Mr. Narasimhan Santhanam, Director judges at the Cleantech Challenge

Mr. Narasimhan Santhanam judged an event at the Cleantech Challenge at IIT Kharagpur. Here is what Narsi had to say about the event:

“I have attended a number of seminars and conferences, so those were fairly familiar territory. But judging cleantech ideas was quite a different experience for me.

I was invited to be part of a panel of judges for deciding the winners of a contest in which 7 teams from around the country had participated. All the teams comprised students who had come up with innovative cleantech ideas – which ranged from the improbable ( using the electricity generated from the force generated from the occupants of an elevator to power the elevator itself), to the interesting (making paper from mushrooms) to the eminently practical (a down to earth, economical and more efficient way of air conditioning). 

The judges panel, apart from me, comprised two IITKGP alumni – one who had briefly studied at IITKGP and had subsequently worked in the power sector for over 30 years, and the other a relatively less senior IIT-KGPian who had considerable experience in the wastewater treatment industry. 

It was not easy to select the winner from the losers – except for a couple of contestants, most of them appeared to have done their homework. We finally chose two teams as the top one and two. The first team was from the SP Jain Institute of Management that had developed and even prototyped and piloted a low cost air conditioner and the second team was from IITKGP, who had used a slightly different material in an emerging area of desalination called forward osmosis. 

All in all, an excellent learning experience and a pretty new one for me”