A prototype developed by Jhansi Kalluri, a student of Telangana Social Welfare Residential Coding Academy, got selected for the prestigious ‘Maker Faire’ in Rome. The platform provides a business opportunity for small and large companies, startups, and investors to develop relationships. Jhansi is the only Indian to get selected for the Fair to be held in October.
Jhansi, hailing from Naraspur in Nirmal district, got trained at the state government’s coding academy in Moinabad and developed a mining worker’s safety helmet named ‘Workforce Guardian’. This product looks after the well-being of miners as a guardian and ensures their safety. The helmet has multiple functionalities based on sensors such as light Intensity detection and brightness controlling, humidity and temperature monitoring, drowsiness detection and alerting, location tracing, hazardous gas detection and alerting, and health status monitoring.
Jhansi says that she was exposed to the Internet of Things, Python programming, web technologies, apps and games development and many more at the coding academy. “This experience has increased my logical ability, analysis of the problems, fostered creativity and boosted my capacity to learn more,” she said.
The class-X student attributes her success to the coding trainers and the government of Telangana for incisive training and introducing coding in class VI. “Thanks to the government of Telangana and the Telangana Social Welfare Educational Society for introducing coding in Grade 6 itself. That’s the reason I got an opportunity to study coding from class VII. Our principal Nagamanimala, teachers and coding trainers at the academy imbibed that coding is an essential skill,” Jhansi said.
Jhansi says the transformative idea to revolutionize the safety of miners was conceived from her real-life experiences. The young innovator said that she has learnt the importance of safety at work as she grew up seeing her grandfather work in the forest department. “In class VIII, our social teacher taught a lesson named ‘Mining and Minerals’ and the Telugu teacher taught about Singareni mines. Those teachings ignited my passion to create something to eradicate the problems being faced by the workers in the mining industry,” Jhansi explained.
The prodigy added that she had a burning desire right from joining the Coding Academy to innovate something and give back to the community to help the people. “Technology shapes the future. By associating technology to daily life, we can work towards a better world. To bring this change, coding is an essential skill because it’s an important part of a digital transformation,” she said.