Atal Innovation Mission

I was delighted when I got selected as Mentor of Change in 2018 and looked forward to teaming up with young minds. When I visited first-time in-person to my assigned school (Pravara Public School), which is almost 4 hours from Mumbai, I was amazed to see how smart, intelligent, and full of Life the students are. That is when I felt that this journey is not only about sharing my experience and wisdom with young minds, but instead, I will learn a lot in this journey from them.
Every time I visited or interacted with them through video conferencing, I felt that they do not need to be taught; instead, we (the AIM team, Mentors, and School) need to ensure that we together create an environment that enables them to grow to their fullest potential. And that is what I thought is exactly AIM’s ATL initiative is striving to do along with all of us as mentors.
One day, I was there in person with students and ATL in-charge and other staff, and we were discussing ideas. I realized that every student was looking at me as a mentor, giving them some problem statement or project on which they can work. Also, I realized that they were trying to think about the projects that can only be done through whatever equipment they were having in ATL Lab. Hence, I decided to have a discussion with them outside ATL Lab that day in open space and asked them not to look upon traditional way of execution of projects; instead, they are the future of innovation for our country and AIM initiative of making them ATL Labs available is just a platform for them to get wings to their ideas and innovation for the betterment of the human lives.
That day, I urged each of the young minds that please look around and observe the things and see if they feel some things need to be can be improvised, keeping in mind how we can make human life better. As whatever we do, technology, economics, politics, etc., everything, if not aligned to touch human lives for betterment, they lose the power of themselves.

 

After 1 month, I received a call from my school, and they requested me to visit the place. I travelled to school and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had come with a project, "Third Eye for Visually Impaired " the core team of students said that they understand this may not be the first time someone would have done it. Still, they wanted to take this up to build for their nearby villages and try to see if they can help improve underprivileged families' lives. They went ahead to build the prototype, and then one day, we all decided to do the pilot of the same, and the pilot was done in one of the "Blind School" in that locality to see if these specks really help and to get real-time feedback/inputs. The pilot was successful with few valuable suggestions.

Today, the team is very keen to see how the AIM team can help them take this forward for build and distribution. The entire school team and I would be happy to share more details and prototypes for the same with the AIM team and see if it can be improvised as a product that can be made available to people who really need it through health centers. I learned in these ~ 3 years as MoC and RMoC that we need to clearly understand that this entire initiative and our involvement are all about students, and it is not about us; we are here to guide and not teach.

Sandeep Khuperkar,
Regional Mentor of Change