Disposal of waste plastic is no longer a problem in the steel city with Jamshedpur Utility and Services Company (JUSCO) using bitumen technology on waste plastic, ranging from polybags to biscuit packets, for constructing roads. JUSCO, a 100 per cent subsidiary company of Tata Steel which maintains and provides municipal services in Tata command area of the city, has constructed 12-15 kms road in the steel city as well as Tata Steel Works besides widening 22 roads using the environment-friendly technology of utilising waste plastic. “As far as we know, Jamshedpur is the only city in eastern India where bitumen technology (Dry Process) patented by Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE), Tirupparanku ram, Madurai, has been implemented on accumulated waste plastic for the first time”, Gaurav Anand, Senior Manager (Quality Assurance) of JUSCO, said today. Claiming that there is no maintenance cost involved for the first five years, Anand, who is an environment engineer, said that for every stretch of such one km long and four metre wide road, one tonne of bitumen costing Rs 50,000 is saved. The use of bitumen has been reduced by 7 per cent ever since JUSCO began using waste plastic in road construction work, he said, adding that the quality and longevity of roads made of waste plastic-aggregate-bitumen was two times better than bitumen road. Describing plastic tar road as a “new pathway”, Pratyush Dandpat, Deputy Manager (Quality Assurance) of JUSCO, said that the technology turned out to be successful. Besides being water resistant, it has better binding property, higher softening point, can withstand high temperature and higher load, has lower penetration value, costs less as compared to bitumen road and has no toxic gas emission, Dandpat said. Though there is great demand for the technology, including from Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand governments, but “we do not have any plan to commercialise it but to serve society. We have even received a request from Nigeria, which wants to replicate it in their country”, Anand said. Courtesy : Havovi Homavazir o the JUSCO initiative, the city will now have strong, durable, eco-friendly roads which will also relieve the residents from the ugly & frightening sight of heaps of plastic waste!!

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Eram Scientific

Kahol and his Indian engineering team built a prototype of a device called the Swasthya Slate (which translates to “Health Tablet”) in less than three months, for a cost of $11,000. This used an off-the-shelf Android tablet and incorporated a four-lead ECG, medical thermometer, water-quality meter, and heart-rate monitor. They then enhanced this with a 12-lead ECG and sensors for blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, blood haemoglobin, and urine protein and glucose. In June 2012, they sent this device to 80 medical labs for testing, which reported that it was as accurate as the medical equipment they used — but more suitable for use in remote and rural areas, because it was built for the rugged conditions there.

By January 2013, Kahol’s team had incorporated 33 diagnostic tests, including for HIV, syphilis, pulse oximetry, and troponin (relating to heart attack) into the Swasthya Slate and reduced its cost to $800 per unit. They also built a variety of artificial-intelligence–based apps for frontline health workers and started testing these in different parts of India.

In March 2014, the Indian government started a pilot of 4,250 Swasthya Slates in six districts of the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, which has a population of 2.5 million. Antenatal testing, which often took 14 days because mothers had to go from clinic to clinic for different diagnostic tests, was done in 45 minutes in a single clinic. The proportion of the time that frontline health workers spent on administrative paperwork, recording data from tests and filling out forms, was reduced from 54 percent to 8 percent of their work day. Hundreds of thousands of people gained access to medical care that had been unavailable to them.

…………..Vivek Wadhwa

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