Last month,NID Director Pradyumna Vyas inaugurated the intra-campus bicycle sharing system at the campus,where any student could borrow a bicycle upon producing his or her identity card. Later,the campaign progressed to proposals on starting an on-campus bicycle club,drawing up route-maps of the city for cyclists and brainstorming on how to make a viable business model out of sharing bicycles. In the subsequent weeks,the students involved in the project have been exploring the city,finding a bicycle rental system frequented by construction workers in Majur Gam (East Ahmedabad),and another in-campus system at the St Xaviers Jesuits House,where priests-in-training use bicycles for transport in and outside the premises. Foreign students from Japan and Germany also helped them draw maps of the city that would serve as guides for cyclists and volunteers who like to promote cycling in the city. On a user-generated Google map,possible cycle stops (for repair or refreshments) near the NID campus have been marked out as well. According to Animesh Shrivastava,a final-year postgraduate diploma student of Transport and Automobile Design,the efforts are part of an attempt to scale up the sharing system beyond the campus walls and into the city. To begin with,we are looking at the BRTS,which as yet does not have a feeder-system, he said. Shrivastava said one of the proposals is that the area between Helmet crossroads and Nehrunagar,which is flanked by two BRTS routes,is an ideal place to implement the cycle-sharing system. There are a number of colleges in the area with a lot of student activity,and they could be encouraged to use bicycles. Besides,bicycles could be used to transit from one BRTS route to the other. The map developed by the students has routes marking architectural buildings of the city,which could replicate the Heritage Walk as an architectural bicycling route. As for the effort in their own campus,the team is planning to approach the Student Activity Council to help them form a Bicycle Club so that the effort,which is currently manned mainly by final-year students,is kept alive. Professor Vyas has also reportedly spoken to an Indian bicycle company to sponsor bicycles for the system. This has excited the team,who are proposing that extending the system to outside the institutes walls could possibly be a good business idea. We have not developed a business model but for a start,maybe bicycles that are part of the system could carry ads, said Shrivastava.
