A low-cost street vacuum cleaner designed by National Institute of Technology-Tiruchi (NIT-T) and gifted to the Tiruchi Corporation in 2019, is no longer in use, officials say.
“We received the vacuum cleaner device from the NIT-T team in September 2019, which the Corporation mounted on a mini truck. But the litter has clogged the insides of the machine and we do not have the expertise to repair it, so it is currently not being used,” a senior Corporation official told The Hindu.
The device, designed at a cost of ₹1 lakh, by 16 NIT-T students, was meant to be operated with the supervision of sanitation workers and ease the strain of manually cleaning the streets.
The product idea was conceived by NIT-T’s 1983 batch alumni Richard Sekar, T. Suresh and Sagayaraj Benedict, and was based on the principle of a household vacuum cleaner. Members of ‘Design Consortium’, the student club of NIT-T, designed the device, fitted it with a 1,700 rpm impeller fuelled by a petrol engine to generate the vacuum.
The neighbourhoods of Ponmalai and K. Abishekapuram covering the bus stand and nearby areas were initially the target areas for the truck-mounted vacuum cleaner.
Sources at NIT-T said that the institute had not been approached for assistance.
The official said that automation of cleaning would be progressively adopted in the city. Last year, the Corporation began using five portable sweeping machines purchased through corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding support, as part of its campaign to clear roadside silt.
