A team from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has emerged as one of the eight national winners in “Wipro Earthian College Awards 2020” by Wipro Foundation. The award program invited students to question and explore the nature of urban sustainability and gain a deeper understanding of urban sustainability challenges. Running since 2011, the program has seen the participation of over eight thousand institutes.
The team, comprising four second-year MBA students, Aayush Gupta, Dr. Dhairya Shrivastava, Kartik Mittal and NishimaKathuria, worked with Prof. Rama Mohana Turaga as the registered faculty guide and mentor to highlight the problem of Delhi’s biomedical waste during the Covid-19 pandemic. Aayush Gupta, a member of the team, mentioned “While the world looks towards recovery with its hope on vaccines, we sought it essential to document the turmoil that the COVID-19 outbreak had on all our lives.”
The award-winning report documents, through primary and secondary sources of data from Delhi, the challenges the local governments face in dealing with the explosion of biomedical waste during the pandemic and the invisible contribution of informal waste workers and other frontline workers in addressing the problem. The focus of the award was on urban sustainability – the intersection of environment, economy and social equity in our cities.
The project involved telling compelling stories about sustainability and environmental issues and current developments in the space. The topics were those that affect people and the planet and our collective future to help inform the larger public, which can then take better decisions for our common good.
