Karnataka Team wins ENpower’s India’s Future Tycoons Season 2 grand finale to beat India’s Water Crisis

Mumbai: ENpower’s India’s Future Tycoons – Season 2 (IFT #2) grand finale was held in Mumbai yesterday. Having received registrations from 7,100+ school children across 130 cities, top 24 teams were shortlisted for the finale to ideate on innovative sustainable solutions for India’s Water Crisis. Water theme is focused on water availability & shortage, usage & wastage, cleaning & sanitation, transportation & shortage and so on UN GCNI was the Sustainability Partner and Niti Ayog’s Atal Innovation Mission was the Knowledge and Outreach Partner.

ENpower’s IFT is India’s first-ever entrepreneurship search and mentoring platform exclusively for young adults aged between 13 & 17 years of age. It is a nationwide hunt for ideas for a better future, empowering children to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset and encouraging them to build perspectives about real-life problems and creating sustainable solutions.

The top 24 teams across the country presented their ideas to an eminent panel of jury consisting of Kamal Singh – Executive Director, UN GCNI; Nikhil Vora – Founder, Sixth Sense Ventures; Lina Ashar – Founder, Kangaroo Kids and Billabong High and Elizabeth Venkataraman – Marketing Head, Kotak Mahindra Bank. The chief guest for the finale was Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar – Ex Vice-Chancellor of Mumbai University and President Ex MP of Rajya Sabha.

IFT #2 began with a two-day residential boot camp on 26th and 27th January 2020 in Mumbai for top 24 teams, which was a great interaction & mentoring opportunity for students from start-up owners, corporate domain mentors, design thinking experts to help them to build a robust execution plan around the idea.

Winning team ‘Achelous’ from Karnataka built a prototype to extract ‘activated carbon’ from plastic waste. This will clean our rivers and oceans while building water purifiers. The winners are Prajwal Erappa, Taran N and Suhas BG from Kendriya Vidyalaya Mysore. The first runner up Team ‘Bone-to-Backbone’ from DAV Model School Chitradurg, Karnataka built an automated water management system model that will help farmers to ensure appropriate auto-watering of their field, thereby saving time and efforts. This solution not only helps farmers to save water but also improves their productivity. The second runner up was an all-girl-powered team ‘Allamanda’ from Vidya Vikasa Vidya Samasthe, Durgapur in West Bengal built a water purifier model from a small garden flower. They researched on the properties of ‘Allamanda Cathertica’ as a natural bleaching agent which is 60% cheaper than current bleaching powders in the market and can be a good product for rural India, thereby saving people of waterborne diseases.

Besides rewards and recognition for winning teams, the top 3 teams will present their ideas on the stage of United Nations Sustainability Development Forum, India Chapter.

Commenting on IFT #2, Sushil Mungekar, Founder & CEO, ENpower, said “This season of IFT has gone beyond ‘inspiring’ students to think creatively to solve problems around them by ’empowering’ them with tools and thinking framework to convert social problems around them into opportunities and convert them into meaningful business ideas. So happy to see that many teams have used this platform in ideating ventures which not only underlines social impact but also build scalable business ideas.”

ENpower aims at ensuring that the children of today become the future drivers of tomorrow’s economy by way of Entrepreneurship Learning – the option of being able to create, manage and steer their own enterprises.

Entrepreneurship learning, far more encompassing than business studies, help children to nurture a mindset and thinking process as an entrepreneur, equipping them with the 21st century life skills such as Problem Solving, Collaborative working, Managing Failures, Decision Making, Risk Taking, Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Managing Resources and Leadership.

Besides the IFT competition, ENpower offers a plethora of courses and workshops on innovation, design thinking & entrepreneurship life skills to school children in the age group of 8-18 years that helps them to be change drivers of tomorrow.