By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 14 Apr: CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum held its Diamond Jubilee Celebration here, today, on completing 61 years in 2020. The theme of the function was: ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat: Utilisation of Indigenous Carbon Resources – Reduction of Import Crude Dependency’.
The Chief Guest at the event was Dr Sanjiv S Katty, DG, ONGC Energy Centre, while Dr Shekhar C Mande, DG, CSIR, was the Guest of Honour. The event was organised in hybrid physical online mode.
The programme was initiated by paying floral tribute to Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar on his 130 birth anniversary at the Dr BR Ambedkar International Training Centre in the IIP campus. The members of CSIR IIP SC/ST Association were also present during the celebration.
Dr Anjan Ray, Director, CSIR IIP, introduced all the guests and congratulated the IIP family on the foundation day. Dr Ray emphasised the potential of waste domestic carbon resources for addressing energy and environmental challenges in the country. Sudip Ganguly, Chief Scientist, IIP, described the Institute’s Journey in the past six decades.
Dr Sanjiv Katty briefly mentioned the activities of ONGC OEC and focused on a few of the research projects with CSIR IIP like Thermo-chemical Hydrogen Generation Helium extraction from Natural Gas wells. He presented a road map of the Geothermal Field development Project in Ladakh.
Dr Mande highlighted the role of CSIR in bridging the gap between industry and academia, and shared his vision of presenting India on the global map through the achievements of CSIR. He highlighted major achievements of CSIR during COVID and POST COVID period. He further mentioned that CSIR had contributed immensely on COVID studies like Paper Based Diagnostic based on CRISPR-Cas (FELUDA) developed by CSIR IGIB and commercialised under the name TATA MD Check, ICMR approved Dry Swab based Diagnostic technique validated by CDFD Hyderabad and IISER Orissa and Ciplenza (repurposed generic drug) developed by CSIR IICT in collaboration with CIPLA. Dr Mande emphasised the need for industry partnership in successful deployment of technologies like the recently commissioned plant at GACL on production of Hydrazine Hydrate by CSIR IICT. He also showcased two major initiatives being worked upon by CSIR. One on UAV drone based telecommunication and remote sensing system and the other on Establishment of a Centre of Excellence Carbon Capture Utilisation and Sequestration. He acknowledged the contributions and efforts of CSIR IIP in the field of renewable and green fuel generation.
On the occasion, DG Dr Sekhar Mande flagged off the institute’s bus run on diesel obtained from the waste plastic conversion plant installed at CSIR-IIP and also drove a Tata Tiago car run on green diesel named DILSAAF (Drop in Liquid Sustainable Aviation and Automotive Fuel) from CSIR IIP’s Bio-jet Plant. The event also hosted the virtual inauguration of Mobile Biomass Pelletiser from Mohali, Punjab for deployment at Nabrangpur, Odisha. Indian Herbs, Saharanpur took the opportunity to showcase several herbal products like insect repellants, pain reliever ointments developed using bio-oil obtained from mobile pyrolyser unit at CSIR IIP. Dr Bhavya Balagurumurthy, Senior Scientist, CSIR IIP, spoke on the evaluation of bio-oils as snake repellants.
Dr Neeraj Atray, Sr Principal Scientist, and Dr Jayati Trivedi, Sr Scientist, demonstrated the production of fuel from used cooking oil in a 50 litre mobile Room Temperature Bio-diesel Unit. Dr Soumen Dasgupta and his team demonstrated the in-house developed Oxygen concentrator and Dry Ice Unit for medical applications. Dr Shekhar Mande expressed his enthusiasm and keen interest in wide scale deployment of the above technologies in the near future.
Dr DC Pandey, Chairman, Celebration Committee, Poonam Gupta, Sr Principal Scientist, Dr Anil Jain, Sr Principal Scientist, and Suryadev Kumar, Incharge IT, and Anjali were present. More than 200 participants attended the event through virtual mode. The vote of thanks was proposed by Jaswant Rai, Controller of Administration.
