Voice of Youth · 1–2 August 2026 · Raajkutir, Kolkata
Nearly 300 students from schools across India filled Raajkutir (IHCL) for the inaugural Voice of Youth — two days of pitches, a fireside conversation, a panel on studying abroad, and a final stage where ten teams made their case. This is how it went.
Teams were assessed on innovation, feasibility, scalability, presentation, research and potential impact.
First prize
An agentic AI code editor. Autonomous agents read your codebase, write and refactor code, run your tests, self-correct, and hand back a clean, verified pull request — making coding more intuitive, efficient and accessible.
It runs a supervised loop: an orchestrator plans, a builder edits and a critic adversarially reviews, every action streaming live, grounded in a graph of your codebase and checked by deterministic verification.
Second prize
EVA, the Equitable Virtual Avatar: a living computational digital twin for South Asian women’s health, built to anticipate conditions like PCOS and endometriosis rather than only treat them.
Third prize
A sustainable, vegan leather-like material made from rice husk, pairing agricultural waste with next-generation material innovation.
Ideas across technology, health, education, sustainability and social impact.
Huskell turns rice husk, an abundant agricultural waste product, into a durable and eco-friendly alternative to traditional leather. Through it the team aims to promote a circular economy — giving agricultural waste a second life while reducing reliance on resource-intensive materials, without compromising on functionality or aesthetics.
They opened with a crime-scene skit: three suspects — the rice mill, genuine leather and faux leather.
A platform connecting neighbourhood kirana stores with online customers — bridging the trust people place in local shops and the convenience they expect from modern commerce.
A living computational digital twin for South Asian women’s health. EVA combines wearable data, medical records, hormonal and lifestyle factors to model an individual’s health, reconstruct past physiological states and project possible futures — preventative medicine made predictive.
A resource recovery system for households, businesses and cities. It organises the collection of segregated waste and follows three principles: prevent waste, keep products in use through repair, resale or donation, and recover value through recycling and composting.
Eco-friendly gifting pots for people who can’t devote extensive time to caring for plants, with thermocol packaging replaced by natural alternatives.
Padma Shri recipient and Chairman of the Ambuja Neotia Group, in conversation with the founders.
“Our responsibility is to leave this world better than we received it.”Harshavardhan Neotia
Mr Neotia reflected on leadership, ethics and the responsibility that accompanies success, and urged students to take up entrepreneurship with passion. Noting the importance of research and networking, he said: “We are moving into an increasingly eco-conscious market, and thus any sustainable idea has a great future.”
Opening addresses came from Sanjay Jain of TT Group, Amit Srivastava of UCO Bank and chief guest Mansi Chakraborty.
International admissions, scholarships, profile building, extracurriculars, application essays, career prospects and university life abroad.
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Radio coverage and reels from the summit.
“Dream big, think crazy, and with effort, at the end of the day, it all falls in place.”Manan Bagrecha · Founder
The inaugural edition closed with an address from Manan, who thanked the students, volunteers, mentors, judges, sponsors and partners who shaped the summit — and encouraged the young participants to keep pursuing their ideas with conviction.
Registrations for the inaugural edition are closed. To hear about the next one, or to partner with us, write to us.
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