Filtering the air with wool, cotton and patience

Tanjot Singh’s air-filtration project — built on compressed wool felt and electrostatic cotton instead of disposable synthetic filters — was felicitated at the national INSPIRE-MANAK exhibition, then won an independent young-innovators award.

By The Young Achievers2 min readSources checked 23 October 2026

Tanjot Singh · No age published by any official or independent source

Filed under: Innovation · Delhi · Bio-based air filtration

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The achievement

Among the 62 students felicitated at the 12th National Level Exhibition and Project Competition of the INSPIRE Awards–MANAK in New Delhi in October 2026 was Tanjot Singh, a student of Delhi Public School, R. K.

Puram, where he is in the IB DP-1 class. His project asks a practical question: can the synthetic HEPA filter media inside air purifiers — effective, but thrown away every few months — be replaced with bio-based materials?

The journey and the idea

His school records the route. The work began in 2024, while he was at Lilavati Vidya Mandir School, with an INSPIRE Award of ₹10,000; he qualified through the State Level Exhibition in December 2025, received mentorship at IIT Delhi in February 2026, and exhibited at Bharat Mandapam from 12 to 14 October 2026.

The system is developed through PraaNavya, the venture he founded: his school describes a prototype built on compressed wool felt and electrostatic cotton, put through internal particulate-removal experiments and comparative pressure-drop testing against a HEPA filter benchmark. In January 2026 the same work was declared the overall winner of the Young Innovators Awards at the InnoHEALTH conference, where the jury praised the clarity of his problem statement and the idea’s potential to scale.

✳ A spark to explore

A purifier filter has to be thrown away every few months — if the clean air comes with a growing pile of waste, what would you build instead? That is a question from us, not part of his record.