E-Paper
Kheri man bags Young Scientist Award 2024
Muneer Khan, a scientist from a remote village in India, received the Distinguished Young Scientist Award-2024 for his innovative soil monitoring device.
When 28-year-old Muneer Khan received the prestigious Distinguished Young Scientist Award-2024 from the hands of Union minister Nitin Gadkari on July 10 in the presence of Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and other dignitaries from the country and abroad, his face was beaming with success and satisfaction.
Khan, a scientist with Harvard University (USA) belongs to a remote village Gauriya in Behjam block of Kheri district and the Young Scientist Award has been offered to him for his innovative ‘soil monitoring devices’.
Muneer Khan said that since 2018, “along with Prof Dr Durgesh Pant, Dr. Ashutoah Kumar Bhatt and Pankaj Adhikari, I have been working on our ‘soil monitoring device’.
He added that after going through various experiments and successful tests, the patent office of the Indian government granted us a patent on January 8 this year.”
Khan said “our ultimate satisfaction is that I have been able to help crores of farmers of our country to improve their agriculture techniques as I myself belong to a very poor agricultural family.”
Elaborating upon his soil monitoring device, he said, “The device was pen-shaped and was easily connected to mobile handsets through an application.”
“Once inserted inside the soil, the device analysed the soil quality and intimated the farmers as to which crop was best suited to the soil and which nutrients the soil lacked in and in which quantity,” he added.
He further said “the device was also able to detect the level of moisture required in the soil, thus helping the farmers to prepare their soil accordingly.”
Poverty failed to discourage him
Khan, the youngest among his four brothers and three sisters, developed a keen interest in physics and math since childhood.
Having lost his father at the tender age of one, his mother strived to ensure proper education of her youngest son.
Her other children were either uneducated or under-educated.
Khan received his early education at a basic school in his village Gauriya. He completed high school studies and was awarded a scholarship at the local zila panchayat inter college. The scholarship became a source to manage education expenses in later years.
Later, he completed intermediate from a private inter college in Lakhimpur and on his merit, got admission in Birla Institute of Applied Sciences in Bhimtal (Uttarakhand).
In the final years of his B.Tech in electrical engineering, Muneer was offered a job of system assistant engineer at CERN laboratory, in Geneva, and this opened the gate for future success.
VisionPro AI eyeglasses
After completing masters in science at Columbia University, where he won the Best Project Award by the electrical engineering department, Muneer Khan founded his own Cadre Technologies, focusing on new inventions to serve humanity.
Along with his team at Cadre Technologies, he developed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology equipped VisionPro AI eyeglasses, which were able to assist the visually impaired users in their day-to-day work including document reading, recognising acquaintances, finding vehicles, etc.
DEO KANT PANDEY
