Manali: Not one to be cowed down by belonging to a largely rural background with a schooling founded in government institutions, Jaya Sagar, still in here teens and a student of Class XI, with her simple agri based science model beat students from much more affluent schools at the National Science Fair held at Bengaluru recently.
A student at the Government Senior Secondary School, Manali, Jaya at the science fair had put up a model of planting spring mustard crops in apple orchards so that the two crops attain a flowering stage at the same time.
Jaya presents her model in IRIS Science Fair, Bangalore
Biological observations made showed that with flowering of mustard plants, insect and bee activity in the area increased much more than where there were no mustard flowers.
With apple orchards in Kullu valley facing a cross pollination problems because of low bee and other pollinating insect populations, the mustard crop in bloom partially helped to overcome the problem and led to improved productivity in the apple orchards.
The scientific model presented by Jaya of planting mustard for achieving better pollinating results in the cash rich apple crop caught the fancy of the evaluators at the “Initiative for Research and Innovation in Science National Fair 2013’ and awarded her a gold medal for it.
In all about 60 lakh students from all over the country had applied online for participating at the science fair competition but only 130 ended up competing at the final rounds.
Jaya has also been selected to represent India at the International Science Fair to be held in USA next year.
The achievement of the young budding scientist was all the more remarkable for she was perhaps the only competitor at the fair from a government school education grounding and was up against other students from metro urban centres studying under CBSE, ISC and other more recognized school education boards than the Himachal Pradesh School Education Board.
Jaya aspires to become an engineer.
As Editor, Ravinder Makhaik leads a team of media professionals at Hill Post.
Spanning a career of over two decades in mass communication, as a Documentary Filmmaker, TV journalist, Print Media journalist and with Online & Social Media, he brings with him a vast experience. He lives in Shimla.
