Mumbai student wins global eco award for helping farmers

In an upscale restaurant in Cologne, Germany, 50 students from across the world were chomping down baby octopus salads, kangaroo chops, and vegetarian dishes like pasta served with asparagus and spinach for dinner. Except one. Vaibhav Tidke, an engineering student from a Mumbai university touched nothing.
Later in the night in his hotel room, Tidke sat cross-legged on his bed, opened his suitcase and removed a packet of theplas and khakras. This was his dinner.

The 24-year-old hails from a Maharashtrian village called Ambajogai, in district Beed. He was in Germany participating in the week-long Bayer Young Environment Programme (BYEE), an annual educational programme set up jointly by the German company Bayer and the United Nation’s Environmental Programme (UNEP).

The programme, first started in 1998, seeks to encourage students with their environment projects. And at the end of the week, four students’ projects which they considered the best were to be awarded, and their projects supported through a fund created by Bayer and UNEP.

Tidke’s project was two dimensional. Firstly, he along with professor Bhaskar Thorat and some of his fellow students from the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), had set up a mechanism for using solar energy to dry agricultural and marine products.

And secondly, he had founded an NGO called Science for Society which tries to solve many of rural India’s problems like access to clean drinking water and availability of power through engineering means. For access to clean drinking water, Tidke uses the solar water disinfection process, where the sun’s UV rays are used to disinfect the water.

Equally simple is his dehydrating of marine and agricultural products. It is nothing more than a duct which traps passing air and solar panels which heats the trapped air. The heated air is then passed on through another duct, on to the products.

“Farmers, otherwise, dry their produce out in the open, which is a lengthier process, is unhygienic and leads to many crops and marine products being lost,” says Tidke.

Their unit on the roof of the ICT building has a capacity of drying 400 kgs products per day. They also have a unit in Nasik of a similar capacity and another under construction in Tarapur, which when ready will be able to dry as much as 3 tonnes per day.

Most of the funding for these units have come from university grants, scholarships and a little from their own pockets. Tidke, himself, has been putting his university stipend of Rs 8,000 on his NGO for the last two years.

And when he needed to raise more money in February 2009, he went to Aurangabad and taught students hoping to crack the Common Entrance Test (CET). He taught eight hours every day, for 14 days to earn a total of Rs1, 50, 000.

But that money was never going to be enough. Luckily, in December 2009, he was awarded a cash prize of Rs 10, 00, 000 by the United Nations for his environmental work.

In Germany, however, there were many contenders for the Bayer Young Environmental Leader award. The projects of other students seemed equally interesting.

A Chilean student had developed a popular web forum for carpooling and an Indonesian girl had created ‘EcoMonopoly’, a board game like Monopoly, except that this one taught young players about rural life and agriculture.

But eventually,  Tidke, with his dream of helping farmers won.