THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : A crusade to protect environmental resources has begun in the city. An army of college students fighting to protect natural resources is in the making in the city. On Tuesday, a group of students of the College of Engineering, Trivandrum (CET) embarked on a long journey to 'know' and understand the Thettiyar river. What confounded the group of 25 engineering students is the plight of the highly polluted river, saturated with waste. The river walk was just the start of a mission to help protect the resources in the state. Christened 'National Resource Protection Force', the project attempts to form units of environmentally conscious students in colleges who will in turn help protect the natural resources.
The NRPF is an undertaking of the CET NSS unit and is being supported in its mission by the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment (KSCSTE) and Kerala Technological University (KTU). “The idea is to have units of environment protection teams in each college who will protect the natural resources next to their college. As a pilot mission, the project has been launched in CET. This will be launched across all the engineering colleges under KTU in the first phase,” says Joy Varghese, coordinator, NSS unit, Kerala Technological University. “As many as 30 engineering colleges are there under the university in the district. With this, we can protect 40 natural resources in the district. Later, it can be spread as a state-level initiative,” he adds.
“There are forces to protect everything, but nothing for environment. And that spurred in the creation of such a force. With this, resources lying next to each college can be adopted by the students. The resources need to be utilised to ensure they are protected. For instance, if we were using the water from the Thettiyar river, we would be protecting it. So resource utilisation without depletion and its protection is how we have envisioned the project,” said Gopikrishnan S, project coordinator, NRPF.
The focus is to make the students environmentally sensitive. The project will be implemented across all the colleges via the NSS units. The students will be imparted necessary training such as resource estimation, and spreading awareness about the need to protect the resource to the local residents and such. "Total resource mapping will be performed. Once this is done, we will have a comprehensive data about all the natural resources in the state.
This will be a great asset to the government and will come in handy while formulating projects. With this data, Environmental Impact Assessment studies will be very easy,” says Gopikrishnan. The project can be implemented as part of the curriculum. “For instance, as civil engineers, we have to undertake camp surveys as part of our syllabus. Globally, the focus is on green job generation. So why not start here?” he asks.