The Chennai Society of Inventors and Eco Freaks is a non-governmental organization that focuses primarily on improving the lives of people in different communities through science, inventions and problem-solving.
It was established in 2018 by a group of final year students from the SSN College of engineering. According to Jose Rohan, the founder and president, during his final year in college, he noticed a lot of students doing amazing projects that could impact people’s lives – there wasn’t any opportunity available for them to take it out into for public use. His own final project, which was an attachment to motorcycles that would reduce the occurrence of accidents on the highway, received rave reviews from his professors, but then was put aside and couldn’t be taken forward for practical application.
Today, the CSIE consists of over fifteen members, a mixture of engineering college students
and recent graduates, who have just begun their jobs.
Hence, the CSIE was founded with the firm goal of bringing out amazing inventions that could change people’s lives for the better. Faithfully every week, the CSIE posts about problems that people report to them, in the hope of finding an engineering solution. At the same time, they also research, compile and post about inventions from local inventors in hope of finding a community in need of them. The team behind CSIE has developed an application, which helps people report problems faced that they come across or inventions they’ve built.
Lost And Found was a project that was born in such a way. A cousin of Jose’s once reported using the app saying that if there was some medium that could connect people who had lost items to people who had found them, it would be of a real benefit to many people. Jose saw the feasibility and the benefit of this idea and immediately started working on it. Two more friends, Ebe and Shimo, were brought in to code the website and Meghna to design the user interface. Within a few months, lostfoundtn.com was born. The main purpose of this website is to facilitate easy retrieval of lost items. Here, People who have lost items can post about it and people who have found items can post about it as well thereby establishing an easy connection between them all.
Their key invention has been the website, LostnFound. Courtesy: Jose Rohan 
The website currently has all the areas in Chennai city listed, but further down the line there are plans to expand it to other cities in Tamil Nadu as well. Apart from science projects, CSIE also focuses on increasing environmental awareness among the people of Chennai. So far, they have released two . magazines, “How to Invent”, and “Saving Planet Earth”, which educates people on how to invent and tinker with great products, as well as how to live a minimalist life respectively. They also regularly post on social media, calling attention to problems such as empty atms and their identification.
For the year 2020, CSIE plans to develop a women safety app that gives people the power to rescue women in danger. Another interesting plan for the year would be the time capsule burial. The capsule will have day to day usage items and will be buried to be opened 50 years from now. CSIE hopes to become in a few years from now, the main hub for great inventions and ideas. A place where great inventions are born from humble backgrounds and taken to communities to uplift people’s life – to change lives through the power of science.
Karthik
Very nice! Interested to see what future inventions you come up with