7-year-old potter turns innovator

His tiny hands caress the mud like only a professional's hands can. As he moulds the lump of mud into a pot, seven-year-old Divya Prakash Pandey's eyes twinkle.

His tiny hands caress the mud like only a professional's hands can. As he moulds the lump of mud into a pot, seven-year-old Divya Prakash Pandey's eyes twinkle.

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The Class 2 student may not have learnt to write exams in his school but is already a diploma holder from Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Pottery is not just a passion for Divya Prakash but also a course of study.

The youngest student to ever enrol in a university in India, he passed the Craft and Design Programme with 76% marks in June last year. But this is not all. The shy student of Kendriya Vidyalaya, Vigyan Vihar, has also become an innovator.

"Clay figurines and pots are usually hardened by baking them in fire but this lends it a reddish colour. My son did not want to bake the figurine, instead glazed it with industrial glue. The professors at the university are surprised by this and planning to conduct a whole new research about benefits of using this kind of glue," said KC Pandey, Divya Prakash's father.

With the use of glue, the figurine retained its colour, has glaze and is quite strong.

"We never thought that he would be able to write the exams but he used simple language in his papers and got high marks as the concepts were already clear to him," the father said.