17-year-old bags top honour for mobile app at CSIR Innovation Awards 2020

Geetu Vaid

Tribune School Desk

Chandigarh,September 26

When most youngsters his age are busy playing video games, this Delhi teen has been itching to do something to improve the quality of life for farmers and people with limited means in the rural belts of the country. He has been deeply involved in providing a solution to their monetary woes through technology in the hinterlands. And his efforts have won him accolades at the national level.

Meet Karan Soin, the 17-year-old enterprising student of Shri Ram School, Gurugram, who has won the second prize (the top prize this year as no first prize was awarded) at the prestigious CSIR Innovation Award for School Children-2020, for his mobile app ‘SUDHAAR’. The award of Rs 50,000 was presented to him today.

The app will provide farmers easy access to small loans and is aimed at improving (‘sudhaar’) rural lives through ‘udhaar' or loans. 

 The app will make the MF ecosystem become more equitable, since anyone with a smart phone in any village can access MFIs, irrespective of their socio-economic status. The app makes it easy for them to get a loan from the comfort of their own village/home, without having to leave their homes unattended or losing working hours. The app has a user-friendly interface with a choice of Hindi or English, with a simple-to-fill form.

The inspiration for this app came in 2017, when he started a digital education programme called “DigIndia” at the Garhi Harsaru village. Over the past three years, he and my team of student teachers from TSRS have imparted digital literacy to over a 1000 villagers of both genders and all ages (www.digindia.org). “I was very keen that they use their newfound technical skills to enhance their everyday lives. In March 2019, I had several discussions with groups of villagers and found that the majority of their issues centred around money and loans. They had very limited access to lenders, and that too at unfavourable terms.  I then decided to design and develop a mobile app which would help them to get easy access to small loans. Over the rest of 2019, I designed and developed this microfinance app for the villagers (mainly small business owners) called s udhaar (which implies sudhaar (improvement) through udhaar (loan) “, says Karan while talking about the genesis of this project.

 But the road to success hasn’t been an easy one for Karan as he had to work hard to upskill himself. “I have been coding for three years, but had to learn the technical aspects of app development, through extra courses taken in my free time during the summer and weekends. I did online courses to enhance my skills to help me learn react native and its capabilities. It was very difficult to balance this with my schoolwork and academic commitments”.

Apart from the technical skills that he needed to pick up the young innovator also had to “prepare” his target audience, the villagers. The main difficulties the applicants (villagers) encountered during beta testing were understanding the written instructions in the help tutorial, and due to unreliable internet connection, many could not complete the form fully before the connection snapped. “Both these issues have been addressed in the latest app update”, says Karan. 

 Ask him about the future plans, and Karan is full of enthusiasm about how his app will be more and more useful for the users. “Out of necessity, the current global pandemic has created a huge need to use digital technology to minimise physical contact. s u d h a a r  and similar digital solutions that ease the economic struggles of the rural population by remote connection are the need of the hour. The current “proof of concept” version of s u d h a a r will be upgraded to a commercial version, sudhaar 2.0. While the app will remain a not-for-profit endeavour, it can eventually include 20-30 companies rather than the current four to cover multiple states. Accordingly, vernacular (local) languages will be added to the app”. 

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