By Sharanya Dutta
Two girls, Gunashree and Shravani, both ninth standard students at Government High School, Uttarahalli, stood at their stall at the Bengaluru Mini Maker Faire on 23rd October, showing us their Smart Irrigation System. Their system, they said, talking about Arduino technology (an open source electronics platform that allows you to build digital devices and interactive objects) with intimidating fluency, detects the level of moisture in an agricultural field, before automatically watering it.
This year’s Mini Maker Faire, a space for people to show what they are making and learning, was organised at the Rangoli Metro Art Centre, by BMRC and Workbench Projects Pvt. Ltd, a makerspace/ public laboratory in Bangalore. There were many people here showing their innovations — there was Invento, which had built an enormous remote-controlled trash collecting car and a humanoid; and Supreeth YS, a student at RV College of Engineering had made a women’s safety device and incorporated it into jewellery that contained a chip under one of its stones — in case of an emergency, pressing it would send out alerts to an emergency contact and activate a loud alarm. Most of the projects used Arduino technology and focussed on low-budget, useful products for sustainable development.
But here, Shravani and Gunashree’s project stood out among many others. The two girls, who like to paint (“usually landscapes, and I like drawing pictures of famous people, like Ambedkar,” says Shravani), want to become doctors or engineers — Gunashree even adds that she wants to “study a lot, even after school.”
As their model showed, the irrigation system would have two sensors, one on the field, and the other at the water source. The sensors would detect the moisture levels in the field, and in turn, the sensor at the water source would let off water to the field, either through a drip system, or a sprinkler.
They had first started their irrigation project in October 2015 as an entry for the Intel-Tech Challenge, whose brief was to send projects that provided solutions to local problems. They attended the Intel Workshop, where they were introduced, for the first time, to sensors and Intel Galileo Boards. Now, a year later, they’ve built a prototype for an environment friendly sustainable product using this technology.
A few days ago, the girls also went to Hyderabad, where they competed in the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog’s ‘Atal Tinkering Laboratories – Innovation Challenge’, aimed at creating work spaces with advanced technical equipment in schools, to foster an interest in STEM fields with this project. And this isn’t all. Just this July, the two girls visited Delhi for the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s ‘Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan’ to show them this project —“It was very exciting. We stayed at the Taj. But we were also nervous because we had to make a presentation in front of ministers,” says Gunashree. She adds that she made friends in Delhi too, and talked to a girl from Punjab about their “cultures”.