Andhra student wins India’s James Dyson Award for a voice-to-Braille printer

Lingampalli Himaja, a 20-year-old electrical and electronics engineering student at Shri Vishnu Engineering College for Women in Andhra Pradesh, has won the 2026 India national title of the James Dyson Award for RUDHRA, a printer that turns spoken words into embossed Braille. The prize is about £5,000, or ₹6 lakh. She will represent India in the international round, where James Dyson selects the final winners. The award is run by the James Dyson Foundation and is open to students in 30 countries.

Himaja is from Chintalapudi in Eluru district. The project started on a college visit to a school for visually impaired children. Students were writing on traditional slates with pins, pressing hard enough to punch dots through paper and then flipping the sheet to read the characters in reverse. The work hurt their fingers. After an early prototype, one student asked why she should type when she could speak. Himaja has quoted that question as the turn that made RUDHRA a voice system rather than only a mechanical punch.

The current build uses Amazon Alexa for speech-to-text and a Raspberry Pi to map the text onto Braille patterns. A user can open the system by voice, dictate, edit and print. The printer lays down the dots so they can be read on the face of the page, which removes the reverse-and-flip step of the slate. Himaja has described the aim as letting a person produce a Braille document without a sighted intermediary and without the physical strain of a hand frame.

She said she did not know about the award when she applied. She finished an exam, saw missed calls from the organisers and learned she had won. Outside the lab she trains in Kuchipudi and plays guitar. Those details are colour. The engineering claim is narrower: a low-cost stack, a voice front end, and an embosser that writes readable Braille on the first pass.

Whether RUDHRA becomes a product depends on work the prize money is meant to buy. Speech recognition in Indian languages, paper handling, dot height that survives handling, repair in a school that has no electronics technician, and a price a state disability department will pay. Alexa as a front end also ties the device to a commercial cloud unless she replaces that layer. Those are ordinary prototype problems. The award does not solve them. It buys time and introductions.

India has a large population of people who need Braille and a thin supply of working embossers. Most school production still runs through centralised presses or hand frames. A voice-driven printer that a teacher or a student can run in a classroom would close a specific gap if it survives humidity, power cuts and languages beyond English. Himaja now has a national title and a ticket to the international judging. The useful test is whether a second school can print a full page, in the language the children use, without her standing next to the machine.