The Hindu Business Line : Agilent drive to improve eco-system

Coimbatore, Sept. 6 Agilent Technologies, a leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis, has started an ‘ecology improvement drive’.

The company is striving hard to propagate the need for preserving a rich and stable physical eco-system for sustaining future generations of human beings.

To reiterate its commitment, it launched ‘Agastya Mobile Lab’, a mobile ecology lab, at Kunigal, about 60 km from Bangalore last month. “We chose Kunigal because of its proximity to Bangalore. Further, the area is an arid zone. It needs injection of new ideas and education to resurrect the eco-system. We plan to replicate the initiative in many other arid and semi-arid parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh,” an Agilent spokesperson told Business Line.

The company sought the support of the Institute of Social and Economic Change and the University of Agricultural Sciences for commencing this initiative. Acquisition and development cost of a mobile eco lab has cost Agilent about Rs 6-7 lakh.

The lab, developed after extended interviews with five village communities, provides information on environment changes that the villages faced over decades and the possible reasons for it.

About 10 models dealing with water, soil, energy and agriculture have been developed at Agastya’s Creativity Lab.

The mobile eco lab moves round each village after sensitising the student community. “We plan to sustain the programme for a period of five years. Once Agastya implements the natural resource management models in the select five villages and reaches out to the larger community through its mobile labs, it would garner the attention of the community and catalyse other villages to initiate natural resource management on their own,” the spokesperson said.

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