to us so that we could reach those who needed them the most. I am thankful to several other people, not the least to Prof. Maiti, who were involved in the process. What is most important is that we have been able to reach the masks to the grassroots – the labourers involved in MGNREGA – who cannot afford this basic protection against the virus.”
About 20 extra masks were handed to the panchayat pradhans. They were also offered N -95 masks with sanitizers for volunteers. About 500 masks will be provided to ASHA workers, police, BDO SDO office and other local government offices. Around 1000 masks are waiting distributed among various other people, some of them to Jagriti Vidya Mandir’s students.
Jagriti Vidya Mandir, located in Tangasool village that is a few kilometres away from the Institute is a school run by GYWS and has an enrolment of 240 students from Nursery to Class V. IIT Kharagpur’s students, organized into the school review committee, regularly monitors the activities of the school and also undertakes skill development among students.
“GYWS activities have become part of our daily schedule,” says Tanishka, who also mentions that students together with campus residents of IIT Kharagpur help organize Sports Day and Independence Day for the school students. “Students, organized into various committees and bodies, take care of various aspects of the running of GYWS,” explains Tanishka.
The student run NGO also has three or four cabs that were used for the transportation and distribution of the food stuff for the despondent families recently. “Now they are being made available to the local police whenever they require them,” said Tanishka, who is hoping that undergraduate, postgraduate and research scholars who are part of GYWS continue to keep alive efforts to reach out to Gopali’s underprivileged. Monalisa Sahu, also associated with GYWS and a 2nd year BTech student of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, concurred, “Helping people to access the bare essentials is the least we can do.”
But we are all bravehearts in our own ways, or so say the students of IIT Kharagpur, many of whom are residing within the campus and are finding their own ways to beat the gloom.
And yet, they have been doing amazing things. Snigdha herself, together with her batchmate and wingmate, Ritika Agarwal, at the SN/IG Hall have been participants in the PanIIT WINIndia Challenge (Wellness Indoors Now) and have managed to bring a lot of creativity in the way they have tackled the fitness challenges. In the first challenge – leg raises over an obstacle – it was Ritika’s idea to feature one of the participants as the plank, while the other did the leg raises.
Picking-up-that-long-forgotten-book-lying-under-a-pile-of-other-reading-material is something that appears to run on loop in every conversation on the daily routine during lockdown. Many like Rana Madhvendra, who is Editor, Technology Students’ Gymkhana, have revived their childhood reading habit. Rana has already finished reading three books – Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Bloomberg by Bloomberg and When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics. Ninaad Lohakare, Vice President at Technology Students’ Gymkhana, IIT Kharagpur, is reading India after Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha. Even Bhaskar Basak, member of the Branding and Relations Cell of IIT Kharagpur, who is juggling several equally enticing activities – binge watching films with friends, playing cards, or doing some assigned work for BARC, has picked up an odd Murakami or two.
Almost all of them are listening to music of some kind. “I am listening to hip-hop, classic rock, alt-rock, etc. We have also been learning to cook a bit since all the outlets are closed and we have a fixed time for availing mess facilities,” says Rana. Bhaskar has mastered making the omelette and his now trying his hand at frying potatoes.
Classes, friends, and a bit of coding, is how Chinmay Singh, a 3rd year Chemical Engineering student sums up his day. He is reading novels and also doing his remote internship with IBM Research. “A lot of my batchmates have also taken up remote internship as this is a two credit course in the third year and industry experience is very valuable.”
From the beginning of my service career, my target had been to improve my academic background. To fulfil my aspiration, I had joined the Graduate program of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE) during my service in Chandigarh. I cleared the Grad. IETE examination in 1989 and after serving in IAF for about nine-and-a-half years, I took voluntary retirement from defence service on April 4, 1991 to join the Punjab Wireless Systems Ltd. (A Govt. of Punjab Enterprise) as an Executive Engineer.
In 2002, I joined back the E&ECE Department as part of the department’s technical resource pool. I completed my MTech in Microelectronics & VLSI Design from IIT Kharagpur in 2007. During this phase, I tried my best to advance the non-invasive blood glucose monitoring research projects that I was earlier associated, with active support from L&T, which could source us the required sensors and ICs. Our hard work bore fruit as our biomedical research work led by Prof. Swapna Banerjee and Prof. Anindya Sundar Dhar was recognized with the grant of an Indian patent in developing non-invasive photoacoustic blood glucose measurement.
I have always loved to take up new challenges, and creating the infrastructure for the countrywide classroom program under the T10KT and NKN virtual classroom was one such challenge. It was quite difficult to design the T10KT studios in the basement of Kalidas Auditorium and three NKN classrooms in the Departments of ECE, Industrial and System Engineering (later shifted to Sir JCB Lab Complex) and GSSST, but I now feel happy that everything went well and we are still continuing to use all the infrastructure for their intended uses successfully.
I also look after the day-to-day operation of SWAYAM Prabha DTH educational channels 11 & 13 of MHRD, coordinated by IIT Kharagpur. Besides the virtual meeting infrastructure of the Institute, I coordinate the recording and live streaming activities of ISWT, GIAN, LEAP, Annual Convocation, GES, etc.
The therapy requires the use of Collagen, the protein that helps maintain the structure and functionality of the cartilage. Once Collagen becomes available as oral nutrient supplements or injectable gel, the therapy will receive a big boost. However, isolating the protein in large amounts is a problem and researchers the world over are looking for ways to do that from various sources.
The isolated Collagen was incorporated in a highly stable Pluronic F127 gel base. The CP (Collagen-Pluronic) hydrogel could be used for cartilage regeneration therapy. In addition, when combined with stem cells derived from the goat ear adipose tissue, this injectable hydrogel was found in laboratory conditions to highly facilitate cartilage formation. It could thus speed up the healing of cartilage injury.
Prof. Dhara said, “The blended CP hydrogel has an encouraging result to be used as injectable hydrogel for cartilage regeneration and also to perform as a stem cell delivery vehicle by minimal invasion.” The multi-institutional and multidisciplinary team included researchers from the School of Medical Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology and Rubber Technology Centre of IIT Kharagpur and from the Centre for Healthcare Science and Technology, IIEST, Shibpur.
The identification and mapping of Hyp position in signature motif plays an important role to correlate molecular alteration of the component chains of cartilage with the progression of arthritis. Prof. Dhara said, “This identification may contribute to early prediction of dysfunctional collagen leading to rheumatoid arthritis as well as molecular identification of Collagen from other sources.”
Inside though, a marvellous chemistry is at work. The airtight wrapper of this pack contains fine iron particles combined with vermiculite (a form of clay which holds water) and carbon or charcoal. When the wrapper is torn and the contents are exposed to air, the iron, highly reactive in its ground form, reacts with the air exothermically, producing oxide a la rust, and heat. The charcoal disperses the heat.
We invariably associate ‘nano’ with everything small – Tata Nano, iPod Nano, or even the Paper Pro Nano desk stapler. But, Prof. Jacob explained, “In the world of science, ‘Nano’ does not necessarily mean small. What I want you to recognize is that in the world of nanotechnology something is happening that makes the same material behave very differently when it is small than when it is at the conventional scale.”
People down the ages have been aware of what can be called the marvel of the tiny, although they could not put a name to it. Take the stained glass windows in the cathedrals all over Europe that go back to the 12th century or even earlier. “They put metallic salts in the glass during processing to get color, although they did not know they were using ‘nanotechnology’. By controlling how these metal containing glasses were heated up, one could decide the colour since the color depended on the shape and size of the metal nanoparticles that were formed,” said Prof. Jacob. [3]
It was the advance of microscopy that made it possible to see at the atomic and molecular level that gave a fillip to nanotechnology. “It is because we can see at this level, and can manipulate objects the way we want, that we can move at a much faster pace,” said Prof. Jacob.
A national lockdown for 21 days. Work from home. Classes on Zoom. Shopping for essentials only when it is truly essential. The entire family thrown into a togetherness they could scarcely afford earlier.
What was the most unique feature of your project that you think contributed to your win?
How difficult or challenging was it to come up with the plan?
Every contest is a learning process. What have you learnt from this particular experience?
How has the curriculum at IIT KGP or mentoring helped you?
Why do you think it necessary to participate in such contests?
What is the future of this particular project?
During her talk at the Science Communication Conclave, Prof. Bhattacharya talked about the threat to public health from nCovid-19 and drew attention to the ‘herd immunity’ and ‘R-naught’ numbers for nCovid-19. Herd immunity is the number that describes how many people in a population need to be immune to that particular pathogen to prevent transmission. R-naught is the basic reproductive number of the pathogen and describes how contagious it can be.
Yet, the threat from nCovid-19 was far more than any of these. “ ‘How do you deal with a novel pathogen when there is no immunity in your population?’ That is the question that we are grappling with now,” said Prof. Bhattacharya while talking to KGP Chronicle recently.
She added, “Of course, you cannot have herd immunity for something like Tetanus which you catch from the environment and not from other people.”
This could happen in the case of Ebola, the other test case discussed by Prof. Bhattacharya at the Science Communication Conclave. The discovery, and the eventual use of rVSV-vectored vaccine, is likely to reduce the threat from this deadly virus in large parts of Africa. The vaccine was tried during Ebola outbreak in Guinea and it was found through the ring vaccine trial – where contacts, and contacts of contacts of the infected were vaccinated – that vaccination, even for those infected, reduced chances of death.
“Covering public health as a journalist is enormously exciting, and probably very frightening as well because you have to get the information right as it impacts so many people,” said Prof. Bhattacharya to journalists at the Science Communication Conclave. For reliable information on the rapidly evolving scenario concerning nCovid-19, Prof. Bhattacharya referred WHO Situational Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Government of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security.
For example, while gauging the severity of air pollution, a journalist could ask if ‘In populations exposed to increased particulate matter such as PM2.5 or PM10 compared to populations not exposed, is there increased mortality?’