This 9th-Grade Indian Student Created A Way To Care For Malnourished Children

Attending Bangalore-based the Head Start Educational Academy, Ayush Gharat is not only a standard 9th-grade student but he’s also a certified Associate Android Developer.

And at such a young age, he has already been well aware of a large number of poor people in India, which led him to develop a solution with the hope to help.

Gharat has come up with a software solution that can help feed poor children in the country. mNutrition, which he created,  offers a way so that organizations can quickly detect and handle any sign of malnutrition, as well as make sure children on the streets get sufficient food.

In India, malnutrition is the largest cause of child mortality. The World Bank said that 44 percent of under-5-year-old Indian children are suffering from severe malnutrition. As a result, they catch diseases more easily; besides, their ability to learn is not as good, which just makes the situation even worse.

Gharat has designed his app in a way that local volunteers and community workers can use easily, even when they are illiterate. There is information on every child’s medical health on the app, which organizations can use to monitor treatment with food supplements and antibiotics, and their responses to the medicines.

For this, mNutrition is an ideal tool to be used in remote and rural areas, where professionals cannot reach quickly to help children and access to resources and healthcare is limited or too costly.

The app has brought about a big leap in terms of monitoring methods, which currently depend on paper-based tracking observations and using old-fashioned filing systems. Instead of the traditional way, mNutrition uses a cloud storage system, able to work with iOS, Android, and web apps.

In his report, Gharat writes that in the long term, health workers successfully implementing this tech decides the success of the government-led programs. The boy said:

Right now, Gharat is among the top 100 regional finalists of 2018-2019 Google Science Fair, where students work to improve social, environmental, and economical issues through technology and science.