A quartet of management students from the Northeast – two from Meghalaya – is providing award-winning solutions to the region’s problems, reports Canvas

THEY HAD bright ideas when they left Shillong to study management in Kozhikode. Those ideas have earned Teidor Lyngdoh and Bahniman Rynjah – and two others from elsewhere in the Northeast – prestigious awards conceived for young minds.

On January 18, the quartet of Teidor, Bahniman, Panii Ngaonii and Monoj Rabha received certificates of appreciation and gifts from IT major Wipro for proposing solutions to the perennial problem of water scarcity in Sohra nee Cherrapunjee.

Panii is from Manipur and Monoj from Assam.

Their institute IIM Kozhikode – ranked fifth among India’s B-schools – too received a memorial plaque and cash reward from Wipro for the quartet’s brainwave. It was the management school’s third consecutive award.

Wipro had instituted the Earthian award in 2011 as a social reach-out programme. Its primary objective is to create awareness on environment sustainability and promote it across schools and colleges across India.

Teidor’s team suggested that the water scarcity in areas around Cherrapunjee could be solved if simple yet efficient and proven techniques adopted across India, could be replicated in one of the wettest places on earth.

The team’s solution involves the construction of contours and trenches along the slopes of the hills, building check dams and percolation ponds in more level land and finally using roof top rainwater harvesting to build community wells to recharge and re-use water. Most importantly, the solution stresses on the involvement of social capital aided by government and NGO intervention to ensure continuity of efforts and sustainability of the very solution.

Earthian was not the team’s first award. It had in October last year won a competition organised by Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG), a national forum, for their entry carrying the theme ‘Sunrise states’. The presentation was an exhaustive solution for promoting tourism in the entire north-eastern region.

The CAG programme was attended by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and top-notch legal professional Ram Jethmalani among others.

“Our presentation had received special acclaim from Mr Modi,” Teidor said, adding his team was delighted to present pressing issues of their native region to a larger audience.

“We are optimistic that our solutions would be taken up on a larger scale and attended to at the earliest,” Teidor said. “We also hope our efforts encourage students of the Northeast to propose solutions to various problems dogging our region.”

One of the solutions Teidor’s team proposed for tourism success is making ‘mainland’ students studying in various national-level institutes in the Northeast, the brand ambassadors of the region.