Madhurima
The award ceremony for this year’s Bal Shakti Puraskar was organised at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi on Wednesday i.e. 22 January 2020. Children between the age of 5-18 years are recognised for their outstanding status in various fields like innovation, social service, sports, culture, arts, design, academics through this honour. The triumphs in the field of bravery is also recognised through this award.
For the year 2020, the Bal Shakti Puraskar was bestowed on 49 children for their achievements in the aforementioned categories. It included the 14 year old Parikul Bhardwaj, who is recognised as the youngest volunteer. She provided social service at the Kedarnath Yatra. Gauri Mishra (13), known as India’s youngest pianist got awarded for her achievements in the field of music. The bravery honour was given to Ishan Sharma (15), who rescued a Russian tourist from 2 thieves.
Sanchita Tiwari (18) got honoured for her exceptional work in the field of sports as she has won 3 international medals for Archery. She was also a torch bearer at the first Khelo India’s opening ceremony. From the field of scholastic, Chirag Falor (17), who represented the country in Hungary for International Olympian Award on Astronomy and Astrophysics was chosen. In the innovation category, 4 students were recognised for their out of the box, yet highly advanced discoveries. Raghav Puri (18), under his project known as ‘Recovering History’, found a way to reconstruct broken artifacts through artificial intelligence. Sagnik Anupam (17) has made an app to predict future floods based on prior year’s river data, which is known as ‘Augura’. Arjun Pandey (17) has made ‘ScoutMe’, an app which is India’s very first scouting portal. It has even been taken up by AIFF (All India Football Federation). Tanish Goel (18) is the inventor of a machine learning base surveillance system featuring smart drones for saving lives of citizens.
The awardees were presented with a cash prize and a Gold Medal by Ram Nath Kovind, the president of India. The honoured candidates will also be made part of India’s Republic Day parade on 26th January.
