Shaastra SIC and IUSC

Once again, IIT Madras brings you its annual technical festival, Shaastra, in a brand new avatar. Bigger and better than ever before, Shaastra has a tradition of fostering innovation and providing a platform for unparalleled growth among its several thousand participants every year.

To top it off, this year at Shaastra, we introduce a brand new event - the "Shaastra Innovation Challenge"!.

We, at Shaastra Impact aim to provide you with a platform to express your desire to help society by using your technical skills. The Shaastra Social Innovation Challenge aims to use the talent pool of the engineering world to resolve some of the problems plaguing rural India.

CHALLENGE 1 - The SIC team in tandem with our partner NGO, Climate Healers (www.climatehealers.org<http://www.climatehealers.org/> ) is challenging you to come up with a design for an innovative solar cooker that could replace the traditional wood-based cooking source.
And there's sizable prize money on offer too.Also, the top designs will be entered into the Climate Healers Global Challenge and stand a chance of being field tested in rural Rajasthan.
We believe that this initiative will go a long way in transforming the lives of thousands so as to enable them to dream of a better tomorrow. And we invite you to make that difference - to carve out the way of the future.

CHALLENGE 2 - SIC team, with the help of the internationally reputed NGO - Green Add + has challenged the students to develop a design (design document) for a fully autonomous (unmanned) robot that can successfully segregate municipal waste into its constituents
Recognition & benefits for winning model

* Prize money
* Recognition from the Ministry of Urban Development & National Waste Management Council, INDIA.
* Recognition from United Nations Development Program.
* Post winning - Opportunity to develop model further and pitch to leading industry / government bodies - and hence there may be opportunity to commercialize/patent innovation.

The Inter University Sustainability Challenge

With the IUSC, we're aiming at one particular aspect of this sustainability drive - cleaning up our Alma Mater. And so, we're inviting teams from colleges across India to pit themselves against each other in a race to see who can make the biggest difference for our planet.



Apart from a hefty prize for the winning teams, there's also a huge bonus - teams that participate will get funding and mentoring for a large-scale green project of their choice in their home campus! That too, by awesome organizations, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, the Harvard Sustainability Initiative, and AASHRE to name a few. And it doesn't stop there! Teams will also receive an Environmental Training and Certification program by the Copenhagen Communiqué, the Federal Ministry of German Research and Education Initiative, GreenAdd+, and the Prince of Wales' Programme for Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge.



This fall, Shaastra's where all the big names are at!

For more details, visit - http://www.shaastra.org/2011/main/events/SocialInnovationChallenge/

Or Contact -
Akand Sitra,
impact@shaastra.org<mailto:impact@shaastra.org>,
Shaastra Impact,
Shaastra 2011