Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Amrita University) is a private university spread across South India in the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Amrita Univeristy offers the Live-in-Labs program - a multidisciplinary, “theory into practice” initative that facilitates the research, development, and deployment of sustainable solutions for current challenges faced by rural communities in India. The program provides international students an experiential learning opportunity where they can directly interact, observe, study, and live in rural communities in order to gain a better understanding of problems in the areas of health and livelihood, education and technology, environment and farming, and infrastructure. Many international students from US, Europe and other countries work with Amrita students in the areas mentioned above to build self-reliant communities.
Background on the project
In the old days village people would make oil out of lemongrass by means of distillation and sell it on the market. Firewood would come from the forests but since a long time already this has been prohibited by the government due to environmental concerns. Knowledge about the process has virtually been lost. Amrita University is taking initiative to bring this knowledge back and provide the village people with an income generating option using a different source of energy, such as grid power. A prototype for the distillation of lemongrass has been developed and installed by a former group. They also designed a business plan for it. The assignment for us consists of further testing, introducing the technology to the local people (on-the-job training), fine-tuning and implementing the business plan, including marketing. That means that we should actually make the technology and enterprise work.
Who are we?
We, Laurence and Jelmer, will be working on this project in India from October 2016-January 2017. Laurence is a third year Molecular Science and Technology student and Jelmer a third year Applied Physics student. We will be joining forces with dr. Udaya Bhaskar from the Chemical Engineering department of Amrita University Ettimadai campus and two of his students, Mahesh and Prithvi. Together we hope to accomplish something great here!