KUALA LUMPUR: Thanuja Kumaran added another accolade to her name recently after her Digital Hope project won the Tuanku Bainun Young Changemakers Awards 2021 for the Individual Category (6-12 years old).
The 10-year-old also became the country's first Indian girl to win the award since its inception in 2015.
Thanuja started her Digital Hope project — an initiative to provide refurbished digital devices to underprivileged students — after she saw her classmate struggling to follow online learning without a digital device.
The Klang-born girl has distributed 16 digital devices, including laptops and tablets, that have benefited 22 students and their school-going siblings so far.
"I felt very excited and happy when I was announced as the winner. I could not believe that I won because all the other participants submitted very good projects," an elated Thanuja told the New Straits Times.
However, the young champion is not one to rest on her laurels.
Thanuja has decided to embark on her long-pending dream project of producing organic fertilisers from food waste for her school garden.
Thanuja made her mark on the international stage after the proposal bagged several innovation awards from India, including the International Budding Star Award from the Vibrant Education group last year.
She was also named the "Tamil Scientist of the Year" by the Research Centre for Science and Sangam Literature in Tamil Nadu, India in 2020 after she demonstrated her technique to create compost from kitchen waste such as onion peels, tea waste and crushed eggshells.
The competition posed a double challenge to Thanuja. Apart from making a persuasive pitch, she also had to translate several scientific terms to Tamil, for which she sought her mother's help.
The international recognitions further fired up Thanuja's passion for the project, so, she decided to initiate a community-based gardening project using homemade fertilisers for the Tuanku Bainun Young Changemakers competition.
This time around, she wanted to rope in her other schoolmates from SJK(T) Ladang Highlands and cultivate an organic garden at the school.
Her school headmistress, Panginiammal Muniandy, also agreed to set up the garden and made the necessary arrangements for Thanuja to carry out her dream project.
Unfortunately, as schools remain closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Thanuja was forced to shelve the project and addressed "digital poverty" instead for the competition.
"Now that schools have reopened, I want to work on this project. Besides reducing food waste in landfills, plants also grow stronger and healthier when we use organic fertilisers.
"Nature gives us food and in return, we must nourish the land using clean fertilisers," she added.
Thanuja's mother, Thivviyah Sanmugam, said her daughter's knack for inventions kicked in when she turned nine.
"She is a very inquisitive child and questions everything that she sees or reads. She loves watching investigative cartoons, and in fact, she wants to become a detective in future.
"So, I registered her for many online training programmes to keep her occupied while the schools were closed during the Movement Control Order," she said.
Thanuja will also receive RM2,000 from the Tuanku Bainun Creative Centre for Children for her victory and she plans to save the money for further studies.