Tiruchi Corporation’s truckmounted street vacuum cleaner lies in disuse
The truckmounted street vacuum cleaner was designed at a cost of ₹1 lakh by NITT students.
A lowcost street vacuum cleaner designed by National Institute of TechnologyTiruchi (NITT) and gifted to the Tiruchi Corporation in 2019, is no longer in use, officials say.
“We received the vacuum cleaner device from the NITT team in September 2019, which the Corporation mounted on a mini truck. But the litter has clogged the insides of the machine and we do not have the expertise to repair it, so it is currently not being used,” a senior Corporation official told The Hindu.
The device, designed at a cost of ₹1 lakh, by 16 NITT students, was meant to be operated with the supervision of sanitation workers and ease the strain of manually cleaning the streets.
The product idea was conceived by NITT’s 1983 batch alumni Richard Sekar, T. Suresh and Sagaya
raj Benedict, and was based on the principle of a household vacuum cleaner, sources said.
Members of ‘Design Consortium’, the student club of NITT, designed the device, fitted it with a 1,700 rpm impeller fuelled by a petrol engine to generate the vacuum.
The neighbourhoods of Ponmalai and K. Abishekapuram covering the bus stand and nearby areas were initially the target areas for the truckmounted vacuum cleaner.
Sources at NITT said that the institute had not been approached for assistance.
The official said that automation of cleaning would be progressively adopted in the city.
Last year, the Corporation began using five portable sweeping machines purchased through corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding support, as part of its campaign to clear roadside silt.