India shining at NASA Space Settlement Design Contest
A young boy from Pune, who is in the 7th standard, has made India proud by claiming the top prize on offer at the NASA Space Settlement Design Contest 2014, which had been organized a short period back. In fact, the extent of India’s intellectual capability, especially among the educated children in the urban centers, can be gauged from the fact that out of the 25 who have won the first prize in the said contest 12 are from India. The first prize winner is Chaitanya Vashistha who is a student at the St. Arnold Central School that is located in Wadgaonsheri.
600 individuals from 18 countries across the world took part in the said contest. In fact, space design has been one area where the best minds in India have always had some level of interest and this basically contributed to the extent of participation by schools from this South Asian country. One of the ground rules of the competition was that the participants needed to be in the 12th standard or lower than that. Chaitanya is now looking to take part in the Google Science Fair, which shows he is not satisfied with what he has achieved in the NASA competition. Such drive and focus at such a precocious age is indeed commendable.
Pune has also done well as far as second prize for the stated competition goes. Out of the 30 teams that won the second prize two were from this Maharashtrian city that is reputed to be the educational capital of India. In fact there are 20 other teams from India in this list. The two teams that did well from Pune in this segment were Hellos from Vidya Valley School and Yahvi from St. Mary’s School. Ishaan Diwan, Jaideep Patil and Shreyash Chaudhuri designed the project created by Hellos.
In the 3rd prizes division India did well by winning 15 awards for categories such as Literary Merit and Artistic Merit. Apart from this 24 students from India were also mentioned in honorable terms, thus making their country proud. However, there are certain teething questions that need to be asked over here:
- While it is true that this is an international competition and Indian kids have done well, what will happen when they grow up? Will they stay in India and continue their work or head to the US or a European country where they will get better research facilities and infrastructure and perhaps a better standard of life? Brain drain is one of the major problems in India. Unfortunately not much is being done in this regard.
- Why is it that in majority of these competitions only the urban schools are able to participate? Why can the schools from the towns – let alone the villages – not take part in them? Is it a lack of awareness or absence of facilities, which translates to lesser skill sets among the students of these schools? Is the school system in India structured in such a way that only a few can aspire to brilliance while others wallow in mediocrity? The question is will the powers-that-be sit up and take notice or will they only talk of empowering the youth and country and then do precious little about it? From the looks of it, it seems that the chances of the second one happening are greater than that of the first one – sad but true.
