Engineering students from Mumbai bring tech solutions for civic issues

In an innovative competition called 'Project Deep Blue' organized by multinational tech company Mastek Ltd, supported by Majesco Ltd. engineering students from the city came out with the solutions to solve real-life social problems using their technological skills.

Engineering college students came up with many interesting ideas like identifying which company is manufacturing more plastic from the garbage that the company generates or how citizens can file a complaint with the authorities to solve pothole problems in their area.

The 'Project Deep Blue' encourages engineering students to solve real-life social problems using their technological skills. The mandate for the students is to come with meaningful technical solutions over a course of three months for the problems that they have identified which have an impact nationally and internationally.

Third Year students of DJ Sanghvi College of Engineering Juhi Shah, Rahil Sarvaiya and Shomil Shah chose the challenges of implementing the plastic ban as a problem and came with their solution.

Shomil Shah, one of the student said, "This project is focused on profiling the plastic waste and litter which is disposed of in our nearby garbage dumps. Citizens simply need to click pictures of garbage and upload onto the software that we are making. Just by clicking a mere picture of a garbage dump, the algorithm can identify wrappers, packets etc. and also identify the product brand and backtrack it to its respective manufacturer. Through this, we can create a graph, which can tell us which manufacturers are the major contributors to the plastic waste in our country."

Another student explaining their project on citizen's problems, Aniruddh Chandratraye, from NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, said, "The intent of our solution is to build a centralised platform wherein citizens from a particular zone can report about problems arising in their area, such as, potholes by simply taking a picture from their mobile device and uploading it to our system using the website or the application. The system will use its technologies to determine the severity of the road damage and will come up with an estimated cost of repair. This can be then verified by real humans and the repair work can be completed. "

A review of the work completed can also be done after the pothole repair is completed, informed Chandratraye.