Dinesh C Sharma Archives - InnoHEALTH magazine

Distributed incubation may help promote grassroots innovations

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 07:33:39 +0000

Several grassroots innovations which we often hear about failing to make it to the market. This is due to a number of factors including lack of access to formal incubation facilities, venture capital, and prototyping and mentoring. In order to overcome these hurdles, experts have suggested setting up of special purpose incubators that can provide necessary technical and mentoring support to innovators in the non-formal sector.
“The idea is to develop some kind of distributed incubation and to nurture ventures in their respective regions, in the spirit of in-situ incubation,” said Dr. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology (DST) while presenting recommendations emerging from roundtables held as part of the Festival of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rashtrapati Bhawan few months back.

It was also suggested that since most innovative products fail to compete with large companies and against established products and brands, the government must develop norms for a preference in public procurement for such products.
Besides distributed incubation facilities, the roundtable also came up with the idea of ‘value addition centres’ which should be open for all innovators so that prototypes of innovations could be further developed and converted into marketable products. At present, academic and research institutions are involved in developing prototypes only and innovators have to look elsewhere for fabrication. Commercial fabricators accept orders for large quantities. “Innovators need special fabrication centers where limited units of a finished product can be developed for a pilot study, market research and test commercialization,” Dr. Sharma added.

Also Read: Innovation is the New Buzz Word

Innovators at FINE 2018
There is a need for testing and calibration of technologies developed by a large number of innovators. However, many innovators and startups do not have adequate funds for Distributed incubation may help promote grassroots innovations By Dinesh C Sharma this. A fund through which the testing and calibration of technologies could be facilitated is required.
In order to correctly ascertain the needs of the people, an appropriate need-gap analysis is essential to guide the R&D efforts in the right direction. If the industry could be involved during the initial phase of product development, the chances of the products’ acceptance by the people increase manifold. Hence, industry and R&D linkages at institutions be facilitated.
The roundtable on sustainable agriculture recommended adoption of one innovator by every agriculture institute and university. The Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) already runs a program called Innovator Farmers – IARI Fellows. It was recommended that this scheme should be extended to central and state agriculture universities for innovations in agriculture and allied activities.
“We have seen that coming together of innovators from informal sector and institutions in the formal sector can help disseminate innovations on a wider scale,” observed Dr. Anil K Gupta, Executive Vice Chairperson of National Innovation Foundation which organized the innovation festival in collaboration with the Office of the President and DST.
“The exhibition of innovations held at Rashtrapati Bhavan has demonstrated to industry, government and civil society how innovators are collaborating for a creative and compassionate India,” President Ram Nath Kovind said while speaking at the concluding session.
However, he said, merely showcasing innovations was not the sole purpose of this Festival.
(By India Science Wire)

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Smartcity development are heat islands

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 06:02:34 +0000

The phenomenon of urban heat islands, in which concrete and built areas experience higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas, may get accentuated with rapid urbanization. This is the conclusion of a new study of urban areas selected for development of smart cities. The study, which covered 89 of 100 areas selected for development of smart cities, has found that agriculture and irrigation are two dominant drivers of urban heat islands or UHI in India. In addition, significant presence of atmospheric aerosols – mainly pollutants – over urban areas can influence UHI.

Moisture from irrigation canals and agriculture fields play a key role in keeping rural areas surrounding cities much cooler that urban areas, resulting cities becoming heat islands. In a heat island, temperature could be 1 to 6 degrees higher than surrounding areas. Remote sensing data and climate modelling were used to evaluate UHI across the country.

When the surrounding of non-urban areas have no agriculture during summer, cities are relatively cooler during daytime. However, if the non-urban areas are under irrigated agriculture, cities are warmer than surroundings. This means UHI effect during day time is mainly driven by agriculture and irrigation. However, in the night-time, cities are significantly warmer than surroundings in both winter and summer seasons. Night time urban heat is mainly driven by the amount of heat stored in buildings and other impervious surfaces.

Urban areas located in highly irrigated regions – Indo-Gangetic Plain and north-west India (Haryana and Punjab) – show UHI intensity of 3 to 5 degrees. During summer season (April and May), when air temperature is at the peak, land surface temperature becomes is higher than that of the post monsoon season in absence of agricultural operations. Moreover, amount of moisture and vegetation in non-urban areas are also limited as crops are largely harvested by the end of March and soil moisture is depleted due to high atmospheric water demands, the study said.

“While urban areas have experienced increased number of heat waves and temperature extremes in recent past, urban heat island effect driven by rapid urbanization can further worsen extreme hot conditions in cities,” pointed out Dr Vimal Mishra, a scientist at the Water and Climate Lab of Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, which did the study. The results of the study appeared in journal Scientific Reports on Wednesday.

The development of smart cities will result in rapid growth in urban infrastructure and population, leading to increases in UHI intensity. “Our results can provide policy insights for development of smart cities,” Dr Mishra said. “Considering night-time heating which could be significant during heat waves, measures such as passive cooling should be used. Building materials that absorb less heat and are sustainable can reduce the amount of heating caused by stored heat.” The presence of water bodies and vegetation in cities can also help reduce additional nighttime heating in urban heat islands.

The study team included Rahul Kumar and Vimmal Mishra (IIT Gandhinagar); Jonathan Buzan and Matthew Huber (Purdue University, USA); Rohini Kumar (UFZ-Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany); and Drew Shindel (Duke University, USA).

(Article shared from India Science Wire)

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INDIA'S NUTRITION ATLAS GOES LIVE

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 05:23:24 +0000

The Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) has developed the country’s first Nutrition Atlas to provide all the relevant data and information about nutrition.

The Nutrition Atlas provides information and data on nutritional status of population groups at national and state levels, along with an overview of nutrition-related deficiencies, disorders and prevalence levels in various parts of the country along-with information on nutrients, nutrient rich foods, nutritional deficiency disorders and a host of other topics.

The portal also includes information on nutrition rich foods and nutri-guide for various nutrients, minerals, essential amino-acids, fatty acids, dietary fibers and proteins, along with their biochemical cutoffs, recommended dietary allowances, signs and symptoms and dietary sources.

The Atlas is interactive and displays information in the form a user may select and has been developed through a long drawn, cohesive and technical exercise by a multidisciplinary team in the bioinformatics division of NIN. It makes use of publicly available data sources like reports of National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, National Family Health Survey, World Health Organisation and other public databases. The Dashboard acts like an information management tool, helping the user track data on under nutrition, over nutrition, overweight, obesity and communicable and noncommunicable diseases. It can also provide different time trends on each of these parameters. The development conducted the research under ICMR.

ARTICLE SHARED FROM ‘INDIA SCIENCE WIRE’

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