The winning team posing with their teachers.A team of four teenage boys who do odd jobs to fund their education has created a robot which won the national award for the best innovative idea in the first-ever Avishkar make-a-thon held in Delhi last week. Hailing from a government school in Chhattisgarh, which did not even had a computer two-years back, these teenagers’ created robot called Krishi Mitra (farmer’s friend) which is powered by solar panels. This robot can perform all farming activities from dispersing seeds, irrigation to supplement as a tractor.
Another innovative technology from the same school was ‘cow reliever’ which is a battery-run machine to aide ailing animals. Cow reliever secured second place in the senior category of the nation-wide competition.
“In our village, cows often catch foot diseases and it takes 5-8 people to tame the animal and provide medication. Due to the disease, their milk production also decreases causing economic loss to farmers,” said Prakash Nirmalkar, a 16-year-old student who worked on the project. “Our product works as a crane but much smaller and adaptable to Indian roads. It can lift a cow easily with remote control and can transport it too,” he adds.
The third innovation from the school also made it to the national finals but could not win a prize. It was a cycle which could power batteries and even charge appliances. Gaurav Mahto, a 15-year-old said, “Our village has power cuts of 6-7 hours a day in summers, if we could implement this at a larger scale it can even power fans. We can use huge batteries to save the energy so generated to be used later.”
(L to R) Students charging phone from electricity produced by cycle. The cow reliever prototype lifting a cow. Krishi Mitra prototype on display.All the three teams were trained in the Atal Tinker Lab (ATL) established in the school two years back. “Our school had a huge drop-out ratio since most of the students are from low-income family background. Their parents are daily wagers and cannot afford their studies. But after we settled the lab and motivated students to create technology to solve problems in their vicinity, the students started to enrol back in the school,” said Dhananjay Pandey, mathematics teacher and head of the school-based ATL lab, government multipurpose higher secondary school.
At present, the lab has 56 active students working to realise ideas into prototypes. “We stay in the lab after school hours to work on students ideas but this makes the students skip work hours; so I also have to feed them evening meals to prevent drop-outs,” he adds. The lab in the government-run school works from 4 pm to 11 pm.
However, funding for individual projects still remains an issue. “Our project (cow-reliever) was acknowledged by the district administration, they had also expressed interest in buying a product developed on it but we currently do not have the funds to convert this prototype into a fully functional product,” said Prakash.
