Govt to award six innovations today

The National Innovation Council has decided to support a bunch of innovators from IITs, students and working professionals for their six innovations that seek to reduce the drudgery of construction workers, rickshawpullers, street vendors and garbage collectors without being labour-displacing.

Sam Pitroda, Adviser to PM on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh and Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Minister Kumari Selja will award these innovations, selected from 468 entries received under proposals invited last October for anti-drudgery innovations, in the Capital on Wednesday.

The selected innovations include a Vessel Desk created by Raghunath Lohar, a student from Maharashtra, and HuMotor, developed by a team of students with Dr Sarvana Kumar and Dr Sandipan Bandyopadhyay from IIT Madras. Both seek to minimise the drudgery of construction workers by easing the burden of carrying loads on their heads.

The other innovations selected for support by the government include a compact portable display unit developed by Manjunath Butta, a design student from IIT Guwahati, for hawkers and street vendors to ease their space requirement.

The NInC will also award working professionals from Kolkata and Chennai for developing a novel rickshaw design, which seeks to ease the drudgery of riskshawpuller by converting the passenger load into a forward propulsive force, and a cycle for the physically challenged respectively. While the innovative rickshaw has been designed by Pratik Kumar Ghosh, the cycle for physically challenged have been developed by Ajith Alex, Aanand Ganesh and Mahesh PV.

Thirty-three innovations out of the 468 proposals, received under the 'innovation challenge to reduce the worker drudgery' floated by NInC last October, were screened by an expert group under R Gopalakrishnan, Member Secretary NInC, for their potential. Six were finally selected for detailed presentation of which four were sent to CSIR for its technical verification.

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