Hyderabad: The three days India's biggest festival of Makers and Innovators, Maker Faire Hyderabad concluded here in the city at Hitex on Sunday night.

Giving his concluding remarks, CEO of T Works, Sujai Karampuri said, Maker Faire will be an annual affair. The next edition will be 3 to 4 times bigger. Makers will be given challenges, problems such as ways and means to clean Hussain Sagar Lake etc. to encourage them to come our with solutions.

The key principle, Sujai added will remain collaborative behind organizing all the Maker Faires. It has to be community driven like this one where 350 makers have come together to drive this India's largest Maker Faire Show. T Works will only play a facilitator role, he said. We will encourage more kids to take part in our future editions. To do that we may organize inter-school competitions such as Robotic War, Drone Obstacle Race. We will pose questions to the Maker Community and seek solutions he stated.

Speaking at the concluding function, Sonam Wangchuk, a Ladakhi engineer, innovator, and education reformist, recipient of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award greeted 500 plus Innovators, Makers, and visitors who assembled for the closing ceremony with “Julley", which in Ladakhi language means "hello".

I find Telangana State to be a happening state he began his speech and asked "How do you get young people into innovating?”. Our education has become just a ritual in which we run after marks, grades. That is why much is not coming out of our education. I have seen a lot of Makers here at Maker Faire Hyderabad talking about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Big Data Analytics and what no. These high technologies are fine. But, you shouldn't forget lower technologies of villages which have solved so far many problems. Don't get into the trap of high technologies that Western World is talking about. Just play with basic Science. Let us solve our own problems, Sonam said and gave a few examples of how basic science has solved Ladakhi problems.

These include Ice Stupa, an artificial glacier in the desert Ladakh for which Sonam Wangchuk given Rolex Award for Enterprise. The Rolex Award for Enterprise supports inspiring individuals who carry out innovative projects that advance human knowledge or well-being. The award comes with a cash prize of 100,000 Swiss francs, roughly Rs one crore and a Rolex watch.

During summer, when water is scarce, the Ice Stupa melts to increase water supply for crops. Ice Stupa was invented by Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh and the project was undertaken by the NGO Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh. Ladakh as we all know is the highest cold desert in the world he said.

The science behind this ICe Stupa, Sonam added is simple, the heat transfer which we learned in high school. The idea is very simple and needs no pumps or power. We all know that water maintains its level. Therefore water piped from 60m upstream would easily rise close to 60m up from the ground when it reaches the village. For simplicity, we can imagine that the pipe is mounted on a mobile-phone tower of that height, and then it is made to fall from that height in cold Ladakhi winter nights when it is -30 to -50°C outside (with wind chill factor). The water would freeze by the time it reaches the ground and slowly form a huge cone or Ice Stupa roughly 30 to 50m high. In reality, we won’t even need a tower structure since we can let the piped water first freeze at the ground level and then mount higher meter by meter as the thickness of the ice grows, finally reaching close to the height of the source, he explained.

Let us solve our own problems. Let us play with our own rural technologies. Don't look for others to come and solve them, he said.

Our country is running behind the materialistic life. “Our Education needs to be linked with life and should take into count the ground situation in different parts of India. What is useful in Hyderabad, may not be useful in Ladakh. Schools have become painful and irrelevant to the present society. They are have become double painful to the kids in Ladakh region”.

Learning with doing is more important. It encourages students to do well. Make this country of 'Makers' and 'Doers', he said addressing 500 plus makers and innovators on a Sunday night. We need thinkers in our education system.

Because of our educational system our children are afraid of breaking, experimenting, making and innovating. Children are full of creativity. We need to change our education system. Thinkers must get priority in IITs and NITs over those who memorize. Students who are good at tinkering must get admissions into IITs and NITs, he told the gathering. Those who are admitted into these prestigious courses must have the ability to think and aptitude for innovation.

People who are good at solving objective type questions are not good at solving a real-life problem, he observed.

93 percent of management graduates in India are not employable.

He appreciated the T Works and Workbench Projects for organizing India's biggest Maker Faire. Maker Faire must address local areas problems which can concern and confront local regions.

Sonam Wangchuk who is the inspiration behind the film ‘3 Idiots’ spoke about a School that creates geniuses out of failures. He spoke about The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) which he founded in 1988. This school only takes students who are failed. Sonam's initiative was supported by the state government and village communities and produced excellent results and they are well established in good careers. Some of them became good journalists, an education minister, social entrepreneurs he told.

Speaking further he spoke about his dream project, the Alternative University called HIAL--Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh. It is an alternative University for Mountain Development. Gitanjali J.B, Founder CEO of the University also accompanied him to the Closing Ceremony of the Maker Faire.

Giving details, both Sonam and Gitanjali informed that the intake for this University has already begun and it will commence courses in phased manners from April 2019. It will have 12 schools viz. School for Agriculture, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Management, Sustainable Habitats, Design, Spiritual etc and others. Each school will take 400 and all 12 schools put together will have 4800 intakes annually. We have already invested Rs 7 crore which includes rupees one crore Rolex Award Prize Money and Six crore crowdfunded. We will need Rs 150crore on the whole. We will raise remaining Rs 143 crore in the next ten years, Sonam and Gitanjali informed.

This alternative University will use all our learnings in the past 25 years. It will be a hands-on Doers University. Here, the school of business runs real-life companies on the campuses. School of Tourism and Hospitality runs high-end hotels and simple home-stays. The school of education runs innovative schools. Revenues of these will sustain the University, while the students get a free higher education and hands-on experience. It is just more than a dream now Sonam stated. He sought people to join in this mission.

It will be an International University and will attract students from all over the world. We are planning to build sustainable homes for the Army in our region. We will also build homes for a simple living for people in our region. These all will be taken up to self-support the dream venture informed Gitanjali.

The first of its kind of event for the Makers community in India, Maker Faire, was organized by T-Works, the biggest hardware prototyping centre in the country, the initiative of Government of Telangana. It is organized in partnership with Bangalore based Workbench Projects with the support from GE First Build.

The debut Maker Faire Hyderabad has three different tracks: Play, Passion and Purpose. Each track represented makers from different spectrum—Children, Artists, and Startups.

Better By Design, a Hyderabad based start-up which develops learning-by-making modules for children painstakingly curated Play Track. CollabHouse, one of the oldest maker spaces in Hyderabad which opened up a tremendous network of artists and makers is put up the Passion Track. SR Innovation Exchange (SRiX), a Warangal based start-up incubator gave a start-up flavor to the Maker Faire.

A three hundred to three hundred fifty Makers struggled for six months to put up the show adds Anand Rajagopalan, Director at T-Works.

The events witnessed participation from diverse backgrounds such as Architects, Artisans, Artists, Chefs, Corporate Employees, Entrepreneurs, Incubators and Accelerators, Leather Craftsmen, Maker spaces, Musicians, Potters, Rural Innovators, and theatre artists.

Thanks to partner Atal Innovation Mission, under NITI Aayog, a Government of India's endeavour to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, the debut edition had overwhelming response from far and wide places such as Adilabad, Bengaluru, Bhilai, Bhubaneshwar, Bidar, Chennai, Ghaziabad, Kochi, Mandi, Mumbai, Nagpur, Nashik, Pabal, Pune, Rewari, Trichy, Vishakhapatnam and from Switzerland thanks to SwissNex. It also received a message from makers in Botswana informed Anand in his welcome note.

T-Fiber, CISCO, Resolute, X, the American R&D company under Google’s parent Alphabet, working on moonshot projects such as internet from balloons and Free Space Optics; Ciena, Dasan, HFCL, HPEnterprises, Huawei, IDBI, LnT, Sterlite, Tejas, GHMC, TSIIC, Hyderabad Metro. SwissNex, a network of science and technology outposts aimed at connecting Switzerland with the world's innovative hubs extended helping hand in making this record-setting event happen in the city.

Workbench Projects got the first license to host a Maker Faire event in India, in Bangalore in 2015. The ecosystem in Hyderabad made us co-host, informs Pavan Kumar, Founder and CEO of Workbench Projects a Hyperspace inside a metro station in Bangalore.

All most all active Maker Spaces in the country Makers Asylum Mumbai and Delhi, Workbench Project in Bangalore, Collab House in Hyderabad, CEPT FabLab, Curiosity Gym, Heramb MakerLab in Pune, Fox Lab in Kerala, FAB Labz in Coimbatore, MakersHive in Hyderabad, Tinkering Labs in IITs, Atal Tinkering Labs in Govt schools have participated and contributed for the success of the event. Thanks to them and a whole lot of 17000 plus visitors today the whole city and state is talking about Maker Movement.