Engineering students from Bangalore take part in a campaign on cancer, kicked off by IIT-Bombay.
Yes, usually it is doctors who are looking for ways to beat the big C.
But here, twenty-three engineering students from IIT-Bombay decided to take on cancer in their own way. Their idea was to kickoff a nation-wide campaign called ISMOKE (I support the movement to kill cancer) in 50 colleges across 12 cities: Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur, Nagpur, Indore, Nashik.
In Bangalore, BMS Institute of Technology (BMSIT), Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM) and BMS College of Engineering (BMSCE) are taking part in their fight to spread awareness about cancer and bring easy access to medical facilities for those suffering from the illness.
The campaign is part of IIT-Bombay’s annual science and technology festival called Techfest, an event patronised by UNESCO and UNICEF. The highlight of the ISMOKE campaign is an app developed by these 23 students — Team Techfest — along with their faculty at IIT. This android application (downloadable at bit.ly/17rC9Pz) gives location-wise information about all the hospitals specialising in cancer treatment, details of oncologists, and has an “ask a query” feature, where questions about cancer and treatment options will be answered by experts from the Indian Cancer Society (ICS).
“We started working on this campaign in May, and launched it in our college by the end of July. We designed a dedicated website for this as well,” Divyam Bansal, third year computer engineering student at IIT-Bombay, spokesperson for Team Techfest, said.
Part of the campaign is a doodling contest, where students are asked to come up with an innovative slogan or doodle about cancer or ill-effects of smoking.
“At BMSIT today, we got 500 doodles,” Bansal said. Doctors from ICS would be giving lectures on cancer and tobacco smoking in all the participating colleges.
The student coordinators will be disseminating cancer-related information to students. Besides, ISMOKE, Team Techfest is running two contests for college students and public, who have effective solutions for social problems. For this, they have tied up with various organisations, including CRY, Smile Foundation, Pratham, Muktangan, Garbage Concern Welfare Society, Indian Cancer Society and The Candle Project.
The winners would bag a whooping prize money of Rs 2.25 lakh each. To know how you can participate, visit www.techfest.org
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