BITS Pilani Social Engineering

The reputation of a university is simply not based on admission and placement records but also on its Social Engineering activities such as the way BITS Pilani has taken up the rain water harvesting project for Rajasthan villages and mission Desert Bloom.

(PRWEB) July 5, 2005 -- A rainwater harvesting project being developed by the Birla Institute of Technology and Science(BITS) Pilani could go a long way in bringing succour to the parched lands of Rajasthan. The Rs.10-million project is being implemented within the BITS campus and two villages near the institute.

A 12-member BITS team, including students and faculty members from the civil engineering department, has been working on the project for over six months. This project which uses Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to determine the elevations and depressions in a terrain will double up as a water reservoir and will also recharge the groundwater.

The two villages, Raila and Jhereli, where the pilot project would be implemented lie in a six-km radius of the BITS campus. These two villages posed the best challenge for the BITS project as they did not have any canal to recharge underground aquifers. The groundwater here was found at a depth of 225 feet below the surface and recedes one inch every year. Routed through BITS' alumni in the US, the development is being completely funded by the Rajasthan Association of North America (RANA).

The most unique feature of this project is that the water harvesting scheme can be replicated throughout the state of Rajasthan with the minimum modifications. Rajasthan has the largest portion of the Thar desert, which covers around 446,000 sq km and stretches to three other Indian states and two provinces of Pakistan.

BITS Pilani in Rajsthan has recently tied up a collaboration with Jacob Blustein Institute for Desert Research (BIDR), of Ben Gurion University, Negev, Israel for a Desert Bloom mission by setting up a Centre for Desert Development Technology. If every institution in India takes up a mission like BITS, Pilani, we will have a better nation to live with.

The pioneering work of BITS Pilani for the society at large goes to prove that the reputation of an educational institution is not merely based on its admission and placement statistics but based on its Social Engineering also.

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