Students take on rash drivers

There are more than a 150 million registered vehicles in India and the number is only set to rise. With that rise has come a steady deterioration in the already deplorable safety standards on Indian roads with people dying every hour in road accidents. However, what really shocked four engineering students from Bhopal was the number of children being killed in school-bus accidents. Something needed to be done.
Raj Sharma, Pushpendra Singh, Nupur Agarwal and Noopur Deo or Innova Triggers as they like to call themselves have decided to take on a herculean task - they intend to check and reduce rash driving on Indian roads particularly by public and school bus drivers through an ingeniously devised system. They call it the Vehicle Mapping and Speed Information System.
“This will be an embedded system that uses GPS or signal releasing sensors depending on the cost and reliability. A chip is connected to the speedometer of the vehicles. We program it so that when the vehicle crosses a certain limit it generates a signal which will be received by a receiver that confirms the speed,” explains Raj. “We also added chip to the milometers to generate a signal when a vehicle crosses the range of a particular domain."
The mapping system, he says, uses GPS as well and is similar to the railway monitoring system. A map shows you where each vehicle is and the speed at which it is being driven. In case of an accident this system also helps establish accountability.

“In this way,” Pushpendra says “besides reducing accidents it also helps in child security, and at the same time gives out information on whether the driver is following the designated route or taking unauthorised short cuts. Stolen vehicles can also be tracked easily.”

Despite the interest generated by their idea the 21 year old students of IES College of Technology, Bhopal are finding it extremely difficult to get adequate backing for their innovation. Stuck at the ideation stage they are looking for “support from people with expertise in embedded systems and micro-controllers, who could help in designing and coding the system”. Most importantly they need money for purchasing the requisite components.

Inasmuch as this system prevents the misuse of public and privately owned transport vehicles, Innova Triggers' vehicle mapping and speed information system could have prevented an incident like the Delhi gangrape from happening. The foursome feel so too. Meanwhile,they’ve decided to dedicate their energies to other worthwhile endeavors.Their current project involves an innovation on the Aadhar card.

“The road hasn’t been easy. We have had to face many obstacles even to reach here, but the journey has been interesting”, says a beaming Raj. “We’ve learned many things, like teamwork and how to work to innovate particularly in the areas of social issues. We’ve acquired problem solving skills, and yes hard work eventually does pays off.” We hope that optimism is rewarded soon. 

original story:http://innovationjockeys.net/past-season-details.php?id=28