Opinion In J&K, school-going innovators show the way

These numbers cannot be discarded as a statistical anomaly. Participation in the Atal Tinkering Marathon is open to all schools of India. What fraction of schools from a state/UT participated in this competition last year? The national average across states and UTs was 3.18 per cent. In J&K this number was an astounding 36 per cent — 10 times the national average. The runner-up, Karnataka — the number one state on NITI Aayog’s India Innovation Index — was at 16 per cent.

J&K hasn’t just participated in large numbers, it also produced quality. With 20 teams featuring in the Top 500 Innovations of the competition (and receiving prestigious internships at various organisations), J&K’s winning rate is higher than the national average. If India’s 35 states/UTs were to equally contribute to the top 500 innovations, each would have contributed 14 winners.

Arguably, the most exciting dimension of this rise is in the problems students are choosing to address. Often, these are local, critical to the lives or livelihoods in the region and yet unknown to or inconsequential for the rest of the nation.

For instance, a team from Government Higher Secondary School (GHSS) Fatehgarh, Baramulla has picked the problem of silent deaths during winter months, resulting from inhaling the carbon monoxide (CO) emissions from wood or coal-fired hearths. They have built a mechanism to sense dangerously high levels of CO and opening a motorised window for the gas to escape, thus saving lives.

We must appreciate such innovations in at least two ways. First, such problems are not known to the rest of our nation because in most other regions people don’t have to endure low temperatures like in Kashmir. Second, while such problems are hyperlocal, their solutions can have global applications, as demonstrated by the recent fire in an apartment complex in Kuwait that claimed close to 200 lives due to inhalation of smoke.

Another example: A team of two girls from GHSS Amirakadal, Srinagar, looked at the problem of flash floods caused by the melting of snow on the mountains when spring arrives. They decided to simulate the situation by taking a square piece of cardboard, a few feet in length and height, mounting a stick on it to represent an electrical pole, placing a pile of cotton around the pole to simulate the snow, and affixing infrared sensors on top of the pole to measure the height of the cotton pile (accumulation). They then took the parameters representing this setting such as the snow condition (from the cotton pile), and gradient of the mountain (from the cardboard that can be used as an inclined plane), and combined them with assumptions about a few more parameters such as the ambient temperature and the distance to the village downstream and fed it all to a mobile application that calculated the probability of a flash flood.

Notice how beautiful this problem is! One can explore geometry by playing around with the inclined plane. One can explore physics and chemistry by understanding the formation of snow, its structure, its behaviour around the melting point, and so on. One can explore meteorology by simulating the amount, rate and length of a snowfall. One can explore how water basins work by understanding the water flows. And, all of this is in addition to learning about electronic sensors, circuits, and software programming.

In a similar example, but one that demonstrates the different needs of Jammu versus Kashmir, students from Air Force School Jammu have developed Bhu Jal Nirdharak, an innovative groundwater detection system that helps farmers and communities accurately locate and assess groundwater sources. Using the Wenner and Schlumberger Array methods with electrodes to measure soil resistivity, along with sensors for soil moisture and pH, the system provides vital data on soil and water conditions. It is complemented by an app that provides the results in local languages like Dogri.

One final example: In the Baramulla district, three students from GHSS Kreeri picked the problem of improving markets for apple farmers. They have developed a cost-effective Apple Grader that cleans and sorts apples, enabling local farmers to market their harvest more profitably. What is most exciting here is that their work did not end with a prototype design! Upon building a desktop prototype, they went in search of a local “garage” that would help them build a real-life product. In pockets of the world like Silicon Valley, where startup ecosystems have thrived over decades, isn’t it this interconnection of schools, labs, garages, and factories that has made it possible for nascent ideas to become global startups like Cisco, Google, or Facebook? Delightfully, this is beginning to happen in India’s Valley too.

What is transforming this land renowned for its picturesque landscapes and vibrant culture into a hub of innovation and creativity? It is the efforts of the governments, schools and community organisations.

In recent years, J&K has undertaken ambitious initiatives to revolutionise the education sector, providing quality schooling closer to students’ homes, and focusing on skill-based education and hands-on learning. At the forefront of this endeavour is the Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) initiative of the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) under NITI Aayog.

ATLs are maker spaces in schools where young minds can bring their ideas to life through hands-on, do-it-yourself projects, design thinking, rapid prototyping, and entrepreneurship skills. In J&K, 127 ATLs have been established. The UT has also become the first among states and UTs to establish 500 ATLs in partnership with NITI Aayog.

The Atal Innovation Mission, in collaboration with the State Education Department, has implemented several special measures to elevate the performance of ATLs in J&K. AIM has organised training sessions for school teachers and district officials across the UT, with support from various partners. Given the difficult terrain, J&K is the first state where labs of smaller size have been allowed. Moreover, this is the first region where up to three schools within geographical proximity are allowed to jointly apply and establish one ATL open to all. These measures have created a more customised template appropriate to the needs of this region.

At the community level, too, effective measures have been taken. J&K is one of the first regions where labs are organised in clusters of 10-30, called ATL Sarthi. These are designed to enable peer-to-peer learning and monitoring of these labs. The ATL Sarthi initiative has been launched in collaboration with the State Council of Educational Research & Training-J&K and JKBOSE.

Additionally, organisations engaged in ecosystem building such as Pi Jam, and the National Institute of Technology Srinagar have organised events to connect stakeholders further. For example, in November 2023, Pragaash, an ATL Innovation Showcase and Ecosystem Strengthening Conclave, united participants from all 10 districts of the Valley.

What J&K has shown us is that if we were prepared to build innovation ecosystems conducive to their context, then they have both the hunger and capability to lead the nation. This, then, is our approach for building similar ecosystems across the remote, hilly, tribal regions of our nation for their future innovators to harness the opportunity available to them.

The writers work at Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. Views are personal