January 5, 2011
School of Business, Amritapuri
 

India kicks off 2011 with its first international energy summit to be held in Nagpur during January 27-30. The theme is Sustainable Energy Development: A Time for Innovations and Integrated Planning.
 

Tackling the challenge of containing India’s carbon emissions and addressing its growing energy needs in the face of diminishing energy resources, students and professionals throughout the nation will present papers to suggest solutions.
 

Participating in the event also will be Biswas B. Chandran, Gautam Nair, Maheshwar Pratap MS and Shabana Mohamed Shani. These final-year MBA students from the Amritapuri campus will present their paper titled Energy Conservation, Universities and Carbon Footprint.
 

The submission was a required project for their class on Environmental Management and Sustainable Development. The students explained the inspiration for their paper.
 

“Without the class, we wouldn’t have become aware of many critical issues. We wanted to do a project to make other young people aware too.”
 

The student paper examines the average carbon footprint of a institution campus, estimating its total amount of greenhouse gas emissions.
 

“The carbon footprint is not only a direct indicator of the amount of pollution that is being spewed into the planet, but also an indirect indicator of the amount of energy that is being consumed,” the student paper outlines.
 

“It can serve as a yard stick for universities to gauge their consumption of energy and strive to reduce it.”
 

In the paper, students discuss practical and sustainable solutions on how to manage and reduce energy consumption. They address the issue of compliance and the importance of making sustainable energy practices mandatory on all institution campuses.
 

In order to help implement these suggestions, they recommend a nation-wide competition among different institution campuses to bring down the respective carbon footprints by a certain percentage in a certain period of time.
 

With an estimated 100 lakh students studying in nearly 16,885 colleges in India, this could potentially educate and inform a lot of young people.
 

The students elaborated on the underlying message they hope such a competition would make clear.
 

“We want institution students to know that people are overusing the planet’s resources and destroying the environment. Our generation is inheriting this planet. We will have to deal with the limited energy resources available to us.”
 

“The responsibility to find and implement alternative energy solutions will fall upon us.”