"Look at all this traffic". "There's so much pollution". "Why can’t people keep the roads clean?" How many times have you uttered these lines in the last week? While we were complaining, a handful of young Indians were busy creating innovative solutions to improve our daily lives. Here’s a list of Indians under the age of 21, who have been silently working to ease our troubles with their inventions this year:
1) ‘Goggles for the Blind’
Anang Tadar, a Class XI student from Arunachal Pradesh, has developed a pair of glasses to help the visually-impaired navigate "hands-free".
Tadar’s goggles, referred to as G4B, use echolocation technology – which mimics the way bats sense their surroundings – to alert visually-impaired wearers to objects within 2 metres of its field view. Here’s how it works:
His innovation won him the Dinanath Pandey Smart Idea Innovation Award in March this year, and according to reports, UNICEF has expressed interest in refining his prototype in order to make it ready for the market.
Tadar told UNICEF:
Blind people wear goggles anyway, but unfortunately they wear them to hide their eyes. Now I have created something to make the goggles useful.
2) Bee Saver Bot
Twelve-year-old Kavya Vignesh hopes to save bees from going extinct. The Delhi girl and her team built a bee saver bot, nicknamed ‘Lightnight McQueen’, on the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit. Kavya told IANS:
This solution can save millions of bees from getting hurt and actually relocate them back to bee farms from where they can be back on the fields where they contribute so much to our food chain.
The young inventors, who call themselves Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, was India’s youngest ever team to qualify for the First Lego League - European Open championship in Aarhus in May. The team won second place in the European Robotics Competition.
Read the full story on The Quint.
3) World’s Smallest Satellite
Rifath Sharook, an 18-year-old from Karur in Tamil Nadu, scripted history in June after NASA sent a 3D-printed satellite he helped build into space.
The 'KalamSat', named after APJ Abdul Kalam, is the world's smallest satellite – with a weight of 64grams.
Read the full story on The Quint.
4) Energy-efficient Car
In March this year, a team of 15 girl students from Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women won honours at the Shell Eco Marathon in Singapore for their creation, an energy-efficient vehicle.
Touted to be the only all-woman team from Asia, ‘Team Panthera,’ comprising 15 engineers aged between 18-21, won the Perseverance and Spirit of the Event Award for Iris 2.0 – a three-wheeled vehicle with a mileage of 300kmpl.
5) Skin Patch to Detect Silent Heart Attacks
Akash Manoj, a Class X student from Tamil Nadu, has developed a skin patch that can detect 'silent heart attacks'. His skin patch, that can be attached to the ear or the wrist, will release a ‘positive’ electrical impulse, which will attract the negatively charged protein released by the heart to signal a heart attack, PTI reported. Here's how it works:
Earlier this year, Manoj participated in the Innovation Scholars In-Residence Programme a the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Read the full story on The Quint.
6) 3-D Printed Sanitary Napkin Dispenser
Three Class XII students of Mumbai’s Cathedral and John Connon School built and set up a 3D printed sanitary napkin dispenser for their school in April this year.
The three innovators, Devika Malhotra, Malini Dasgupta, and Aditi Arya, built a 3D printed dispenser, which uses a coil and light sensor to release sanitary napkins, The Indian Express reported.
The girls plan to approach NGOs to examine ways to make their product available to underprivileged girls in the country, the daily reported.
World's Youngest Country
By the year 2020, India will be the world's youngest country, with over 60 percent of the population under the age of 35. With the government encouraging startups, and with more and more innovators like these on board, the future looks bright, to say the least. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and work on that project you’ve been putting off, throw yourself into that research project, write that book, launch that startup, develop that app – the time is now!
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)