Five school students from Uttar Pradesh have been recognised under the INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme for developing practical solutions to everyday safety, mobility and health problems, including an adaptive speed breaker, a wet umbrella holder, an automatic LPG shut-off system and safer kitchen tongs.
The awards are part of the Department of Science and Technology’s INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme, which supports student-led innovation and problem-solving. The selected students are from Lucknow, Muzaffarnagar, Auraiya, Farrukhabad and Rampur.
Lucknow’s Abhinanjay Pandey, a Class 9 student, developed an adaptive passive speed breaker using a non-Newtonian fluid sealed inside a flexible tube. The design is intended to respond differently depending on the force and speed of a vehicle passing over it. At lower speeds, it is designed to avoid producing an unnecessary jerk, while vehicles travelling at higher speeds would experience greater resistance.
“When the speed is less, then the breaker will not produce any unwanted jerk, but with high speed, the breaker will give jerk to the commuters,” Pandey said. The concept addresses a common road-design problem: conventional speed breakers can affect vehicles travelling at different speeds in the same way, creating discomfort for slower-moving traffic while failing to deter speeding effectively.
From Muzaffarnagar, Class 6 student Aalaukik Shirushwal was recognised for ‘suraksha tongs’, designed to make it safer to handle heavy, hot cookware. The tongs feature a circular loop that hooks onto the rim of a vessel, a metal plate intended to improve grip and a rubber-insulated ergonomic handle to reduce strain.
Shirushwal said the design could reduce burn injuries caused by accidental spills when heavy hot vessels are handled with slippery cloth grips. The proposed users include households, caterers and event cooks, where large or hot vessels may need to be moved frequently.
Class 8 student Divyansh Kashyap from Auraiya developed the ‘Wet Umbrella Holder Yantra’ after seeing a classmate slip in a classroom because of water dripping from a wet umbrella. The device is designed to collect rainwater and prevent it from spreading across indoor floors. Kashyap said the collected water could also be reused for watering potted plants and lawns.
Dakshina Singh, a Class 7 student from Farrukhabad, developed ‘FOOT-O-FIT’, a semicylindrical ergonomic footrest for people who sit for long periods. It includes 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 went to Rampur’s Shubh Aggarwal, a Class 10 student, for a smart LPG leakage detection and automatic shut-off system. The system uses a Wi-Fi module, gas sensor 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 five projects show how the INSPIRE Awards-MANAK programme is being used to bring school-level ideas into a structured recognition system. The reported innovations focus on hazards and inconveniences encountered in roads, homes, classrooms and workplaces, while their eventual use beyond the prototype stage would depend on further development and testing.
