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When 20-year-old Andhra Pradesh BTech student, Lingampalli Himaja, visited a school for visually impaired students through her college, one girl caught her attention. The student was using a traditional slate and pin to write Braille. She was pressing the pin hard enough that her fingertip had become hardened from repeatedly punching letters into paper.
Himaja, the BTech student at Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women, Andhra Pradesh, also noticed another challenge. Students had to understand the mirrored orientation of Braille while writing so that the letters could be read correctly once the paper was turned over.
"That experience stayed with me," Himaja said while speaking to India Today Digital. Instead of simply seeing a problem, Himaja began thinking about how engineering could make the process easier.
Her first attempt was a Braille printer with six push buttons. Users could manually provide Braille input, which the machine would convert into dots and punch onto paper in reverse. It proved that the basic idea could work.
Then came a question from the same girl who had inspired the project.
"The girl I showed my first prototype to asked me - Akka, why should we need to even give pressure on the buttons? We can simply speak it, right? That was a very important feedback for me," the national winner said to India Today Digital.
She added that this one question had changed her project, "It completely changed my idea, and I came back and redesigned it by integrating voice. That is where RUDHRA evolved."
She returned to college and redesigned the system around voice input. The result was RUDHRA, a voice-enabled Braille printing system that converts spoken words into embossed Braille.
The system is integrated with Alexa. A user can give a voice command to open RUDHRA and then speak whatever they want to print.
Alexa converts the speech into text, while a Raspberry Pi processes the text and converts it into the corresponding Braille pattern. The machine then punches the pattern onto paper in reverse, so it appears in the correct orientation when the paper is turned over.
In simple terms, the process is: voice text Braille pattern physical Braille on paper.
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Getting those dots right was not easy. Himaja says accuracy was one of the biggest technical challenges, particularly in maintaining precise distances between Braille characters. Her prototypes went through changes involving different solenoid arrangements and mathematical calculations to ensure that the dots were punched accurately enough to be read through touch.
But the project was shaped as much by conversations with students as by engineering.
During her visit, another student told Himaja about the difficulty of identifying different rupee notes while making payments. The experience made her realise that visually impaired students did not simply need sympathy.
โThey have their own special abilities, and what they need is not sympathy but solutions that make everyday tasks easier for them,โ she said.
That became an important part of how she viewed RUDHRA.
Himaja, 20, is pursuing BTech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Outside academics, she is a Kuchipudi dancer and guitarist and has been involved in student leadership, project coordination and technical initiatives.
RUDHRA has now earned her the 2026 India National Winner title at the James Dyson Award, an international student design competition run by the James Dyson Foundation. She will receive approximately 6 lakh and represent India in the international round, where Sir James Dyson will select the final winners.
Himaja says she did not even know about the award when she applied.
She had just finished an exam when she noticed missed calls from the James Dyson Award. After calling back, her mother told her that she had won.
โI was completely blank. I was not even able to realise that I had won,โ she recalled.
For Himaja, however, the award is less an endpoint than another opportunity to develop RUDHRA.
The current prototype costs around 1.5 lakh, but she estimates that a redesigned version could eventually cost around 50,000 to 60,000. She also wants to make it smaller and lighter by changing the way the paper moves through the machine.
Her larger ambition is simple: to make RUDHRA a personal Braille printer that students can use at school or at home without depending on someone else.
When asked what impact the Braille printer will have on a visually impaired student, Himaja said, "I was thinking about how this can be helpful for students in their examinations and how they can print their own books, notes and other materials."
"My thought was to take it into organisations so that it can be helpful for students during examinations and for printing their own books and notes," she added.
"It can be kept in the classroom like a personal computer or as a personal printer. It doesn't need to be carried daily and can be kept in one place. It can also be made more compact, like regular printers, to help students," she told India Today Digital.
The project has also changed what engineering means to her.
"I want it to help students with their studies, especially during examinations, and help them print their own books and notes. My main thought is to make something that can be useful for students and reduce the physical effort required to write Braille," she further added.
Earlier, Himaja saw engineering largely through academics, grades and placements. RUDHRA made her look beyond that.
โIt is about taking the knowledge we learn and using it to solve problems that actually affect people's lives,โ she said.
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