PUNE: Young engineers from Thiruvananthapuram-based GenRobotic Innovations, who have devised world’s first robotic scavenger called ‘Bandicoot’ to tackle the problem of manual scavenging in India were felicitated with 9th Anjani Mashelkar Inclusive Innovation Award. This award was given at the 7th National Conference on Social Innovation (NSCI) held by Pune International Centre (PIC) on Sunday at Yashada, Baner.
The event was organised by PIC in association with Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS) and National Innovation Foundation (NIF). The three engineers GenRobotic CEO Vimal Govind MK, GenRobotic Director Rashid and GenRobotic CTO Nikhil NP were presented the award by PIC President Ragunath Mashelkar and PIC Vice President Vijay Kelkar.
Speaking at the conference, Govind said, “There are more than three crore manholes in India, which are cleaned manually. Due to that, about 23,000 people die every year in India and 98 per cent suffer from diseases. Since the cleaning of manholes requires human level of flexibility, we explored human faculties like intelligence, vision and flexibility and replaced them with technology. This Bandicoot, using its robotics arm, can perform as flexibly as humans.”
The robot has been already deployed in six states in India and the scavengers will be employed to operate the robots. Eminent scientists like Jayant Naralikar, Vijay Bhatkar and Govind Swaroop along with PIC Honorary Director Prashant Girbane were present at the event.
