14 Year Old Advay's Award Winning Project Focusses On The Fishermen's Plight

Ask yourself before you get inside a story of excitement built upon engineering, what did you do when you were 14? When I asked myself, I knew I did many things except exploring the love of my life, science in my own way. Advay Ramesh, a 14-year-old kid had an entirely different answer, giving which he is now one of the Community Impact Award winners of Google Science Fair. His project named “FishErmen Lifeline Terminal – FELT” is what led him to the success.

In his introduction, Advay proved how he was motivated all along to grow with the future innovation and challenged himself with difficult competitions, summits, projects. Honored with the winning trophy of ISRO on GAGAN-IRNSS User Meet Student Competition, the pathfinder entered Google Science Fair with his project to save fishermen from getting harassed. Explaining his motives, Advay was vitalized by the frequent news about the fishermen getting arrested by Sri Lankan Navy for unintentionally crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line. This takes days, sometimes months for them to get back to their home and business, obviously after having Indian govt. involved.


Advay offered a robust system with a software that will fetch the exact location using the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) data (an ISRO project), refers value added service to give histories regarding previous issues and couples an emergency alarm. The groundwork will depend on Global Positioning Services (GPS) and later a more user friendly map could be fetched using Standard Positioning Services (SPS). Going further, Advay’s enhanced Android based application can draw a polygonal map to detect the actual boundary and save fisherman from getting trapped.

The proposed system also bears a path tracking tool which saves the already covered path and could be used for future reference. Plus, there are more myths than real incidents. To reduce the unnecessary fear of being a hostage, Advay came up with a way of storing history on similar incidents which might be further extracted for other purposes.

Ultimately Advay tested the prototype in different areas to verify the offerings which checked each one point in different timings. In future, he would like to feed the application in a smart navigation device which will have these several options to explore. Also, the handheld system will have an offline option for no internet zone. All together it’s a packed approach that promises to simplify many complicated zones for our humble fisherman.

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