Use and throw is not in our culture, says IIT-Kharagpur Director

Partha Pratim Chackraborti, Director of IIT-Kharagpur, said the India has the innate culture of repair-and-use and not the sophisticate but profligate and sophisticate ways of the West in using natural resources.

His message was that the West has got itself mired in “unsustainable uncertainty”.

“Use-and- throw is not in our culture,” he said.

Technology education and use of it by business enterprise, also needed to be attuned to local ethos and the sustainability quotient.

Otherwise, short-term and elitist direction of the economy would be unsustainable and counter-productive, he warned while delivering the L.N. Birla memorial lecture “Global corporate sustainability: Education at Crossroads” here on Sunday. Concept of education has undergone dramatic change over the last few decades because of widespread use of technology and in the coming days, text books and class room would require reconstructions.

Educators need to enable students to think anew.

The technology has broadened the horizon and democratised the system, but compartmentalised thinking and idea generation, he said.

Chakraborti said the key challenge was to implement knowledge and sustainable technology on the ground.

As a case in point, he said IIT-K has taken up research project using nano-technology for preparing fertiliser.

He said IIT-K has used its expertise to provide simple solutions such as filtration of arsenic contaminated ground water by using easily avail available natural red soil called “morum”, preparing CTC tea with mixer and heater or artificial heart without a chamber.

The common challenge for the industry and the tech education institution was to reduce carbon footprint, underling the need for collaboration between the two.

jayanta.mallick@thehindu.co.in

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