Harshal Kolwankar

School is a place which is also considered as one’s second home as most of our time in a day is spent there. Unfortunately, there are some not-so-good experiences for me when it comes to school. We used to have around 60 students in one classroom. The sound levels used to go very high, to the point that it used to be irritating to the ears. Nevertheless, I did not realize that this means, such types of rooms have an acoustic issue at hand! And there are even ways for the resolution of these challenges.

Also, if you are sitting below the fan or towards the back bench, the teacher’s voice was hardly audible to many of us. On some occasions, I also had acute headaches as I reached home after school. All these things had at least some effect on my grades too. Years passed, I graduated from school, college and then did my MBA too. Later, I worked for a few education-related companies and I realized that I always wanted to contribute to the education sector in India somehow. 

And I call myself blessed to now be part of Ecophon, where I can bring about a change in the way education is imparted and received in India. I certainly realise that whatever happened to me in my school days, wasn’t just a problem pertaining to me. But there are scores of students all over the world who suffer due to poor acoustic conditions in schools. With the kind of projects we have executed so far, I have witnessed the amazing difference that students testified after their campuses were acoustically treated (especially classrooms).  I saw the amazing drop in reverberation time as well as increase in speech clarity, with good acoustics.

I made a decision, to strive harder in order to bring about a change in a student’s life. I decided to do my best to spread the good message of acoustics to the very ends of my country. Every child deserves a stress-free environment to study. Every teacher deserves good acoustical infrastructure to teach. If an institute takes care of both, success is bound to follow!