Ten school teams emerge winners at the grand finale of India@75 Youth Ideathon

NEW DELHI: Ten school teams were declared winners at the grand finale of India@75 (Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav) Youth Ideathon 2022. The two-month long festival of entrepreneurship and innovation for school students culminated at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi with the selection of 10 student teams for incubation grants of Rs 1 lakh each.

Top 25 teams were selected after grueling four rounds that saw participation of more than 94,000 school students from over 7,000 schools in India, showcased their innovation to high profile jury comprising of Anil Kumar Pokhriyal, CEO of Management Entrepreneurship Professional Skills Council; Vinay Bansal, founder of Inflection Point Ventures; Anisha Bhasin from Atal Innovation Mission and Shubham Goel, Head of Atal Tinkering Labs.

To inspire and motivate more female students to come forward with entrepreneurial ideas, Sheatwork sponsored a special award worth Rs 25,000 for the Girl Innovator Award, which was conferred on a team from Sarvodaya Central Vidyalaya, Thiruvananthapuram.

Top 10 innovation, startup ideas

The top 10 teams selected include a team from Government Higher Secondary School at Kreeri, Baramulla that demonstrated an innovative apple grading solution to address the market pain of apple producers in Kashmir.

A team from Sunbeam School in Varanasi showcased a low-cost model of ventilator to increase the affordability of critical life saving devices in hospitals. Another team from Amity International School at Vasundhara gave a taster of high protein laddus made of low-cost nutrient extracted from fruit wastes.

Yet another innovation came from young students of Bal Bhawan Public School in New Delhi who demonstrated Sloot, a file compression app that can be a huge relief to millions of computer owners by releasing upto 80% of disk space.

The other teams in top 10 came from Bharatiya Vidya Bhwan’s RK Sarda Vidya Mandir in Raipur, Darbari Lal DAV Public School in Pitampura, Delhi Public School RK Puram, Delhi Public School at Bangalore North, Neerja Modi School in Jaipur and Mayoor School in Noida.

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Speaking at the award distribution ceremony at the Grand Finale of Youth Ideathon to recognise the outstanding contribution of students, mentors, teachers and schools, Dr Biwajit Saha, Director, Skill Development, CBSE said, “The New Education Policy 2020 released by Prime Minister Modi has provided a clear thrust to the theme of innovation and entrepreneurialism in schools and Youth Ideathon is an important annual event to recognise the innovation efforts of school students in India. It is a comprehensively designed intervention and shall not only provide the right thrust to establish a culture of innovation amongst schools but also help India improve its innovation competitiveness."

IIT Delhi director Rangan Banerjee urged the winning students not to rest on the laurels and that in a rapidly changing world, R&D and innovation is a journey that must be carried everyday with full rigour.

“There were more award categories in the form of Top 10 Team Certificate + 9 Month Incubation with a phased grant of Rs 1 lakh; Top 25 Teams Certificate + Prototyping Grant of Rs. 10,000; Special Mentors of Innovation Award by CENTA to mentors of Top 25 teams, Top 100 Ideas Certificate + access to Young Ideator program; Top 1000 Certificates; Most Popular,” the official statement said.

Participating schools will be conferred with Certificates of Appreciation and Ideas Innovation Trophies.

The novel five-stage competition of innovative entrepreneurship ideas by school students was organised by ThinkStartup in association with Management Entrepreneurship Professional Skills Council (MEPSC) and Baja Allianz Life and has been recognised by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).