In October this year, five students from modest government schools packed their bags and boarded a flight to Panama City. They were on their way to represent India at the FIRST Global Challenge — an international robotics competition featuring teams from 193 countries. Their journey began far from global attention, in a small and often overlooked Atal Tinkering Lab on their school campus.
These are not the students who typically find themselves on global STEM stages. For Gouresh, the team’s lead programmer, the lab opened a doorway to a long-standing fascination with machine logic. For Ningaraj, raised by a single mother working in housekeeping, it offered possibilities that once seemed distant. A decade ago, such a story would have been difficult to imagine. Their achievement is about much more than competition results. It reflects what can happen when potential meets opportunity-and it raises an urgent question: how many such stories can India create?
Why Tinkering Matters
Tinkering labs offer something most Indian classrooms still lack: the freedom to explore, experiment, and fail safely. With robotics kits, microcontrollers, 3D printers, hand tools, and guided instruction, these spaces encourage inquiry-driven, hands-on learning. Students learn to solve real problems, collaborate, iterate, and apply theory to practice.
The five students who competed in Panama spent months after school-often late into the evening-teaching themselves coding, electronics, and mechanical design. Mentors from the Amazon Future Engineer Makerspace, run by The Innovation Story, supported them throughout. Within six months, the team built a functional, competition-ready robot designed to help other robots navigate obstacles — a fitting metaphor for what a supportive ecosystem can unlock. More importantly, the experience reshaped how they saw themselves: the lab did not merely teach robotics; it taught them to think like innovators. India has islands of excellence in STEM-Atal Tinkering Labs, private competitions, and nonprofit maker initiatives-but these remain fragmented. Over 10,000 Tinkering Labs now reach around 10 million students, yet with more than 1.5 million schools, access is still uneven, especially in government and rural institutions. This gap represents a lost opportunity. As India moves towards a projected $7 trillion economy by 2030, innovation capacity will determine how much growth can be unlocked — and who participates in it. Tinkering is often treated as an add-on, limited to competitions or one-off projects, but impact remains shallow when learning is episodic. To truly cultivate problem-solvers, tinkering must shift from a project to a core learning approach. This means integrating hands-on making into the timetable, training teachers for inquiry, linking labs to local challenges, ensuring ongoing mentorship, and building industry exposure. In short, tinkering must evolve from programme to pedagogy. India’s future innovators will emerge when schools create space for curiosity and encourage students to become creators, not merely consumers. The talent exists; now intent must match it. Innovation depends not only on tools in students’ hands but on the belief placed in their potential. India’s innovators of tomorrow will emerge by design — if the nation chooses to design that future today.
The writer is the Founder of the Innovation Story; views are personal
