Mumbai: Day 8 & 9

While staying in the second hotel of our trip, we have focused a lot more on class and making connections with students and faculty of IIT- Bombay, since we were now 10 minutes away from their huge and beautiful campus. One of my favorite speakers who came to talk to us presented from an architectural standpoint how we should be designing structures to account for climate change. One program she talked about that many other students and I got intrigued about was a competition called Solar Decathlon in which a big group of students and faculty members from a university design and build a house that will generate its own electricity and be sustainable. As soon as her presentation had finished a group of civil engineers on the trip contacted her to see if we could learn more about the competition and see if we could implement that back at Northeastern.

The speaker, who is also one of the faculty that leads the project on campus, invited us to listen and learn more about the program in one of their final presentations before their competition in France. Since the meeting was on campus and most of the group was not going to the meeting, we had to get from our hotel by sharing taxis, but these were not just ordinary taxis... they are three wheelers with a driver in the front and space for three people in the back! The ride over there was an experience in and of itself because we were used to riding on a bus where we don’t notice how close we are with the other cars but from this motorcycle/taxi we were at eye level with everyone else, it was kind of scary and fun all at the same time. Once inside the correct building (did I mention the campus is huge?) we walked in the middle of the meeting and everyone stared at all the Americans that just walked in, talking quietly with their neighbors about who they think we are and what we’re doing there. Once they took a lunch break, we had the opportunity to meet the project leader and ask him a lot of questions about how much time the planning and designing took them and what major difficulties they faced throughout the process to be able to keep in mind if we want to start a team at Northeastern!

Later in the afternoon we spoke to professors and some students who specialize in engineering products for rural sustainability which includes things like more efficient water pumps and machines that reduce some of the manual labor from farming and agriculture. The professor that spoke about this was also very interesting because he knows that students that come to study at one of India’s elite universities to be successful, meaning earning lots of money, essentially, but the real focus should be building up the nation’s economy by concentrating on the biggest sector of the market, the agriculture. We then went to their workshop where they showed us some of their products that have been implemented in rural areas and they mentioned that they don’t patent the inventions so the farmers can make the products themselves.

That night the people who had gone to the talk about Solar Decathlon went to dinner to discuss how we can start a team and what we would need to do to accomplish our goal, which will be a lot of work especially with co-op cycles. Hopefully we can get the support of major faculty in the fall and see where to go from there if we want to compete in 2017, since we won’t be able to compete in 2015.

The last day we spent in Mumbai started out with a speaker from Swiss Reinsurance, which is a really interesting business because it insures primary insurance. He talked about how climate change is affecting the probabilities of natural disasters for many reasons, some of them being that people are moving to areas of risk, there are natural disasters everywhere, and in the areas of risk the concentration of people residing there is bigger now than in the future. In between that session and the next, we had a little bit of time to be able to check out the galleria, a mall with shops and a food court, right next to the hotel. It was there that I bought a shirt that is super colorful and I’m so excited to wear it!



Later that night we had our farewell dinner because we were headed off to Bangalore the next morning for the next part of our trip!