Eighteen-year-old Shiv, a Class 8 student from Gurugram, comes from a family of straitened means. But thanks to help from Harmony House (a day care shelter for kids like him) and the efforts of Quase (an aggregator of NGOs), things might soon change for the better.
The only boy among four sisters, of whom one is married, Shiv's other three sisters work with their mother as domestic helps while his father is a cycle mechanic. It is apparently from the latter he gets his aptitude for engineering.
"When Shiv walked through the Harmony House doors at seven years old, it was clear that he needed our love, care and guidance. Initially, he struggled to concentrate on his studies and did not have the drive to succeed in his exams. As he had missed so much of the work covered by his peers, he had difficulties keeping up in class. We began to notice that he would build mechanical structures in his free study periods, and we quickly realised that Shiv has a talent for mechanical and robotic engineering," says Avneesh Chhabra, Director of Quase.
Quase runs PassionGuru, a program that provides free mentoring to 8-16 year-olds via online classes and with a completion certification to make learning more fruitful. Noting his interest, Chhabra took Shiv to a car workshop recently and the boy was enraptured. So after some lessons, Chhabra gave Shiv a challenge to make some items, which he did successfully.
"Since he was so fascinated by the car parts at the workshop, we are going to be getting him different parts which he can use to craft novelty furniture out of, which we will sell online and give him all that his pieces earn," shares Chhabra.
Initially, Shiv's father was not encouraging about Shiv pursuing his skills and talent, but has now seen and realised how good he is at it, and allows him to learn and practice. With dreams of becoming a robotics engineer, Shiv might just be the next tech genius of his generation.