In the academic year 2022-23 Live-in Labs team visited villages of Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh for 10 days during January – February 2023. It was a multidisciplinary team, including students and faculty members from various disciplines like engineering, commerce, management, visual communication, and computer science. Altogether 53 students and 14 faculty members from Bengaluru, Mysore and Amritapuri campuses of Amrita University participated in this project.

Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA), Greater Noida, and Wheels Global Foundation were the major stakeholders of Live-in-Labs’ program during this visit. 10 villages under YEIDA were identified for the Live-in-Labs projects. These 10 villages were delegated to 10 student teams. All the 10 teams had students from different disciplines and a faculty mentor to guide them. The entire team got briefing and supportive documents from YEIDA to continue with the work. To help the team in the locality, technical village coordinators were assigned to each team by YEIDA.

During the visits, all teams experienced cultural and traditional aspects of the villages of North India. In the duration of 10 days, they also tried to identify various issues connected to the village. The work process included making a resource map of the village to identify possible resources in the village, transact walk to check the opportunity, identify strengths and threats that existed in the village, estimate the inflow, and outflow to get an idea on market system and seasonal works, calculate income-expenditure to have an understanding of the village economy, and finally identify ‘champions’ to bring certain changes in the village.

Student teams had to interview the villagers to get a real picture of their lives. Based on the data collected, students analysed the data to understand the various problems and challenges of the villagers. Thus, using principles of human centred design and participatory rural appraisal, students were able to highlight the major issues, their cause, and effects.
At the end of the visit, the students reported back to YEIDA and presented their initial findings. The YEIDA stakeholders committed that based on the reports prepared by students, possible solutions will be provided for addressing the challenges of the villages. Also, the students had an open platform to propose any practical solution to major problems of the villages.
Altogether it was an eye-opening experiential project work for students of Amrita University. Through this visit, students were able to understand rural India, and learned to be compassionate towards the situation of the people in rural India.