The pandemic has resulted in a lot of behavioural changes among people in dealing with the ‘new normal’ due to the coronavirus. What that has also brought along with it is room for innovation that is being witnessed in India. In the past few months, there are numerous challenges posed to students and entrepreneurs to come up with solutions for the virus. While the majority have been coming from urban, there have been frugal approaches by rural India.
One such example is a 9th class student from Zilla Parishad High School, Chintalakunta in Jogulamba-Gadwal district of Telangana - Sreeja, and her mathematics teacher Augustine. In a bid to prevent the virus from infecting people, Sreeja has devised a smart-band that alerts people when they try to touch their faces.
Sreeja’s idea of creating an alert system came from her teacher teaching them the precautions to be taken by every individual. While everyone was advised to stay home, Sreeja was worried about her father, who had to go for farming, making him vulnerable to the virus.
“I made a simple mask out of the plastic which can cover his face, only to realise that it led to a lot of sweat while working and eventually touching his face.”
This made Sreeja think of developing something that could alert people while they are touching their face. “Innovation for me begins when I think differently. I then decided to devise a smart alert system,” she says.
Sreeja says that when she read about science experiments in her school library and few relatable ideas her teacher showed her, she realised that a lot of them function based on human body movements. “So, I should figure out the timing of buzzer which will alert people. With my thinking I told my teacher we can put a connecting wire that gives buzzer, at our elbow as it is the interjection point when the hands moved to and fro. But when we tested on people, they felt uncomfortable,” she adds.
With the help of her teacher, she then came with a smart ring that anyone can wear, which also failed, unfortunately. As she continued to tinker, a breath of fresh air came in the form of Jambaiah, a young electrician in the village. “I told him about my idea of the band/watch and my failures. With the help of Jambaiah, I was able to devise it with a plastic cap, speaker, iron ball, and two connecting wires. While we move the hand to and fro, the iron ball touches the concerning negative and positive wire and generates buzzer sound.”
For Sreeja, who aspires to become a collector, innovation is not just pondering over new ideas but also to identify the available resources in her community and create sustainable solutions.
From the same ideology came another idea of biodegradable planting pots made with groundnut shells. When she visited a nursery in her surroundings, she noticed that the plastic covers used for potting plants that were discarded around the area. “It was nice to witness many plants being grown but it was equally disturbing for me to imagine a huge chunk of plastic covers used. We debate about plastic waste in our school and I wanted to replace plastic, but I had to find an alternative.”
Augustine, her mathematics teacher who has been an innovator-mentor to Sreeja, says, “When Sreeja and I were discussing how to find alternatives for plastic, one of the school students plucked the groundnut shells in the nearby farm and gave few to us. The groundnuts that had soil to it made Sreeja instantly question as to why we cannot use groundnut shells as they do not decay even when they stay for long in the grounded soil. That’s how the idea came.”
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Sreeja and Hari Krishna with the bio pot devised by her
When they started testing the groundnut shell’s firmness, they realised something should be added to make it strong. Sreeja says her grandmother is the one who helped her figure out how to make the groundnut shell firm.
While it takes a lot of passion, determination to innovate at a young age, it is equally important to create such an environment around them that makes young children tinker. Sreeja attributes that to her school ZPHS, which she says helps students innovate to solve community problems.
“We have a program in our school— No Bag Day, which is observed once every month where we do a lot of reading and ideating to address community problems. One day a week, we take the pride of becoming a leader for our school or community,” she adds.
When asked about plans to scale her ideas, she said, “the smart band devised cannot be used right away as I need to work look and feel matter. It should look wearable, for which I and my teacher need help.”
Sreeja and Augustine have submitted the groundnut shell pulp to T-Works with the help of Telangana State Innovation Cell (TSIC) for the validation on rigidity, post which Sreeja wants to market it and replace the plastic planting pots.
Prannay Kumar N is a senior innovation fellow at the Telangana State Innovation Cell and works with grassroot innovators