On the eve of the National Technology Day, ATL Marathon’s Top 30 Innovations to be supported through industry partnerships

In an effort to identify India’s best student innovators, Atal Tinkering Labs of the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) of NITI Aayog, organized an Atal Tinkering Marathon, a six month long nationwide challenge across six different thematic areas, namely, clean energy, water resources, waste management, healthcare, smart mobility and agri-tech.

On the eve of the National Technology Day, ATL Marathon’s Top 30 Innovations were showcased through a booklet compiling the work done by the children, the mentors, teachers and schools. The booklet was released by the Dr Rajiv Kumar, Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog, with Shri Ramanan Ramanathan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission.

"This booklet is dedicated to Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who took oath for the first time as Prime Minister of India on May 16. He believed that the future of this country lies in the hands of its children and the Atal Innovation Mission, named after his legacy, translates his dreams into reality", said Dr Kumar. "A very new era is coming where we will become an innovative society rather than an imitative society."

The Top 30 teams are being awarded with several prizes including a three month-long ATL Student Innovator Program (ATL SIP) in partnership with industry and start-up incubator. The goal of the Student innovator program is to test the innovations in the community. Students will be trained on business and entrepreneurship skills, including intellectual property, effective communication, making an elevator pitch and so on. Additionally, ATL schools will be offered a participation voucher to World Robotics Olympiad (WRO), which is a global innovation challenge.

From over 650 innovations received, Top 100 were shortlisted based on novelty and prototype functionality. There 100 teams were then given a month to further refine their prototypes and rework their presentations. Following this, their innovations were judged by an esteemed panel of judges including industry and academia experts to select the Top 30 innovations. These top 30 innovations have been identified from 20 different States and Union territories from across India, full details of which are available on the AIM website.

Atal Tinkering Labs under the Atal Innovation Mission of NITI Aayog, is based on the philosophy that incentives and prize awards are a great beginning to create an exponential wave of innovation and entrepreneurship amongst school children. The ATL Student Innovator Program is an effort to institutionalize a mechanism, where high school students can work with university incubators to pursue their innovative and entrepreneurial ideas along with their education. Our goal is to drive extensive forward and backward linkages within the stakeholders in India, to create a paradigm shift in the student mindset and prepare them to become young innovators and entrepreneurs.

Student Innovator Program fosters industry partnerships to test school prototypes and deliver entrepreneurship training to young innovators. Atal Innovation Mission's Atal Tinkering Marathon shortlisted student projects based on novelty and prototype functionality and provides awards and support, including a three month ATL Student Innovator Program in partnership with industry and incubators to deliver entrepreneurship training and community testing, plus participation vouchers for a global robotics challenge to strengthen school-incubator-industry linkages.