THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Old computers, mostly defunct, dumped in the IT labs of many of the government schools in the state will soon be removed and replaced by new ones by the IT@School authorities. A project to help 10,000 odd schools and educational offices in the state to scientifically recycle e-waste, accumulated from the year 2000 onwards, has been finalised by IT@School project along with the Clean Kerala Company of the state government.The scheme will put in place scientific mechanisms to recycle and refurbish the e-waste as per the norms set by the Union government. Through this programme, IT@School plans to recycle over 1 crore kilogram of e-waste from over 10,000 schools and offices. As per the government order, electronics equipment and its components received by the schools before March 2008 and CRT monitors, mouse, keyboard, 600 VA UPS received till March 2010 will be disposed as e-waste in the first phase.A school-level committee would be set up to identify the list of such equipment. Subsequently an expert committee , set up by IT@School, will conduct a detailed verification after which the equipment would be declared as e-waste. The list of old equipment in schools that can be recycled include computers, laptops, desktop cabinets, monitors, drives, printers, projectors, UPS, camera, speaker system, television, network components, generators etc."IT@School has devised an online system to capture the quantity of e-waste in each school and to collect them as batches and this exercise would be completed by July 15," said K Anvar Sadath , executive director of IT@School project. "Subsequent to this we will conduct Hardware Clinics in select regions to repair and upgrade machines which are repairable. Students under Hardware group of 'Hi-School Kuttikkoottam', another programme of IT@School by networking more than 1 lakh students, would also be a part of such school level committee", he said.Clean Kerala Company has been entrusted with the task to collect the e-waste in batches of 500 Kg from schools, for which neighbouring schools will be clustered. The e-Waste collected from schools would be scientifically processed at the company's Hyderabad facility.

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