The initiative is now a group, consisting of 100 students who now work together with the Niti Aayog, to drive innovation and creativity.
A 15-year-old girl from Bengaluru has recently been honoured with the prestigious Diana Award 2024, the highest recognition for young people between the ages of 9 and 25 for their exceptional social action or humanitarian work.
For the past three years, Jeya Malhotra, a 10th standard student at the Air Force School in Jalahalli, has dedicated herself to empower students through digital literacy and entrepreneurial skills. She has mentored over 90,000 students across India and Canada, helping them develop crucial skills for their future.
Jeya was part of the virtual award ceremony held on December 5, where she shared her story and the impact of her work alongside Prince Harry of the British royal family.
At just 12 years old, Jeya connected with the Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, through her school, which led her to the Tinker Champ – a government initiated student-driven programme that helps students develop 21st-century skills and leadership qualities.
Under the programme, Jeya created Khwaish – an initiative that supports children with intellectual disabilities. Reflecting on her journey, she said, while many people focus on helping underprivileged children or providing digital skills training to students, intellectually challenged children often get overlooked and do not receive the attention they need.
To validate her idea, Jeya created a basic website and began submitting it to various competitions. In 8th grade, she entered the ATL TinkerPreneur 2023, a 9-week-long digital skills and entrepreneurship bootcamp and competition, and secured the All India Rank 1, standing out among 9,000 startup ideas from across the country. The initiative is now a group, consisting of 100 students who now work together with the Niti Aayog, to drive innovation and creativity.
In three years, the initiative has reached students from more than 250 schools, providing them with the opportunity to learn and grow through digital tools and entrepreneurial training.
Jeya emphasised that while there is a lot of enthusiasm in the community to learn, the main obstacle is the lack of proper resources to turn ideas into reality. The key issue, according to Jeya, is accessibility, which is hindering progress.
Highlighting how the 15-year-old has been balancing teaching and learning both, Jeya said from the beginning she wanted to work on projects that could make a difference for a larger group of people. However, many innovators were focusing on more general issues. That’s when she decided to focus on a field that could directly impact the lives of intellectually challenged children—an issue she deeply cares about. Social entrepreneurship has always been her passion, she said.
Jeya recently created ‘BizBox’, an entrepreneurship kit used by over 100 students in rural areas to help them grasp entrepreneurial concepts, even in areas without digital connectivity.
Article Credit: newindianexpress