An Indian boy has grabbed the world’s largest pre-college science competition in the United States in the environment engineering category of pesticides.

12th grader, Prashant Ranganathan from Jamshedpur, participated in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair along with 20 other students from all across India.

“My project will actually help farmers in biodegrading the pesticide which is plaguing the country,”Prashant said after he was declared winner in the environmental engineering category at this years’ competition.

Other than Prashant, four Indian-American received top awards in other categories. In all, 1700 students from all over the world participated in the week long event that concluded on Friday.

Prashant is a student of Carmel Junior College. His project 'Biodegradation of Chlorpyrifos’ using native bacteria’ said that farmers should not use pesticides.

Prashant bagged the award for his innovation for fighting against pesticide and getting rid of its effects through biodegradable use.

"In almost all the states, like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, Haryana and Bihar and Jharkhand, there's extensive farming.

Excessive use of pesticides affect the health and environment around them, he said.

While the top ‘Gordon E Moore Award’ of $75,000 went to 18-year-old Ivo Zell, of Germany. As he constructed a remote-control prototype of a new ”flying wing,” almost participants of the Indian delegation returned from the annual competition.

"India really boasts really extraordinary mathematics, science, physics, education," Maya Ajmera president and CEO of Society for Science and Public said.

In fact, every section the award ceremony had the budding Indian scientists on the stage.

So were the Indian American high school student, promoting one of the Intel official to say "Indians and Indian Americans rock today" as the awards ceremony concluded at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Pratik Naidu won an award in the category of computational biology an bioinformatics. Adam Nayak from Oregon won in the category earth and environmental sciences, while Karthik Yegnesh from Pennsylvania won in Mathematics and Connecticut’s Rahul Subramaniam won in the microbiology category.

As a result, Indians and Indian Americans accounted for nearly one-fifth of the top categories of the awards.

"I think that many generations of Indian scientists and engineers and computer scientists, have truly paved the way of this generation of young people doing extraordinary things," Ms Ajmera said referring to the incredible and innovative projects of Indian students who participated in this year's science competition.

A brother - sister team of Sairandi Sathyanarayanan & Sacheth Sathyanarayanan, who are from Chennai’s National Public School invented a gearbox that generates electricity when a fisherman’s boar is lying idle in the night, which according to them is enough to meet the energy needs of a fisherman's house for a day.

The brother-sister team not just received accolades from the judges, but were on the state on Friday for receiving awards in various categories.

12 grader, Shinjini Ghosh from Kolkata’s South Point High School was recognized for developing a language identification kit based on the variations in intonation using discrete markov-chain model.

Sahithi Pingali, who is from Bengaluru’s nventure Academy received awards for eveloping a new approach to monitoring lakes in developing countries in a crowdsourcing environmental science.

Mumbai’s Kunj Siddharth Dedhia, who is a student of the Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai  developed an application based on user feedback for cyclists to reduce incidence of lower back pain, while Chaitanya & Geeve George from the Little Rock Indian School in Udupi received an award for developing a smartphone aided multispectral imaging system.

11-year-old Indian-origin hacks Bluetooth using ‘raspberry-pi.’

AMandeep