INTEGRATING APPROPRIATE – SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY AND

SERVICE-LEARNING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: WHAT WE ARE DOING AT

MJCET

ALI ANSARI

PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

MUFFAKHAM JAH COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY

HYDERABAD, INDIA

Where is Hyderabad and what is MJCET?  • Hyderabad is a large, bustling city that has experienced tremendous growth

(Development?? Progress??) in recent years resulting in a dense concrete jungle, numerous big and small industries, polluted roads, trafficjams, water scarcity, local climate change and so on.

• Ours is a primarily undergraduate college, with about 3000 students in 7 engineering disciplines, about 20% women.

How to integrate Service Learning & Approp. Tech.? 

Our college is part of a large university system (Osmania University) and is constrained to operate within the confines of the university’s curriculum, centrally administered examinations and other limitations. We have neither the freedom nor the opportunity to introduce novel/unconventional learning experiences into our teaching program.

How does one sneak into this institutional straitjacket and find a few soft spots to provide service learning and appropriate tech. training to students?

One takes advantage of The Great Indian Paradox.

Indian culture has deep spiritual roots which recognize the value of service, self-sacrifice and the “ephemerality” of life. Within the last 40 or 50 years a different worldview and a new set of lifestyles, based on “conspicuous consumption”, have been superimposed on this culture.

In the midst of the desperate rush to get ahead, get rich and live the good life, there are, among Indian university students, many still whose hearts are open to others’ suffering.

• In 2002 I set up a center called Center for Environment Studies & Socioresponsive Engineering (CESSE) invited my students to help solve an “engineering problem” in a local, slum area.

(The students designed a lovely cover page for a brochure on CESSE)

Mission The Centre’s mission is to promote environmental literacy and social responsibility among engineers and the public. We seek to involve engineering students in environment related studies and projects directed at improving the quality of life of people through simple engineering solutions.

As our pilot project we undertook to solve an engineering problem in a slum area near our college.

A high wall, built by the government to hide the slum from the tourist spot (a lake) on the otherside,was causing massiveflooding in parts of the slum during heavy rains.

Could the students helpsolve the problem?

A good number of Civil and Mechanical Engineering students responded to the call. The topography was studied and ground levels were measured at many points.

 After a careful analysis a partial solution (providing a wide open drain along the wall and linking it to a sewage line) was suggested to the Municipal authorities.

 But once we got involved with the residents of the community we couldn’t get out. and some work was started – testing of drinking water quality, testing of samples from an open well, study of sanitation problems, inadequate water supply etc.

But it soon became clear that most of the environmental problems were linked to poverty, unemployment, low morale and lack of community togetherness.

 We then shifted our attention to the much more serious problems of rural communities in our state, Andhra Pradesh. Some of these problems have reached a stage of crisis. Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide as their crops have failed and they are unable to pay back their bank loans. Irrigation water scarcity in Andhra Pradesh (and many other states of India) has reached alarming proportions.

Project “Green Village”

• Meanwhile, Ali Ansari, who happens to be a former faculty of Mech. Eng. Dept. of Univ. of Colorado at Denver, contacted Bernard Amadei, Professor of Civil Eng., Univ. of Col., Boulder and founder of Engineers Without Borders – USA. Soon a chapter of EWB-USA was started at MJCET, with good response from students.

• We contacted govt. officials, in particular the Director of a World Bank funded project directed at rural development in a number of villages around Hyderabad. Through them we identified a small, backward village, Turk-Yenkapally (henceforth TY Village), 80 km from the city.

• Immediately, a student-faculty team was formed. Once again there was enthusiastic response from students. We thus reached an important conclusion.

“There are enough idealistic and compassionate engineering students in India. Given the extremely large engineering student population in the country, if even a small fraction respond to the call and are efficiently mobilized a great deal of extremely useful work could be done in rural India.”

Sundays are for villages

The lives of the 100-odd small farmers of Pudur mandal's Turkyenkapally village, Rangareddy district - 80 kilometres from Hyderabad - may soon be spiced up with engineering solutions from students of Muffakham Jah College of Engineering and Technology (MJCET).

Reports of some of the students working on the village project

 • Engineering and agriculture are thought to be a world apart from each other

and an idea of blending them is what makes the whole project exciting and interesting. Helping develop a village in an engineering way with the help of the local people is the best way, as they know what they want.

• To understand the aim of the project, I had to start from scratch with basic knowledge about agriculture, water management, food processing etc. Since the village, Turkh yenkapalli, falls in a semi-arid region, I tried to know more about dryland agriculture, watershed programmes and more, things that would help sustainable development in the village.

Trying to communicate with the people and getting to know their problems and trying to make them understand what we are trying to do and explain how they would be benefited, was a tough job but very satisfying, as it meant looking at life so closely, getting to know what many farmers undergo so that we may have our fill of food and the importance of every single food grain that we waste and every single drop of water we let go.

   Today, before I use any resource, there is a feeling of responsibility of

saving and caring as a human and as a citizen. This small step of Reformation by the students and the faculty of MJCET, I’m sure, will create a revolution tomorrow, when service training becomes a culture among the student community, then the ‘sleeping giant’ India, shall awake and arise to a better tomorrow.

 

• The day all of us start thinking beyond “I, Me & Myself”, then can we say the world has become a better place to live in. Being a part of this prestigious project I and my team have already started to realize this. I personally am grateful to my professor, Dr. Ansari, for placing his faith in me and considering me worthy enough to give me a chance to develop my humanitarian qualities.

Collaboration with Univ. of Colorado, Boulder under

Mondialago Award Program• Our Green Village student team, in

collaboration with Prof. Bernard Amadei’s student team, has been selected for entry in the Daimler-Chrysler Mondialogo Award Competition.

• I plan to introduce an extracurricular “Appropriate Technology and Service Learning” Program at our College.

• This will consist of learning materials, homework and hands-on sustainable community development work.

• At the completion of the program students will be given a certificate, qualifying them as “Green Engineer”.

• I am looking for partners in US and elsewhere to jointly sponsor such a program.