As the semester was rolling out, all of us got busy again, in getting colossal print-outs of our projects and practical lab reports. An overstressed photocopier kept beeping for the man in-charge to replace its toner while the laserjet hollered blatantly for some air in the Computer Lab.
Students bulging out of Helical queues were inherently given a lesson on patience and the importance of waiting for one’s turn. They threw away pages that didn’t live up to their expectations. The abandoned pages, as they flew in the air, narrated a story of their own, the story that was told time and again, by the prophets of our environment.
And at the end of the day, it’s a huge job for the janitors to clean up the entire mess and all they do is dump those sheets of paper or incinerate them and what happens to the other pages, err, I mean the good ones? Of course, we assemble them neatly in beautiful folders and submit it to the faculty on the day of our practical exam (in my case, it was the same day as the day I took the prints). And what does the faculty in-charge do? Simple, he/she ensures whether the reports are checked and then throws it onto a pile of Practical reports, that are later taken to the store-room, where the pages are removed from the stick-folder and DUMPED while the folders are re-sold! This is not the story of our college, but of every institution in the state (It might be too cruel to say COUNTRY).
Worldwide consumption of paper has soared by 400 % in the past 40 years with 35 % of harvested trees being used for paper manufacture. The numbers are rising EXPONENTIALLY and it is predicted that within a decade from 2011, not more than 500 trees would be left on Earth, if the scenario doesn’t change. And it's not just the trees you have to think about. According to Waterfootprint.org, it takes 10 litres of water to produce 1 sheet of A4 paper. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, Indians use about 25 million toner cartridges and 45 million ink cartridges a year. Think about all the Carbon emissions!
Last Saturday, whilst waiting for my turn at the Photocopier, I had a word with Brigadier Dua (Our TPO) on this issue and if we could think of some alternative to hardcopies of assignments and lab reports. As assignments are compulsory, he came up with an idea of using electronic media for assignments (for God’s sake, we are an engineering college!). And the proposed suggestion is quite practical too. I mean, everyone knows that assignments on paper are just a formality. Although it aims at improving our skills in the subject, what it actually does is improve our COPYING SPEED (and Practice has made me perfect the art). If we can spend hours on the internet, trying to hook up with the opposite gender on socialnets like orkut & facebook, we can spend a flash of a minute to send our assignments to our teachers, cant’ we?
So, here is my question – Should we ban assignments and lab reports on paper and thus, save our environment as well as progress on the frigate of technology?
THINK!
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