11-year-old Becomes Youngest Indian to Deliver TEDx Talk, Spoke About Soil Conservation

Delhi-based, 11-year-old, Oviya Singh has become one of the youngest Indians to give a TEDx Talk. She delivered her TEDx session at Jamia Millia Islamia, recently. She spoke about soil conservation and highlighted alarming facts related to the global deterioration in the quality of agricultural soil.

“When I got the opportunity to deliver a TEDx Talk through PlanetSpark, I knew that the subject of my talk was going to be “Soil Conservation,” she said. She spoke about food wastage and increasing population are some of the factors aggravating this potential crisis, the most alarming one is “agricultural soil degradation”, which is impacting food cultivation at a global scale.

Oviya is a student at the communication skills learning platform, PlanetSpark, who has excelled in the art of public speaking. She holds various public speaking-related accolades to her name that demonstrate her prowess in the skill.

She is a two-time champion at the ‘Youth Spoken Fest’; ‘Podcast Challenge (2021)’; the ‘National Speech and Debate Tournament’; and the Global Public Speaking Champion (2022) by PlanetSpark. She is also the winner in the ‘Extempore Competition at the IDIA International Fiesta 2021’.

Oviya has also co-authored two published books. Her first book ‘Living Life of Inspiration’ is a collection of motivational and life stories of inspiring people. The second one is titled ‘Rise – Poems Of Heat, Resilience, And Light’ and consists of inspirational and motivational poems. The child prodigy is also a part of PlanetSpark’s podcasting club, wherein, she has her own podcast titled “Go Out and Contour the World”.

During her TEDx Talk, she urged children, adults, industrialists, public figures and governments to do their bits to restore the organic content in the soil. Oviya stated, “We will either be remembered as the generation that let the planet die or as the generation that even god looks up to and says “damn, these guys are competition.”

During her talk, Oviya emphasised the significance of organic soil content that has degraded to a frightening level of 0.5 per cent. She highlighted that agricultural soil requires a minimum of 4-6 per cent of organic content to be cultivable, and the reduction in the same has already degenerated the cultivation capability of 52 per cent of the global agricultural land.

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