THE HOME OF INNOVATION
“Students need multidisciplinary education to become job providers” —PROF. V. RAMGOPAL RAO Director, IIT-Delhi
The Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-Delhi) has traditionally been known as a centre of engineering studies. Humanities education was considered more of a service area. But that has changed in the past couple of years. Now, we have departments for humanities at IIT-Delhi and their faculty has also grown. Humanities and engineering education are imparted simultaneously and both departments work in tandem. About 20 years ago, the IITs were only focused on technical studies, but that’s not the case any longer.
Multidisciplinary education is the need of the hour. If we want to provide an impactful solution to a problem, multidisciplinary approach is the way. A system-oriented approach needs to be adopted for research to be visible in society and that’s how IIT-Delhi has been looking at it. Every other student in the institute wants to be an entrepreneur, but you cannot build a startup unless you have a complete solution for any problem. To turn students into job providers, they need to be given multidisciplinary education. We, for example, now have the School of Public Policy, the Department of Design, and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at IIT-Delhi. In fact, 10 departments have been set up in the past four years.
IIT-Delhi has been at the forefront of research and innovation in the past one year. A rapid antigen test kit for Covid-19 was developed. In July 2020, an RT-PCR kit, costing only Rs 399, was launched. Ramja Genosensor, a
start-up incubated at IIT-Delhi, developed a multipurpose organic hybrid surface disinfectant spray, NANOSHOT, one shot of which can be effective for 96 hours. The spray kit can sterilise car dashboards/ seats, tablets, wallets, books, luggage, lift control panels, TV remotes and other products. IIT-Delhi incubated start-ups E-TEX and Clensta and launched a complete anti-viral protection kit in October 2020. It consists of a novel Clensta protection lotion and hand sanitiser as well as the E-TEX Kawach anti-viral T-shirt and Kawach mask.
Another product is the low-cost facial protection equipment COVLOCK. It can effectively inhibit personto-person transmission of the contagious virus through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It’s an innovative ergonomic face shield, which can be comfortably worn for prolonged hours, just like a pair of glasses. The product received financial support from the Clifford Chance Business Services. The project was a collaboration between the Clifford Chance Business Services and IIT-Delhi. ■
—as told to Shelly Anand