Overview #

The IISER Bhopal iGEM team in­cludes 7 male and 5 fe­male stu­dents who come from var­i­ous parts of the coun­try and speak dif­fer­ent lan­guages. The team has tried its best to main­tain in­clu­siv­ity in all forms as given be­low:

During the course of this pro­ject we tried to in­ter­act with and in­clude views of peo­ple from var­i­ous sec­tions of the so­ci­ety rang­ing from farm­ers, vil­lage heads, other stake­hold­ers to sci­en­tists, ad­min­is­tra­tors and pol­icy mak­ers. Our team is very di­verse, which makes it eas­ier for us to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds.

We ex­tended our ap­proach to sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion as well. With the di­verse lan­guage skill set the team had, we trans­lated key words of our pro­ject into other Indian lan­guages. Altogether the team speak 10 lan­guages. By col­lab­o­rat­ing with the iGEM City University of Hong Kong team we were able to trans­late words com­monly used in our pro­ject into 5 for­eign lan­guages, for bet­ter reach.

Women in sci­ence is a com­plex con­cept that needs at­ten­tion. Our team has 5 fe­male mem­bers. From our ex­pe­ri­ence we re­al­ized the gen­der dis­par­ity preva­lent at the grass roots and to ad­dress any prob­lem it is cru­cial to ad­vance gen­der equal­ity, pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties for women for di­verse per­spec­tives and in­clu­siv­ity.

Our team is of the opin­ion that there are no age re­stric­tions for learn­ing sci­ence, and we strive to ef­fec­tively com­mu­ni­cate the knowl­edge of sci­ence and our pro­ject to a va­ri­ety of age groups, in­clud­ing chil­dren and the el­derly peo­ple.

Various peo­ple who con­tributed to the suc­cess of our pro­ject #

Farmers, both from mar­gin­al­ized and non mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, played a very im­por­tant role in shap­ing our pro­ject. We also reached out to their chil­dren, who were stu­dents in a small Government school in a vil­lage, to ed­u­cate them about the ef­fects of stub­ble burn­ing and non-biodegrad­able plas­tics. On an ad­min­is­tra­tive level, we in­ter­acted with mu­nic­i­pal of­fi­cials to un­der­stand how our so­lu­tion could be­come more ac­ces­si­ble to the farm­ers and farm­ing com­mu­nity. We sur­veyed and in­ter­viewed in­di­vid­u­als from the non-farm­ing com­mu­nity from a di­verse back­ground to get an idea of the im­pact stub­ble burn­ing has on their lives, in terms of health is­sues and oth­er­wise. Finally, we had var­i­ous meet­ings and in­ter­ac­tions with Scientists and Professionals to help us build the sci­en­tific as­pect of our pro­ject.

Future prospects #

Women made up a very small per­cent­age of sur­vey re­spon­dents, so in or­der to ac­count for this, we plan to con­duct work­shops and talks for women, es­pe­cially from mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, to come for­ward and take part in ac­tiv­i­ties that can have a pos­i­tive ef­fect on their lives. These will be con­ducted in var­i­ous lo­cal lan­guages.Ad­di­tion­ally, we in­tend to con­duct more out­reach ac­tiv­i­ties in a va­ri­ety of set­tings, in­clud­ing schools and NGOs across the coun­try.