From sensor-based pill dispensers to biometric engines, how Kashmiri students are racing ahead in Atal Innovation Mission

Twenty thousand schools from across the country participate in the annual Atal Tinkering Marathon each year with the aim of “foster curiosity, creativity, and imagination in young minds” through its 10,000 tinkering labs across the country. The marathon, started in 2017, is part of the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) under the NITI Aayog.

In an Op-Ed he wrote for The Indian Express on December 26, former Atal Innovation Mission director Chintan Vaisnhav said that schools from Jammu and Kashmir have made their mark at the Atal Tinkering Marathon, 1,627 participating teams accounting for 20,000 innovative projects last year. This, he says, is at least 10 times the national average.

Like Toufiq, other students tinkering at these labs have found innovative ways of getting ahead of some of the issues they’ve witnessed around them. Among them is 18-year-old Shahida Bano, also from Baramulla. Concerned with accidents caused by underage drivers, Shahid came up with ‘biometric engine’ – a key that links the driver’s biometric to their Aadhaar.

“What this does is that if the driver is not above 18, the car engine does not start,” she says.

She also went to a tech competition in Japan in 2023. “This was the first time I travelled abroad and saw a five-star hotel. In Japan, I was in awe of other’s projects and that pushed me to take this up and develop solutions for the problems that I see around me,” she says.

Another student, Sheikh Anzar Amin, developed a gauge for measuring monoxide levels in a room. In the harsh winter of the valley, monoxide deaths are an annual recurrence: for instance, on January 6, five members of a family died in a room with a gas-heater running overnight from apparent monoxide poisoning.

“The gauge calculates the monoxide levels in a room. It is attached to the regulator on the cylinder and turns the regulator when the levels rise in a room,” Anzar says.

The project led Anzar to seek an audience with the prime minister on the last Independence Day, at the Red Fort. Currently, he is taking a gap year and looking for incubators — institutions that support entrepreneurs in developing their businesses — for his project.

“I believe this has the potential to save so many lives,” he says.

All these students have patents for their innovative projects and are looking for ways to scale up production. What they most desire is to continue developing their ideas into workable solutions for themselves and the society they are part of.

Explaining Kashmir’s participation in the Atal Tinkering Marathon, Vaishav says: “On average, 3.2 percent of schools participated in any state. In contrast, this participation was 36 percent of J&K schools”.

On the possibility of scaling up the students’ projects, he highlights that the mission “connects school students with patents to appropriate incubation centres across the country to get further support to build a business around the area of patent”.