Amit from Saharsa wins Rhodes scholarship to Oxford: to work on hydrogen fuel for cars!
Amit, born and brought up in Saharsa, Bihar belongs to a lower middle class family. His father works as a railway employee, and mother is a homemaker. And he has won the Rhodes scholarship to study at the Oxford University. Amit is currently pursuing his final year in mechanical engineering as part of a five-year integrated programme at IIT-Roorkie depended on funding from various scholarships during his studies.
Amit told a reporter ‘My parents weren’t so well educated. We faced financial problems as we were five members in the family and had to survive on a single source of livelihood. As we grew up, it became difficult to make ends meet as the cost of education also got higher. We could not afford expensive coaching centres and had to make do with whatever little we could afford’. Since Amit is the eldest child, he had to ensure he got high scores to get admission in a good government-run engineering college, where he could find a way to afford the term fees. He knew that if he scored low, there was no way his family could afford to send him to a private college.
While speaking of his research project on fuel cell technology in automobiles, Amit said that he wanted to do something about the pollution emitted by automobiles. No matter what fuel you use, it is bound to emit some smoke and gas that harms nature. When Amit first read about using fuel cell technology in automobiles, he was quite intrigued and wanted to put it to use in India. But he says ‘fuel cell is a revolutionary device that uses chemical energy from a fuel and converts it into electricity following a chemical reaction. Interestingly, the fuel from which the device derives its energy is hydrogen, which is practically hard to store and transport, unlike any regular fuel.’
Amit says his stay at Oxford through the scholarship will help him achieve his dream as his research at Oxford University will focus on extracting hydrogen from water and storing it at room temperature. He says that the technology is at a nascent stage in India and hence it would have been difficult for him to have pursued it here.
[Courtesy: photo and information from Divya Nair in rediff.com]
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