NITK IEEE
Social
Initiative
By Amit Raj
A
glimpse of NITK’s technical prowess can be seen in the
four technical clubs of the college. NITK IEEE is one of
them, with a group of highly motivated students brimming with
ideas. With a steadily growing membership and a penchant for
student activity, the club strives for excellence in all of its endeavours. Having won four awards, including the best student branch
and best student enterprise awards, the club has set its sights on
taking up more challenging and socially relevant projects.
One of the most ambitious projects, which promises a tremendous impact, is “JAGRITI”. This project is an attempt to catalyze and contribute to social welfare efforts, by using the power
of crowdsourcing in problem identification and resolution, and by
providing an anonymous straightforward platform for reporting issues. The plan is to start by concentrating the model on child labor
and child abuse, and thereafter expanding to cover other issues as
the project grows.
India is sadly the home to the largest number of child labourers in the world. The 2001 national census found an increase in
the number of child labourers from 11.28 million in 1991 to 12.59
million in 2001. 40% of the labour in the precious-stone cutting
sector consists of children. NGOs have discovered the use of child
labourers in the mining industry in Bellary District of Karnataka in
spite of a harsh ban on the same. A major concern is that a huge
number of child labour cases go undetected, partially owing to the
distributed nature of the problem.
A growing phenomenon is using children as domestic workers
in urban areas. The conditions in which children work is completely
unregulated and they are often made to work without food, and for
very low wages, resembling the situations of slavery. There are cases
of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of child domestic workers.
The argument for domestic work is often that families have placed
their children in these homes for care and employment. There has
been a recent notification by the Ministry of Labour classifying
child domestic work as well as employment of children in dhabas,
tea stalls and restaurants as “hazardous” occupations.
The trend is that, although many people sympathize with the
situation of these children, they fail to take action owing to lack
of efficient and formal channels of authority. Child rights in India
suffers from a lack of awareness and a lack of initiative on the part
of the people.
The first phase of the Jagriti project tackles this very issue. If
there exists a framework through which one could make a difference in a simple way, one would indeed try to do so.
Jagriti plans to develop a web based anonymous simplistic environment, which can be used to report sighted child labour, abuse
and other such issues. Such a platform provides power directly to
those who wish to act but are bogged down by the fear of bureaucracy. Aided by a mask of anonymity, anyone so predisposed to
bring about change can fearlessly employ the platform.
The undertaking also plans to employ data analytics to discern
the nature of the reports and to determine the geographical distribution of the issue. Collaborations with NGOs and other volunteering organizations will be established to aid in the efforts of
prevention of child labour and to ensure primary and secondary
education to all.
Another IEEE social venture under SIGHT is the “Interactive learning for the Blind.” Following the success of “Educational
games for the blind” deployed under SIGHT in Mangalore a few
years ago, a team of students are working on developing interactive
learning for the blind. The team is collaborating with the St. Alosyius School for blind to develop applications that the students at
the school desire. This venture basically seeks to develop a low cost
and easily accessible apparatus that would aid the blind in perceiving
shapes and understanding math more interactively. The proposed
instrument is a slate with an adaptive surface whose shape can be
changed depending on the data it is fed.
NITK being a technical institute for education, the club and
its members also display a keen interest in knowledge dissemination. The “NITK open Collaborative learning” and the “Online
programming tool” projects are doing exactly this, by developing an
online interactive platform wherein students can explore and learn
through the resources provided
.
The Shoreline
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