Leveraging creativity for a youthful India

Naresh, of Class 1, sambuvad, bowled us all over with his creativity. Just a five-year-old, Naresh was the third most young student giving a brilliant idea so far in the country. Earlier, two students from Tamilnadu and Tripura were recognised with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Ignite awards by NIF. Naresh wanted the wind energy to be used for compressing air to run a pump and fill air in the tyres of vehicles.

It is not an uncommon sight to see the driver and a nurse of 108-ambulance struggling to lift the victim of an accident on the road to take him to the hospital. If the person is well built, the situation is tougher.

Krish, of Class 6, was very concerned and suggested a stretcher having a jack kind of lifting mechanism. Related to this, Vikas, Class 6, Medhapar, felt that whenever an accident takes place, an automatic message should be triggered to call 108 ambulances.

Every year, birds get injured by the strings of kites. If Harish, of Class 7, Nilpar, had his way, then it will be mandatory for every string manufacturer to have a bird repellent substance coated on the string.

Care of injured birds or humans is so evident in these ideas. I wish we could absorb little more of empathy from our children so that our society becomes more kind and compassionate. We have all seen children sometimes watching TV from a close distance affecting their eyesight. Those who have spectacles sometimes don't wear them. Ramdeo Kanji bhai, class 8, Sambuwad was very keen that TV should stop if somebody is sitting too close. Not a difficult thing to do technologically. There were dozens of more ideas no less impressive. Some were very practical though not very new. These had been sent to us by children earlier. For example, if one did not wear a helmet, the two-wheeler would not start. But, the ideas givers cannot be blamed for not knowing that others children had already submitted these ideas. One way to promote originality and innovativeness along with empathy and social sensitivity is to share the list of awarded ideas with every school. The teachers may be encouraged to share these ideas over time with the children so that slowly and slowly, their awareness about these ideas would increase. These could also be painted on the wall or posted on the notice board in bold letters also. The problem is that we pay negligible attention to ignite the creativity of the children. Inspire-Manak programme, DST seeks ideas from the half a million schools but does not yet focus on sharing the awarded ideas with all these schools. This is a problem even more evident at the higher education level. That's why SRISTI made a database of two lac engineering projects by about five lac engineering students at techpedia.in. A similar database of children's ideas will be developed by SRISTI, to create widespread awareness of children to make them think more originally.

GIAN will work with SRISTI and designers and fabricator volunteers of the Honey Bee Network and try to convert some of these ideas into products with the help of NIF's fab lab and SRISTIs natural product lab. If the banana skin can heal eye diseases, then we should thank Mata Daya of Lakavat, for sharing this insight learned from the elders in the family. Those of the readers who are sceptic about such claims may believe it when they visit the site steemit.com where a scientific report about its effect on cataract disease is mentioned. There are several other references.

The author is founder of Honey Bee Network & visiting faculty at IIM-A 
anilgb@gmail.com