Five school students from Uttar Pradesh have been recognised under the INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme for developing practical solutions aimed at improving road safety, household safety, indoor cleanliness and everyday health. The award-winning UP student innovations include an adaptive speed breaker, a safer pair of cooking tongs, a wet umbrella holder, an ergonomic footrest and an automatic LPG leakage shut-off system.
The INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme is run by the Department of Science and Technology to support student-led innovation and problem-solving. The selected ideas emerged from situations that students observed in schools, homes and public settings, including vehicle speed, accidental burns, slippery floors, prolonged sitting and gas leakage.
Lucknow’s Abhinanjay Pandey, a Class 9 student, developed an adaptive passive speed breaker using non-Newtonian fluid sealed inside a flexible tube. The design is intended to respond differently depending on the speed and force of a vehicle passing over it. At lower speeds, the breaker is designed to avoid producing an unwanted jerk, while faster vehicles would experience greater resistance and a stronger bump.
The concept addresses a familiar road-safety challenge: conventional speed breakers can slow traffic but may also cause discomfort or vehicle impact when approached at speed. Pandey said the design would allow slower vehicles to pass with less disturbance while producing a stronger warning for vehicles travelling faster.
A Class 6 student from Muzaffarnagar, Aalaukik Shirushwal, was recognised for developing ‘suraksha tongs’ to make it safer to handle heavy, hot cookware. The tongs use a circular loop that hooks onto the rim of a vessel, a metal plate to improve grip and a rubber-insulated ergonomic handle intended to reduce strain. The design is aimed at reducing burn injuries caused by spills while lifting hot vessels with slippery cloth grips. The reported users include households, caterers and event cooks.
From Auraiya, Class 8 student Divyansh Kashyap developed the ‘Wet Umbrella Holder Yantra’ after seeing a classmate slip in a classroom where a wet umbrella had been left to drip. The device is designed to collect water from umbrellas and keep indoor floors dry. Kashyap said the collected water could be reused for watering potted plants and lawns, linking a simple school-safety intervention with small-scale water reuse.
Class 7 student Dakshina Singh of Farrukhabad developed ‘FOOT-O-FIT’, a semicylindrical ergonomic footrest intended to encourage movement during prolonged sitting. It incorporates a rocking mechanism, acupressure dots and an electronic system that tracks soleus push-ups, pulse count, estimated calorie burn and active and inactive time.
The fifth award-winning project came from Rampur, where Class 10 student Shubh Aggarwal developed a smart LPG leakage detection and automatic shut-off system. The device uses a gas sensor, Wi-Fi module and servo motor. When a leak is detected, the servo motor turns the regulator knob off and an alert message is sent to the concerned person’s mobile phone.
Together, the projects show how everyday urban risks can become starting points for school-level innovation. The reported solutions remain student-developed concepts, and the material does not establish whether they have undergone commercial production, regulatory testing or deployment at scale. Their recognition under the INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme provides support for the ideas and highlights the role of school innovation programmes in identifying solutions to practical safety and usability problems.
