It is a sultry humid afternoon in the dusty bylanes of southeast Delhi’s Jaitpur. But the humid weather does little to dampen the enthusiasm of over 50 local students from Classes 6 to 12 working intensely on a range of technical models — a circuit for intelligent sensor-based lighting, a robotic arm, a dispenser machine, an automatic sliding door, and more.
Started by a Delhi-based techpreneur couple, Harpreet and Gagandeep Sapra, in June 2022, Makersbox Foundation is a free to walk-in two-room Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) lab space in Jaitpur. It’s a huge hit among the close to 150 neighbourhood school-going children, who increasingly find themselves spending their spare time tinkering around with wires, circuits and 3D printing machines, in batches.
Manisha (16) is helming a team of three that is working on a prototype of a sanitary pad dispenser machine to be fitted in low resource schools. She places a wooden box on the table and starts working on the circuit that is neatly hidden from plain view inside the box. After fixing the machine, she asks a volunteer to place her palm at a few centimetres distance from a tiny sensor bulb. On doing this, a sanitary napkin pops out of the box. “We are designing a device which does not require putting in coins to extract the product. This is because our mandate is to place it in low resource settings,” Ms. Manisha explains.
Makerspaces are collaborative workspaces housing equipment like 3D printers, woodwork tools, electrical equipment, and computers, which help community members build projects on their own. From 2013 onwards, a few like-minded engineers and designers started makerspaces, for instance Maker’s Asylum, which was earlier in Mumbai and has now shifted to Goa. Maker’s Asylum charges ₹500 for a day to access the space and offers a monthly membership at ₹5,000.
Makersbox, which specifically targets students from Class 6 to 12 in low resource settings, on the other hand, does not charge any fee for children to work at the space.
“Currently we have invested a seed sum of ₹5 lakh towards the capital and operational expenses. We are constantly looking to raise funds to run the space,” Harpreet Sapra, co-founder of Makersbox, said.
Akul Tiwari, a Class 8 student in the nearby privately-run Vatika Public School is a regular at the space and is simultaneously working on two passion projects. “One is a circuit design for a motion sensor, another is a 3D design for a drone,” young Mr. Tiwari says.
“Back in school, we barely get any time to spend time in science laboratories; all the study is bookish. We have one microscope in the lab and 73 kids jostling to peep into it; half of the kids do not get the time to work with the microscope due to lack of time,” he rues.
Spaces like Makersbox have a great impact on the student during their formational years, says Akanksh Saraf, a Bachelor of Engineering student at Shiv Nadar University, who routinely volunteers a few hours in a week here, mentoring children on technical projects as a part of his internship.
“Exposure to practical learning helps develop a sense of critical thinking in students about projects that work or do not work. While questions in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) are theoretical in nature, the experience garnered at the makers space helps kids prepare better for an engineering college experience,” Mr. Saraf observes.
“Makers spaces such as this are a breath of fresh air in a highly competitive, private equity funded ed tech space with the likes of Byjus, which force parents to enrol their kids for coding programmes, even if their children do not have the aptitude for it. Here, we encourage children to discover projects at their own pace in a zero-pressure atmosphere,” Diwakar Kumar, engineer and instructor at Makersbox, says.
Ms. Harpreet, who also help set up a hands-on engineering lab in Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) at Okhla, agrees. “The problem statement we were trying to solve for at IIIT-D was that B.E. and diploma students had no experience in handling simple engineering devices like screwdrivers or woodwork tools. They were unable to fix circuits. They would just go out there and purchase projects instead of making them on their own,” she says.
To move away from rote learning for aspiring STEM professionals, government think tank Niti Aayog, under the Atal Innovation Mission, funds hands-on do-it-yourself labs for schools known as Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL).
Under the ATL scheme, a school must apply to secure funding for setting up the lab. “After thorough assessment of the school, a financial support of ₹20 lakh is allotted of which ₹12 lakh are disbursed in the first year, and the remaining ₹8 lakh are disbursed in instalments over the next four years,” a source working closely on ATL told The Hindu.
“Currently, there are 10,000 such ATL labs across India and most of them are based in private schools. Some of them are based out of international schools. However, richer schools can always self-fund their tinkering labs. Why do they need government-funding for this?” questions Gagandeep Sapra, co-founder of Makersbox, one of the few people active in the Makerspace movement, who had earlier advised Niti Aayog on setting up ATLs.
While currently there are up to 10,000 ATLs across States, the Niti Aayog team working on the project had conducted an internal analytical study on the projected requirement based on population density and geography. “The estimate suggested that we need as many as seven to eight times the current number of ATLs in the country,” the above quoted source said.
“India is such a diverse country with different States having varied requirements. It is not one-size fits all, and we need more enthused techies to come forward and set up an increasing number of makerspaces in both government and non-profit settings,” Anirudh Malpani, who runs Malpani Ventures, an angel investment firm that funds frugal innovation, said.
