Bin there, done that

The one thing common between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and these techies is their initiatives for a better India – “Smart Cities” and the “Swachh Bharat” mission. On Sunday, Sree Harsha Thaneeru, Chiranjeevi Kunapareddy, Hrishit Patel and Hardik Joshi won the Smart Cities IoT Devthon for Metropolis, held here, for their innovation on community garbage bins. They also won Rs 1 lakh.

The team “Clean Up” impressed the jury within three minutes of their demonstration despite another team, “Smart Bin” pitching a similar solution. Their idea was to install sensors inside community garbage bins, which would send out information to servers whenever there is an overflow and in turn, alert garbage collection teams. It would also have a compactor, to compress the waste and increase the capacity of garbage bins by 10 times.

Since school friends Harsha, Chiranjeevi and Narasimha Dale (who couldn’t make it to the competition) had this idea for a while, they utilised the 36 hours allotted to them for just building the prototype. At the event, they met software developer Hrishit and IT consultant Hardik, who were tackling a similar issue — alert the municipality when garbage bins were 2/3rd full — and decided to team up. And, it worked out pretty well.

While Harsha and Chiranjeevi worked on the hardware aspect, Hardik and Hrishit built the user interface and also coded an algorithm which would help garbage collection vans take the shortest route and cover a maximum number of garbage bins on the way, thus, saving time and fuel.

Then there was the “advance analytics”, which research engineer Chiranjeevi oversaw. He says, “We would also analyse and forecast which bins require more attention, and frequent disposal.”

Collaborating with GHMC should ideally be their next step, but that will have to wait. Harsha, who left his IT job to be a social entrepreneur, says, “For now, we plan to talk with the private firm, Ramky Group, which has been effectively collecting waste in the city.”