Stubble burning solution: Chennai students win IIT Kharagpur award

| Video Credit:
The Hindu

Every November, Delhi chokes under a blanket of smog. There are many reasons for why this happens. One is the much discussed and debated stubble burning in the nearby states of Punjab and Haryana.

Farmers have taken to using alternative varieties of paddy that don’t create the thick stubble that would need to be burned. Strict fines are being imposed on those who burn. Cases are filed against offenders. But the problem does exist and cries for a solution. Experts and top end researchers are working on a low-cost solution to this problem.

Stubble burning caught the attention of three bright students at the Agurchand Manmull Jain School in Chennai when they were told about the Young Innovators Program at IIT Kharagpur late in 2023.

The YIP is an annual competition that attracts bright minds in schools across the world. The 2023-24 edition of YIP attracted some 1,200 entries.

The three students at Agurchand Manmull Jain School, Revanth, Pio Jacksmith Fernandez and Santhosh came up with a simple solution they call Pyro Polish for stubble burning and submitted it. Out of 1,200 entries, 250 teams were selected. On Day 1 of the competition, 32 were shortlisted to showcase their models. Out of the 32, 20 were selected to make their powerpoint presentations.

And Pyro Polish was declared the winner of senior division. Here’s their story.

Reporting: Samreen Wani

Video: Shiva Raj, Thamodharan B, HG Shakambari

Editing: Shiva Raj, Johan Sathyadas

Western Ghats from a view point at Agumbe, in Tirthahalli taluk of Shimoga district, which is called “Cherrapunjee of the South”.
| Photo Credit: K. MURALI KUMAR

Tropical rainforests like the Amazon and Western Ghats, considered lungs of the planet, is likely to survive future global warming, according to a study led by Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

A release from the institution said that a team consisting of its scientists and also those from Calcutta University and University of Western Ontario studied detailed records of rainforests in sediments from Vastan coal mines of Gujarat deposited in coastal lagoons around 56 million years ago.

Coal layers in Vastan

The coal layers in Vastan are nothing but a spectacularly fossilised tropical rainforest containing a huge amount of plant and pollen remains as well as variety of mammals and insects that lived in these forests. India was a tropical island then, surrounded by oceans and Himalayas were yet to form. The period is known as Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when global carbon dioxide rose to an abnormally high level that the future global warming might reach.

“The study took several years of field and laboratory investigation. We had to date the sediments to confirm its PETM age and collected samples at centimetre intervals, analysed the pollens to understand how the tropical rainforest community evolved in response to such extreme global warming… The climate was also monitored by analysing oxygen isotopes in fossil teeth of small horse-like ungulate mammals that once roamed in these forests,” Prof. Anindya Sarkar, lead researcher of IIT Kharagpur, was quoted as saying in the release.

The study has just been published online in the Elsevierjournal, Global and Planetary Change. “We found a large anomaly in carbon isotopes exactly at 56 million years. This was such a characteristic signal for a super greenhouse globe with very high atmospheric carbon dioxide… The rainforest not only survived but also diversified during and after this global warming phase,” lead author of the paper, Arpita Samanta, a former PhD student at IIT Kharagpur and currently assistant professor at Kolkata’s Asutosh College, was quoted as saying.