Brilliant research projects by students of technical institutes across the country would now be able to serve the needs of small and medium scale industries rather than collecting dust in store rooms.

IIM-A Professor Anil Gupta's brainchild 'Techpedia.in' is a unique website created to connect large amount of research work done at the undergraduate level in technical institutes to the industries concerned.

The projects, the database of which would be posted on the website, will benefit medium and small scale industries that cannot afford to have their own research and development facility.

"The fate of the well thought and hard-worked projects of the final year undergraduates is unknown, as scores of batches pass out through more than 3000 technical institutes of the country," Gupta told PTI explaining why he took up the initiative.

"If at least one per cent out of the 1 lakh projects, that are published each year, have the brilliance along with the potential to be developed into a product, it would hugely benefit the micro, small and medium enterprises, along with the major players in the field of manufacturing and services," he said. .


"Along with serving the needs of industry, it would also help in bridging the existing gap between industry and academia and, at the same time, act as a huge technical database which the students, faculties, and researchers alike could refer to," Gupta said.

The website has recorded 1.4 lakh projects in the first year after its inception creating a huge database for the projects undertaken by students during their graduation, which so far remained unrecorded. The initiative was taken up by Gupta-promoted NGO Sristi.

"Actually this is the work of government or UGC, but as they have not done it we have to take it up," Gupta said.

"After procuring all the technical database of Gujarat based colleges, centres were set up at Nagpur, Pune, Rourkela, Banaras and Chennai with the mobilisation of numerous volunteers to amass projects and theses reports from IITs, NITs and other technical colleges of national repute in the first phase," Hiranmay Mahanta of Sristi, who is looking after the project, said.

"Within six months, more than 1.2 lakh projects were procured from more than 500 colleges," he said.

Mahanta said the results are encouraging as many industries have shown interest in projects posted on the website. .