CETA’s student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) has returned to the village of Abheypur, near New Delhi, India, to assess and extend the work they did last January in installing a solar-powered well and water storage facility. The well, constructed with local help, allowed the girls of the village the time to attend school and the women of the village the time to participate in projects supported by a local NGO. Without the well, obtaining water for family use took up to five hours every day.
On this trip, the team plans to install a 1,000-foot pipeline between the new water storage tanks and a neighborhood in the village that still does not have easy access to clean water; to rehabilitate several of the non-working public wells in the village; and to initiate a social and medical assessment of how the EWB projects are affecting the village, especially the women and girls, to determine how to increase the effectiveness of their projects.
The team , which left for India today, comprises both students and professionals. The University of Hartford students are Rachel LaDue and Maria Qadri, both of whom participated in the original installation project. They are accompanied by Dr. David Pines, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and advisor to the EWB chapter here, and Marcia Hughes, the assistant director of the University of Hartford’s Center for Social Research, who will lead the assessment team of Parminder Parmer, a faculty member at Penn State who has worked with her on projects before and who speaks fluent Hindi, and two high-school students, both of Indian heritage who also speak fluent Hindi.
Also on the team are Jeff Lake from UTC Power, who will be the technical lead on the project, and Nadia Glucksberg, a hydrogeologist from Portland, Maine, who will lead the effort to rehabilitate non-working wells. Nadia worked with the team last January, too Nadia is assisted by Jay Peters, who works with her in Portland. Anna Smith, from Kleinfelder in Windsor, Conn., will lead the work on the pipeline, assisted by Daizy Peters, a fluent Hindi speaker from Kleinfelder’s Kansas office (who learned about the project from Kleinfelder's corporate intranet.
The team will return to Hartford August 31, though Jeff, Nadia, and Jay will stay an additional ten days to oversee the completion of the various projects.
A student trip is planned for next January to build a rainwater harvesting system for the village's girls school. In addition, students from the Hartford Art School will work on their educational campaign, and the Center for Social Research will continue their assessment of the various projects in Abheypur.
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