How a railway project put
truck driver’s son on plane to Japan
For his science project two years ago, Ankur Majumdar used his father’s smartphone
to search for photographs of trains. “My project was on treating human waste in
trains, but I had never seen a train before,” said the 16-year-old student from
Odisha’s Nabarangpur district.
On Sunday morning, Ankur flew to Japan with 29 other students on a youth
exchange programme organised by the Japan Science and Technology Agency in
association with the Centre’s Department of Science and Technology (DST).
According to officials, that’s a first for Nabarangpur. The district in
southern Odisha is arguably India’s poorest and the focus of a year-long
assignment, titled District Zero, by The Indian Express. It has some of the
most dismal indicators for education, with 57.35 per cent of the population
having never attended school.
But as Ankur’s story shows, that could be slowly changing.
Ankur’s project, ‘Utilisation of Human Excrement and Environment Safety
in the Railways’, took him to first position at the district and state levels
in INSPIRE, a DST competition to attract the best of science talent among
students. He eventually stood second from Odisha at the national-level
competition held in Delhi last October.
Under INSPIRE, two students are selected from each middle and high
school in the country and each gets Rs 5,000 to prepare a science model, after
which they compete at the district, state and national levels. Students for the
exchange programme are selected from among the INSPIRE toppers.
This year, 248 children in Nabarangpur have qualified for the science
project. When Ankur won the award last year, he was a Class X student of the
Government High School in Murtuma, a village in Umerkote block. Now, he is a
first-year student of the Gurukrupa Junior College in Umerkote.
For his project, Ankur made a “demo model” of a train. “It was the clerk
in our school who gave me this idea. He had just come back from a train journey
and was talking about how disgusted he was with all that human waste on the
tracks. When I told him I had been chosen for the INSPIRE awards, he said I
should think of a solution to this problem. I discussed the idea with my
science teacher and we came up with our model,” said Ankur.
And they got working right away. While Ankur’s father Deepak Majumdar, a
truck driver and a small-time farmer, helped him with the cardboard model —
complete with wagons and a red engine — it was his science teacher Shivram
Panigrahi who sat with him for long hours as they discussed the project.
”We discussed in school, after school hours, at sir’s home... We
finally came up with the concept of train toilets fitted with tanks underneath
where human waste would get collected instead of falling on the tracks. At
every station, a giant vacuum pump would transfer the waste to an open field
nearby where alternate layers of waste would be topped with soil. The anaerobic
bacteria in the soil would then decompose the waste. The Railways already has
bio-toilets developed by DRDO but these are expensive and my teacher says
IIT-Kanpur has said they are not good enough,” said Ankur.
“My Murtuma school was a rural
facility with no good library or other resource material, but we have a few
teachers like Panigrahi sir who was with me through this project. He looked up
the Internet and came up with numbers and data with which I impressed the
judges at the competition,” said Ankur.
There was more he had to do to “impress the judges”. “It was all well
until the district and state level competitions. When I was selected for the
competition in Delhi, they told me I would have to speak Hindi for the judges
to understand what I was saying. So I worked on my Hindi. TV really helped,”
said Ankur, who says he is now hooked to ‘Taarak Mehta ka Oolta Chashmah’ on
SAB TV and Man vs Wild on Discovery Channel.
Ankur has an elder sister, who is in the second year of plus-2 in junior
college, and a younger brother who is studying in Class 7 at the same Murtuma
school. His father says he prefers his son to do all the talking, adding that
Ankur was the one who “studies the most” among his three children.
Ankur, meanwhile, says his aim is to study “pure science” and that he
hopes to do research, “not in Odisha, somewhere outside”.
When contacted, District Collector Rashmita Panda said, “Ankur has made
Nabarangur proud and will inspire many others in the district. He has shown
that despite studying in a government school with limited means, it is possible
to do well.”
Incidentally, the Odisha government and Ministry of Railways agreed last
November to jointly develop at least six-seven rail projects in the state,
including a 40-km track connecting the Nabarangpur district headquarters to its
nearest rail link in Koraput’s Jeypore.
“My first train journey was when I had to travel to Bhubaneswar for the
state-level competition,” said Ankur.
“Now my parents are worried about my first flight. Except for a cousin
who works in the ITBP, no one in my family has ever been on a plane. I asked
him and he said it’s the take-off and landing that’s scary, everything else is
fine. But my mother doesn’t understand. She cried a bit when I was leaving then
and said, ‘we are letting you go only because yeh tumhare career ka sawaal
hain’ (this is a question of your career),” he said.
Source: https://in.news.yahoo.com/railway-project-put-truck-driver-034400823.html
