The thresher that keeps the dust down

In Class 8, Pooja Pal of Barabanki watched threshing dust drift into her classroom — so she built a dust-free thresher for about ₹3,000. It took her to a national exhibition, to Japan, and to the Bal Puraskar 2025.

By The Young Achievers2 min readSources checked 23 October 2026

✓ Verified · Age 17

Pooja Pal · Aged 17 at the award (December 2025)

Filed under: Environment & Service · Uttar Pradesh · Environmental innovation (dust-free thresher)

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The award

The official list of the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar 2025 records her under a single name — Pooja, of Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, the year’s only awardee in the Environment category. Reporting by Dainik Jagran, The Times of India and BBC News Hindi identifies her in full as Pooja Pal, of Agehra village in the district’s Sirauli Gauspur block.

She was 17 when the President conferred the award on 26 December 2025.

Built from tin, wood and an old fan

Pooja was in Class 8 at Purva Madhyamik Vidyalaya, Agehra, when dust thrown up by wheat-threshing machines near her school kept drifting into classrooms, leaving children coughing and struggling to breathe. She asked why a thresher could not work without spreading dust — and, guided by her science teacher Rajeev Srivastava, set out to build one.

From tin, wood, an old fan and a water tank, at a cost of about ₹3,000, she made a model in which a fan draws the dust into water, trapping it instead of releasing it into the air.

✳ A spark to explore

Her father Puttilal is a daily-wage labourer and her mother Sunila Devi a cook at a government school; the family home had no electricity or toilet, and Pooja studied by the light of a diya. The model won the Department of Science and Technology’s INSPIRE Award in 2023 — reported as the only entry from Uttar Pradesh to do so that year — and reached the national science exhibition. In June 2025, by then in Class 12, she travelled to Japan for the Sakura Science High School Programme as one of 54 Indian students, the only one from her state. The science ministry is now facilitating a patent for her device. What everyday problem in your own surroundings have you stopped noticing — and what would it take to solve it with what you already have? That is a question from us, not part of her record.