It was our pleasure to interact with Mr. Biplabketan Paul - a globally acclaimed development professional with 30 years of multi disciplinary experience across water management, irrigation, agri innovation and government policies.
The aim of this session was to enhance our knowledge. Mr. Paul was welcomed by our respected Director Dr. Neeta Shah. The interaction started by recalling when he met Neeta Mam for the first time, 20 years back. He thanked Neeta mam for motivating him. He also gave credit to our Academic Director, Dr. Mithun Khandwala acknowledged him as ‘A Man with a Golden heart’. He also talked about IVFE fellowship and how our students can benefit from it. He motivated the students to think deeper in any field that they go to. The interaction started with a powerpoint presentation titled ‘Future Women leaders of Impact Economy’. In his presentation he talked about the Impact economy which has 3 major areas- People, Planet and Profit and how we can make students brilliant for India’s progress. He also shared about how an idea came to his mind for creating a tool which can help defeat floods and drought at the same time. He got his idea from the BANASKANTHA flood and droughts. As people living there were migrating to cities due to flood and drought and around 2700 farmers committed suicide, he created BHUNGROO which guarantees irrigation and food in weather extremes.
Bhungroo is a 7 stage process and is available across India. The uniqueness of this is it saves farmers, increases soil fertility and generates high income. They have received many awards and recognitions across the world for this. Presently they have 11 Engineering colleges as their partners. The interaction ended with a question answer session by the students. Some of the interesting questions asked were 1. How can we do water harvesting at home? 2. Can we find fresh water below sea level? 3. Why the level of groundwater is going down?