Amrita University has won the prestigious Times Higher Education (THE) Asia Award for Outstanding Contribution to Environmental Leadership. The honour recognises Live-in-Labs®, the university's flagship rural internship programme, and Amrita was the only Indian institution to receive an award this year.
Through Live-in-Labs®, students from Amrita and more than 30 international institutions form multidisciplinary teams and live in impoverished villages across India to co-create sustainable solutions to the challenges residents face. Since its launch in 2013, the programme has reached over one million beneficiaries across 25 states and logged more than 400,000 hours of fieldwork.
Times Higher Education highlighted three of the programme's innovations: the ricycle, a low-cost rice-planting machine; a load-carrying aid for women; and compressed earth block technology for affordable housing. The judges praised the initiative for mobilising "the brain power of the university in service of environmental sustainability."
Amma established Live-in-Labs® to nurture empathy in young people and to involve rural communities directly in their own development. "All universities should send their students for internships in impoverished rural villages or city slums," she has said.
