Push for Clean and Smart campus
To bolster awareness about cleanliness and ecological conservation through use of smart technology, the ministry of Human Resources Development awarded the best performing universities in India at an event held in New Delhi earlier this week.
The ‘clean and smart campus’ competition was organised by the ministry in collaboration with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the Terre Policy Centre, an environment-focused NGO as well as the International Institute of Waste Management, Bengaluru. The event recognised and awarded top performers in India in clean and smart campus, tree plantation as well as water and energy conservation programmes.
“The competition aims to recognise and reward the campuses for the innovative activities led by students on cleanliness, reducing the carbon footprints for mitigation of climate change and promoting smart technologies like IoT, cloud network, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and robotics and cobotics,” said Rajendra Shende, Chairman of Terre Policy Centre, Pune, one of the brains behind this initiative. The competition was based on an online questionnaire and the responses were assessed and points awarded through an automatic computer-based process. Of the 739 nominations received under the three categories, the top 35 institutes were selected and a visit to these campuses was organised by a group of experts who finally selected 11 winners of various prizes under the three categories.
Hitting a Bullseye in the smart campus category, with its deployment of modern techniques such as ICT based learning, cloud networking, robotics and, automation, among many other features, the University Institute of Engineering in Gharuan, Punjab made its way to grabbed the top prize as a university, while the GMR Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh won the top award for a smart college and Swami Keshawanand Institute from Rajasthan bagged the top slot for a polytechnic in this category.
For the institutes, these awards go a long way as a motivation to continue to excel and keep their student communities involved in these key challenges that India faces and where the youth would have to bear the consequences of their actions or inactivity. “Our students, who join as trainee artists, personally take interest in planting trees and taking care of the greenery in and around the campus for as long as possible,” says officials of Karnataka State Dr Gangubai Hangal Music and Performing Arts University that won the Third Prize in the Non-Residential Clean University Category.
Launched in 2017, the “Clean and Smart Awards” endeavour to measure cleanliness, waste management, water conservation and environment-friendly practices alongside the implementation of ripe and well poised technological solutions like Smart Campus Cloud Network (SCCN), which is a tool to share information on work done in a campus on resource efficiency and facilitates colleges and universities to mainstream the future policy-makers and policy-implementers in implementing the SDGs by promoting sharing of the information on transformative actions undertaken by students and faculties in the campus.
