The International Institute of Organized Research (I2OR) based in India and Australia has honoured Attingal Polytechnic Principal and international award-winning writer Shajil Anthru with the International Outstanding Principal Award 2022-23. By enabling on-campus assembly of electric vehicles and public information systems, India’s first Industry on Campus came into existence at Attingal Polytechnic in Kerala. Shajil Anthru ensured provision of stipends to all students of the college in the coming days. I2OR in its statement says that this award is “for achieving an impressive benchmark by starting the first Industry on Campus in India and Kerala for the assembly of Electric vehicles and Display systems, there by ensuring a stipend for all students in a college”
In 2019, the state government announced the Industry on Campus (IoC) and assigned ASAP (Additional Skill Acquisition Programme) as the implementing agency in polytechnic colleges. Shajil Anthru was the first to bring it into operation. As part of the programme, the college launched a three-year project in September 2021 called ‘Innover En Poly’. As an initial step, five students of the 2018-21 Mechanical Engineering batch set up the Man’ O Lab – an Agro-based manufacturing unit. Noting its success, Coimbatore based Axion Ventures, after evaluating various polytechnics, has signed a tripartite agreement with Attingal Polytechnic and ASAP on October 31, 2022, to manufacture electric autos. Subsequently, an agreement was signed with the Kerala Association for Rural Development, Kollam, Socio-Economic Unit Foundation, Thiruvananthapuram and National Jalajeevan Mission for assembling a public information system within the campus.
The selected students are successfully carrying out the initial phase activities. The Principal Shajil Anthru, who pioneered India’s first initiative industry on campus, is a great technologist and writer. He surpassed Ernest Hemingway’s six-word short story and won the Asia Book of Records and international fame by writing a three-word story. Zeroism, which he developed based on that story, deals with the after era of post-meta modernism. He is the founder of the poetic branch called Fish bone Poetry and Reflectoem. Shajil Anthru is also a social activist who is taking the initiative to create a “Kerala with Zero unemployment”.