Grand Event - World Environment Day
On the occassion of World Environment Day (5th June, 2017), Hon. HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar was in the city of Pune to launch SCCN project of TERRE Policy Centre in MIT – World Peace University (MIT WPU) Campus.
MIT WPU is now officially on the cloud platform of SCCN called as 'SmartSense', which is based on Big Data and IoT. This will help the students and faculties of MIT to track their energy consumption on a real time basis and hence, will help them to strategise their consumption to save energy and cost.
The Minister also announced an open competition - ‘Clean, Green and Smart Campus’ for colleges and universities across the country. “In this competition, educational campuses will keep their campuses clean, plant trees, conserve water and energy, besides implementing sustainable waste management projects. The participant institutes will be evaluated in January and winners will be announced in February" he said.
Adding on to Hon. PM Narendra Modi's commitmment to the Paris Climate Agreement, he said the objective is to make the campuses across the country green and sustainable. “We think that students should learn all these things through field experience and practical work… all these things ( water conservation, etc. ) should become a part of our lifestyle” he said.
Dr. Vishwanath Karad, Founder of MIT Group of Institutes said, “SCCN is no coincidence. It was an idea that was waiting in the wings of MIT since 2007. Now the moment of that idea has come. No one can stop the idea from implementation, when its moment has arrived.”
Rajendra Shende, Founder of SCCN, Chairman of TERRE Policy Centre and Former Director of UNEP said, "“Through our catalytic project, the cloud platform will enable connectivity to other campuses in India and worldwide to compare and generate positive competition to better the resource efficiency.”
During the Press session, Harit Soni, collaborative partner in SCCN and Director of Ecolibrium Energy added, “Although the system of dashboard has been there before, it is for the first time that all the data from across the 800 universities will be on one platform, all at the same time. This will create a sense of competition amongst campuses to make themselves more sustainable, and enhance environmental development.”