11-year-old Mumbai girl creates app to ‘Nudge’ people into taking action against Climate Change

Unchecked urban development, increased dependency on fossil fuels and the rampant use of plastic are some of the key reasons behind the massive degradation of our environment. It is high time that we take responsibility for our planet and do our best to try and save it.

To encourage people to do their bit towards saving the environment, 11-year-old Mumbai girl Kaavya Majumder has created an app called ‘Nudge’ which encourages people to save the planet by participating in simple environmental challenges. The purpose of the app is to reinforce positive behaviours and help people cultivate environmentally healthy habits.

‘Nudge’ is a smart app based on nudge theory in behavioral economics, which proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behavior and decision-making of individuals.

All daily challenges in this app are carefully chosen to help users save natural resources; promote reuse and recycling of materials as well as healthy living and manage food waste. Moreover, each challenge includes a link that can help users explore further about that particular topic. Users also earn points and get to compare their results with other players using the leaderboard feature of the app.

Speaking about the inspiration behind the app, Kaavya, who is a student of Class VI at Cathedral and John Connon school, said, “While climate change is a complex problem in need of unified global response, every individual effort towards building a safer future is valuable. It is our need and greed which has spawned this climate crisis, and I firmly believe that if we all decide to live sustainably, we will be able to save precious resources. A small step taken daily by each one of us will cumulatively start a movement. Nudge is an app which can help start a social campaign towards this goal.”

Creating an app is not an easy task. However, Kaavya was quite perseverant in her approach while developing Nudge, she said, “There were times when things didn’t turn out the way I would have wanted them to. For example, I faced problems while working with my database, which often affected how my leaderboard worked. Sometimes my code would not be saved on the platform I was using to build the app. So when everything finally worked out, it was a huge relief and a joyous moment for me!”

Deepa Raj, Kaavya’s mentor at WhiteHat Jr who guided her with the project said, “Kaavya is an extremely intelligent and compassionate girl.  Her passion for saving the earth is apparent from the kind of hard work she has put in creating the Nudge app. It is a matter of great pride for us to see Kaavya, using the skills she has learnt, has created an app that can help people learn more about how they can contribute towards saving the environment. I hope others are inspired by Kaavya’s app and join her in this endeavor.” TNS