India
Aryan Singh started a weekly course, eazyTech, where employees and volunteers travel to villages in Rajasthan and teach the local children and people how to operate a computer in different occasions.
Aryan Singh, a 16-year-old boy, hails from Jaipur, Rajasthan, sits in a small office with his father in tow. He seems friendly, genuine, and down-to-earth. Look deep and you realise he’s got the world at his fingertips. He is the CEO of not one, but two startups. One of those he calls his to-be moneymaker, while the other is purely a non-profit charity organisation.
A non-profit company, eazyTech, was started by Aryan while he was still in high-school. Living in Rajasthan, he realised he was reasonably well-off with easy access to technology, which is apparently called his first love. But, the same could not be happening in other villages in his state, where they don't even have internet for basic knowledge.
The fulfilment wasn’t immediate, and it took a particular situation to reveal that unfortunate truth. Aryan’s first real foray into the public sector was with a simple app - a citizens’ gathering for people to raise complaints with their local government, for everything from lack of drinking water to potholes on the roads.
Aryan sent description and link of the app to the government, but got no response. That's when he realised some villages in Rajasthan do not have internet and are not aware what a computer is and how it is used.
The eazyComputeBox uses a portion of the power of a traditional PC, which can be connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and will even run on a custom OS Aryan wrote for the system, the Linux-based eazyOS. Nonetheless, he said it would cost about Rs 2,000 to build if you manage to buy parts for cheaper from China and would cost Rs 4,000 if it is sourced from India. In fact, this eazyComputeBox is so inexpensive and convenient, and Aryan is currently in talks with the Rajasthan government to have it power their digital ballot boxes at remote polling booths during the elections.
The next step for Aryan was to uplift his fellow citizens to a point where they can use a computer comfortably. For this, he started a weekly course where eazyTech employees and volunteers travel to villages in Rajasthan and teach those local children and people how to operate a computer in different occasions. Right now, eazyTech’s Sunday Pathshaala stretches across nine countries with 57 volunteers, which includes villages in Rajasthan, Ladakh, and Africa with Zimbabwe branch on the road to being set up.
The 16-year-old had previously attended a particular summer technology course at the Stanford University and is currently preparing for another month-long stopover at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). When the time comes, his startups will enable him to study at the college of his choice.
Read Exclusive COVID-19 Coronavirus News updates, at MyNation.