By Ishaani Budhraja
At 6:30 AM in Bangkok, while most teenagers are hitting snooze, Ritika Yamdagni logs two hours of studies before her classes even start.
It sounds like a grueling lifestyle, but Ritika isn't a textbook robot. Her drive is fueled by an inspiring habit of curiosity. As a senior navigating the final stretch of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program, “There are definitely days where my calendar looks kind of ridiculous,” she grins.
“What I’ve really learned is that I can’t treat everything with urgency. I’ve had to learn to prioritise. School can be so focused on grades and deadlines,” she says. “But working on real-world projects keeps me grounded. Suddenly, the physics and chemistry I’m studying aren't just for a report card, I can see how they’re actually going to be useful out in the real world.”
Ritika describes herself simply: “A high school student in Bangkok who gets very curious about problems and has the tendency to build things to try to solve them.”
Growing up half-Indian and half-Singaporean in Thailand, she was raised at a rich cross-section of cultures and perspectives. Her exposure to global issues started early at the family dinner table, driven by her father, who works in the renewable energy sector.
“My dad would always talk to me about the largest problems the world is facing today,” Ritika recalls. “Just seeing the way he approaches tackling issues and creating community outreach really inspires me.”
Her inclination toward hands-on problem solving showed up back in Year 8, when her mother complained that the vegetables growing on their apartment balcony weren't doing well. A young Ritika created a custom Arduino-based aerobic bioreactor that monitored and controlled environmental conditions for composting.
Her transition into large-scale agricultural tech began with Root & Renew, an initiative inspired by French agronomist Benoît Deloffre, focused on bringing regenerative agricultural practices to smallholder farmers in Thailand's Kamphaeng Phet region.
It was there that Ritika had a massive reality check. “I had come up with a lot of ideas that, in theory, sounded great,” she explains. “But the more I started speaking to the farmers, I realised those ideas assumed they had the resources to experiment, which just wasn't realistic.”
“That experience really changed the way I viewed science. I began questioning how I can feasibly make this work. That’s what pushed forward the prototyping, engineering, and development of SeedShift.”
In Southeast Asia, nearly 80 percent of the food supply is produced by smallholder family farms. Yet, the average age of these farmers is pushing 60, and traditional hand-planting is physically punishing.
When seeds are planted at inconsistent depths or uneven intervals, farmers lose both precious seeds and crop yield. Ritika developed SeedShift to fix that initial, critical step.
In simple terms, SeedShift is a low-cost, mechanical precision seeder. As it moves through a field, it opens the soil, places seeds at controlled spacing and depth, conditions the soil, and covers it up, all in one single pass.
Turning an idea on paper into a functional machine took two full years of field testing and iteration, running from mid-2024 to 2026. Naturally, building hardware meant getting comfortable with failure.
“One field test that really stayed with me was when we were testing SeedShift with corn,” Ritika shares. “We marked a short row, pushed the seeder through, and expected roughly one or two seeds to drop per interval. But when we dug the soil back up, we saw sections with four or five seeds jammed on top of each other, followed by stretches with nothing at all.”
“My first assumption was that the seed plate was wrong, so I went straight to changing hole sizes and adjusting the brush singulation system. But when I tested it again, the exact same problem kept happening.”
It was only after stepping back that she spotted the true culprit. “I realised the issue was the ground wheel connected to the metering system. It was slipping every time it hit softer patches of soil, losing traction, and then suddenly advancing and dumping a bunch of seeds at once.”
That lesson reshaped her entire approach to engineering and life: “When something goes wrong, the most obvious explanation isn't always straightforward. Now, whatever the issue may be, I try to take a step back and look at the whole system before jumping to conclusions.”
To date, Ritika has successfully raised over THB 3 million in grants to fund her research, field trials, and hardware development, a remarkable validation of her vision before even finishing high school.
To take the technology further, Ritika collaborated with researchers and professors at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) to develop SeedShift 2.0, incorporating electric drives and soil-monitoring sensors.
Walking into high-level meetings as a high school student, often the youngest person in the room and the only young woman, could easily intimidate anyone.
Ritika remembers her very first pitch back in mid-2025 with a US-based company, before her prototype was even finished. “It was definitely nerve-wracking,” she admits.
“There were a lot of questions they asked that I didn't have answers for. But that was crucial for me to do more research and better understand how to move forward.”
Over time, she built a network of global advisors and mentors across engineering, biotechnology, business, and agriculture, through a mix of outreach, programs, introductions, and project work.
Her advice to other young girls entering male-dominated STEM fields is equally direct: “Do not wait until you feel 'qualified' enough to start building, otherwise you're never going to start. You probably won't feel ready the first time you walk into a workshop, lab, or conference room. That’s completely fine. Pick up the tool, ask the question you think sounds stupid, and start.”
Ritika’s engineering mindset extends far beyond agriculture. Driven by a desire to make health navigation simpler, she developed Blossom PCOS, a companion app designed to help young women manage Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS).
“PCOS isn't the kind of condition where you can simply go to the doctor, take a pill, and expect it to disappear,” she explains. “Managing it involves tracking several factors over months. For someone newly diagnosed, it’s overwhelming.”
To ensure users felt entirely safe, Ritika made a firm engineering decision: Blossom PCOS operates with 100 percent local, on-device data storage, keeping user information off external cloud servers.
“We’re asking users to log very personal details that many women don't even feel comfortable sharing with friends or family,” she stresses. “Keeping everything local created technical limitations for me as a developer, but that trade-off was non-negotiable.”
“Stigma already stops women from seeking help. If they have to worry about who has access to their health data on top of that, it creates another massive barrier.”
As she prepares for university, Ritika’s vision for SeedShift is expanding toward an integrated, AI-driven precision agricultural network connecting soil sensors with drip irrigation, drone data, and smallholder farmers' mobile phones.
At seventeen, Ritika Yamdagni represents a new generation of engineers: grounded, empathetic, and relentlessly practical.
“Invention only matters if you can manufacture it, finance it, and make it affordable for the people who actually need it,” she reflects.
It’s a powerful ethos from a young innovator who proves that you don't need to wait for a diploma to start changing the world, you just need enough courage to pick up the tools.