Berhampur: Imagination is a road full of creativity, freedom and ambition that leads towards change. The students of ITI, Berhampur have used their imagination to create beautiful replicas of animals and birds by using discarded tyres.
Step inside Odisha’s Industrial Training Institute (ITI) Berhampur and you can feel that no scrap can be labelled as waste. About 100 students of the skill development institute given shape to Odisha’s first first tyre park.
Spread over an area of 4,000 square metres on the campus premises, the park features sculptures as high as 30 feet, all made out of worn out and discarded tyres.
The park has sculptures, including model tractors, cars, Olive Ridley turtles, tigers, elephants, horses, dinosaurs and even the giant King Kong. The tyres have also been converted into vases while another attraction is a huge footwear made the discarded tyres.
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“Damaged tyres can’t be recycled. They are mostly burnt. This contributes to air pollution. Moreover, often rainwater accumulates in these abandoned tyres and turns into breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying dengue-causing pathogens,” said the principal of the institute, Rajat Panigrahi.
Realising this, the institute decided to encourage its students to build a park of tyres. At least 3,000 discarded tyres have been used said Santosh Swain, said Panigrahi.
While some tyres have been donated by Berhampur Municipal Corporation (BMC) and RTO, some have been collected by students from junkyards. The institute plans to open the park for public soon.
For making the sculptures, the students adopted a special technique called rapping for shaping up the tyres as per requirement. “First we transform the smaller A4 size drawing into a bigger one. With the help of the 2D drawing, the inner metal framework is made by welding scrap metals,” added Panigrahi.
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