This 57-Year-Old School Dropout’s Novel Agarbatti Machine Is Winning Awards!

Karuna Kanta Nath might be a dropout, but his success as a grassroots innovator proves that curiosity cannot be taught in schools or colleges. It is innate to every innovator.

Now 57, the man has won the Dinanath Pandey Smart Idea Innovation Award at Regional Science Centre for an innovative incense-stick making machine.

Nath competed with over 20 innovators at the two-day ‘Innovation Festival’ in Guwahati, held by Indian Council for Science Museum in association with the National Innovation Foundation.

The idea of the festival is to open a platform for the people of the northeast to showcase their innovations.

Karuna Kanta Nath, who is a belongs to Barabari village in Darrang district, exhibited a set of four innovations costing around Rs 1 lakh – including a bamboo slicing machine, a bamboo bit machine, a bamboo stick machine and an incense stick polish. Nath’s incense stick machine can generate over 20 kilograms of incense sticks in an hour.

He has already managed to grab the attention of state entrepreneurs – who have bought many of these machines already.

Read more: My Story: I Went for a Survey, but Uttarakhand’s Kumaoni Girls Taught Me a Valuable Lesson

Speaking to the Times of India, Nath said, “I’m happy to be here. I have been trying to come up with something to help people in their day-to-day activities since the 1990s. It feels good to get recognized. So far, I have come up with 28 innovations which have been recognized by many institutes.”

The awards are given in the honour of master innovator Dinanth Pandey, whose wife Putu Devi said she said, “I’m glad to give this award to the innovator whose tools have helped many in creating a livelihood.”

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