There's a saying that goes "children are the future," and there's a very good reason for that. Not only do they seem to be doing a lot more than we ever achieved at their age, they also see solutions to problems we struggle to come to terms with. That's why we should celebrate and use these ideas.
In India itself there are plenty of brilliant minds in the making. We're up some of the most path-breaking ideas we've seen coming from incredibly young minds around the country. And who knows, maybe one day you'll see some of them as the head of a successful startup, finding solutions to 21st century's worst problems -- from reducing pollution, switching to cleaner energy consumption or fighting our plastic plague. They're changing the world one day at a time.
This first one is an app that was developed by three students of Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering in Delhi, Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna. 'Air Cognizer' is an Android app that lets you measure the Air Quality Index (AQI) in your area using just your smartphone.
Free to download, all you have to do is upload an image you've taken outdoors, half of which includes the sky region. Then, using machine learning image processing techniques and comparing it to photos and data related to the AQI, the app can tell you how polluted it is where you are. The three won a cash prize of ?Rs 1,09,500 from the US-based Marconi Society for their work.
Satyam Thakur, a Class XI student from Bangalore, decided he wanted to find an easy way for people to reduce their carbon emissions. He realised that the materials that make up clay pots in many Indian households also make them good absorbers of particulate matter. He designed a cheap filter made out of broken clay pots that can be fitted over car exhausts, or even upscaled to cover the chimneys of factories.
After use, they can be then be reformed into clay bricks for construction, or dusted off harmlessly and reused once more. Even better, he found they were also capable of filtering water to make it drinkable. And because it uses common waste, it can be incredibly cheap and easy to make.
Gitanjali Rao is just 12 years old, but she wanted to help save lives. She developed a device called Tethys, that can check the lead content in drinking water, potentially saving people from illness and even death. Not only is it fast and accurate, it's also easily portable. She believes this sort of device should be available all across India, where monsoon flooding often ends up contaminating drinking water sources with runoff from nearby factories and the like.
Another 12-year-old, Haaziq Kazi, is on a serious mission to fix the world's plastic pollution issue. Studying in Pune's Indus International School, he designed a ship that simply patrols the world's oceans, cleaning up the plastic pollution along the way.
The ship, ERVIS, is designed to be powered by hydrogen and renewable natural gas. Apparatus on the ship's sides create mini whirlpools to suck in nearby water, and therefore the floating waste with it. This waste is then sorted internally, with storage spaces for both plastic and spilled oil, and the clean water is pumped back out. Once filled up, the storage containers can be disengaged and transported to land, where the waste can be recycled.
Saurabh Kumar from Lovely Professional University was recently one of the youngest researchers presenting a paper at the 27th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition (EUBCE) in Portugal. He developed a way to mass-produce bioethanol. This is a compound manufactured by fermenting the sucrose and starch-rich parts of crops left over after a harvest.
Bioethanol is a renewable petroleum substitute that's also less toxic to the environment. And because it's made from plants that first scrub carbon dioxide from the air during their lifetime, its net carbon emissions are also much lower. In fact with Kumar's method, as well as farmers incentivised to grow crops like sugarcane and wheat, producing large quantities of it would become much easier, providing a viable fuel substitute for automobiles.
Arun George, Nikhil NP, Rashid K, and Vimal Govind founded a startup in India recently called GenRobotics. Their first product, built in college, was the Bandicoot. It's a robot built to replace manual labourers employed to clean manholes and sewers across India.
Bandicoot has machine vision to perceive its surroundings, as well as a CPU and wireless unit, allowing someone to operate it remotely. When lowered into a sewer, it has a universal robotc arm to let it perform all the tasks a human would have to in that situation, as well as a bucket in which to store the waste it's cleaning up. The Bandicoot can collect up to 20 litres of sewage in 20 seconds flat, saving hundreds if not thousands of workers from illness and disease at the same time.
This is a device similar to the Bandicoot, built by a team of students from IIT-Madras. The SEPoy Septic Tank Robot is in fact scheduled for real world trials starting next month. Much smaller than the previous entry, this robot, swims through waste in sewers, using its fins to cut up the sludge into manageable chunks. That way, a tanker can just pump this sludge out the way they would the top layer, without the need for a human to enter the sewer at all.
Built by a large group of students from the Lovely Professional University, the Flying Farmer is a drone meant for survey purposes. Wireless sensors on the device can help map the area of a farm as it flies over, surveying the yield and biomass at the same time while also estimate the nutrient content of the soil. And not only is it easy to use, it also only costs about 10,000 to Rs 15,000 to build.
Additionally, the drone can also be used to quickly and conveniently deliver pesticide payloads to certain areas of a farm. It can also detect weeds growing between crops and relegate the information to the farmer so they can deal with the problem.
Tilak Mehta (13) started up his own company in Mumbai last year called 'Papers N Parcels'. It's a delivery service but, instead of employing drivers and buying vehicles, it instead contracts members of an already well-established delivery system in the city.
The startup has tied up with 500 of Mumbai's famous dabbawallas, letting them turn around approximately 1,200 parcels a day. There's even an app for it, to make hiring the service easier. Then the dabbawallas transfer your parcel the way they usually do for people's lunches.
Ayush Gharat from the Head Start Educational Academy in Bangalore wanted to figure out a way to help NGO and social workers that care for street children in India. He designed a software called mNutrition, that lets employees easily track the health situation of kids they're caring for. Simply inputting medical details like age, sex, height, weight, the workers can gauge which kids are in most need of help, and focus on them first.
The Mars Rover Manipal (MRM) team at Manipal Institute of Technology recently placed highest in India and eighth in the world in a competition. They were designing a Mars rover capable of travelling across uneven Martian terrain, as well as able to conduct certain retrieval and scientific missions. With any luck, perhaps their design will one day even be used by ISRO on a mission.
Samaira Mehta is just 10 years old, but she's already a teacher herself. Living in the US, she's set up her own company called CoderBunnyz, that teaches kids how to program AI using games and the like. She's been so successful that she's delivered multiple speeches across Silicon Valley, and even carries out workshops at Google's headquarters.
Rishank Kanaparti from the National Public School in Bangalore realised that using high beam headlights on the roads at night can lead to a lot of avoidable accidents. So he developed an AI-powered solution to manage the issue. Using sensors that detect an oncoming vehicle, the system can automatically dip your car headlights down until the other car passes, thereby keeping both drivers safe. The best part is that it's cheap to implement, and can be integrated into pretty much any modern vehicle.
Aparna Ajit Gupte, also from the National Public School in Bangalore, read about far too many incidents in her city where kids were mauled by rabid stray dogs and injured. The thing is, though Bengaluru does have initiatives to vaccinate these strays, it can be hard to track them all. Her app basically uses image recognition, asking a worker to click a photo of a dog when they get hands on them. Then, it checks a constantly updated database for images of the dog, to see if it's one that needs a shot or not.