By IANS
NEW DELHI: Bhumi Pednekar has dedicated herself to raising awareness about Climate Change and the need for sustainable living. In an ongoing Instagram interview series, the actress engages with young climate warriors, 11-year-old Kaavya Majumder is one of them.
Bhumi spoke to Kaavya who has created an interesting app called ‘Nudge’ which encourages people to save the planet by participating to live more sustainably. The app features carefully chosen challenges to motivate users to save energy and water, to promote reuse and recycling and healthy living, and to manage food waste and garbage.
Hearing Kaavya speak about how technology can be used to address Climate Change left Bhumi in awe of the little child genius. She said to Kaavya, “You have really inspired me today. When I speak to young climate warriors like you, I feel like there is still a lot of hope. This is a tough journey, a long journey but we are on the right path. I really hope that our conversation inspires a lot more young talent to come forward and contribute to the cause.”
Majumder, is part of a project at WhiteHat Jr, where she is learning to code, and developed ‘Nudge’. The app is based on nudge theory in behavioral economics, which leverages 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.
Bhumi believes the journey towards saving the environment is a tough and a long one; and Kaavya’s journey has just begun. Speaking about what prompted her journey into creating awareness about climate change by making such an app, Kaavya said, “Climate change is a problem that needs no introduction for most of us nowadays because I think we can see its impact in our daily lives. From people dying in deadly heat waves in Canada to severe floods in Europe that are destroying livelihoods, to even the largest wildfire in the history of the USA. All of these events left a great impact on me. Amongst all these scenes of destruction and suffering, what really gave me hope was all the kinds of innovations happening in India and all over the world that were helping tackle the problems like global warming and climate change. These really made me believe in the power of technology to change our lives and change our planet and they inspired me to use technology to empower common people to do their bit for climate change.”
Thoroughly moved by Kaavya’s plans for the future and her passion for saving the environment, Bhumi also made an appeal to people to join her in creating awareness about Climate Change by saying, “Every small little action of what we do is going to have a consequence and living a sustainable life is exactly that: being aware of the damage that your actions are going to cause and then taking the higher road. I hope more young people get inspired by the work being done by young climate warriors like Kaavya and do whatever they can to help save our planet.”
