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Students to be involved in designing future cities

Special Correspondent

Focus on use of technological progress to solve real world challenges

NEW DELHI: Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal on Friday launched an innovative programme to involve students in the designing of infrastructure like roads, highways, communication networks, energy-efficient utilities and modern housing, office buildings and industrial plants for the various cities in the country.

The programme will be in the form of a competition and focus on use of science and technology development process to solve real world challenges, incorporating real world data, and using globally recognised professional software, with teachers engaged as programme counsellors and technical professionals as mentors. Called the `Future Cities India-2020 competition', the programme is intended to create a talent pool geared to meet the ever-increasing needs of infrastructure development. The students will learn the fundamentals of development and practical implementation of their infrastructure design concepts. The programme would be implemented by the Union Ministry of Science and Technology and the US-based Bentley Systems, which specialises in providing software for infrastructure projects. The Bentley Systems would provide professional software free of cost to all the schools participating in the competition.

Launching the programme, Mr. Sibal said the competing teams would be required to develop and design solutions taking into account the need for financial prudence, timeliness and other real time needs.

The programme would be initially launched in Delhi as a pilot project on August 15. Eight schools have been identified and teams of four students from each of them would be asked to develop a design for the management of traffic for the Commonwealth Games to be held here in 2010.

The best two designs would be selected and given to students of four technical institutions -- IIT, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi College of Engineering and Netaji Subash Chandra Bose Institute of Technology for further refinement.

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