The road to this honour began in 1956. Shiv Mandlik’s great-grandfather, Laxman bhai, climbed scaffolding to change a streetlight. There was no harness. He fell, and he never came home. Decades later, on a site, Shiv Mandlik watched another worker fall from height in almost exactly the same way. “In seventy years the buildings kept getting taller, and the worker’s protection stayed exactly where it was,” he says.
In June 2021, alongside school, Shiv Mandlik founded Project Wave. Today it is India’s largest youth-led nonprofit for construction workers, endorsed by the Government of India and UN-affiliated members, with 150 volunteers across six cities and three countries, more than 1,05,000 workers reached and ₹18 lakh raised through public contributions.
Its first lesson was a failure. Workers handed safety kits often left them unworn; use stood at 12%. Shiv Mandlik changed the method instead, taking safety workshops and street plays onto live sites. Across 13,000 kits, use rose to 75%. “Handing out a kit is easy. Getting it worn is the real work,” he says. Project Wave then went beyond helmets: 4,900 metal-sheet shelters, 500 informal workers registered on e-Shram, opening their access to state insurance and welfare, and more than 25,000 sanitary pads for women on sites, lifting hygiene adoption from 9% to 86%.
The most personal answer was engineering. If height killed Laxman bhai, the climb itself had to go. Shiv Mandlik invented the Modular Arm Pole (MAP), an aluminium-alloy and fibre-reinforced polymer light pole operated entirely from the ground. Turn a handle at the base and the fixture comes down, held by an auto-locking brake. The worker does not go up. The pole comes down. Patented in his name and commercialised as Modulite, MAP stands on more than 120 live construction sites, has generated ₹38 lakh in sales and counts multinational corporate giants among its clients.
His second invention, an ultra-lightweight metamaterial base frame optimised with the NSGA-II genetic algorithm, reaches a safety factor of 18.9 and is backed by a ₹1 crore lease agreement. Together, the two won Shiv Mandlik the national gold medal at the Indian National Science and Engineering Fair (INSEF), ahead of more than 2,200 competitors, and a place in Team India’s delegation to the Genius Olympiad, as one of only three teams selected from across the country.
Where climbing cannot be avoided, there is Samrakshak, the fall-detection app Shiv Mandlik co-founded. When a phone senses a suspected fall, a 60-second countdown begins; if the worker does not respond, the site manager receives an emergency alert with their location. It has crossed 5,000 downloads.
On policy, Project Wave gathered more than 8,000 signatures for stronger worker-safety policy, but Shiv Mandlik saw that the rules already existed; enforcement was what failed. In October 2026 he convened and chaired the closed-door Roundtable on Fatal Falls in India’s Construction Sector, seating senior officials, an IPS officer, a minister, a UN-affiliated member, an ICMR-NIOH official and the builders who run live sites at one table, around one question: why do workers keep dying from preventable falls when safety rules already exist? He is authoring the white paper that follows, proposing reforms to fall-protection standards, site audits, contractor accountability, reporting systems and emergency protocols.
Shiv Mandlik was also one of just 32 students selected from across India for RSI-India 2026, a fully funded six-week research residency at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, modelled on the Research Science Institute at MIT and run with the US-based Center for Excellence in Education. At IISc’s Centre for Ecological Sciences, he researched how body size governs the thermal limits of bees. His research has been published by Springer and Elsevier.
“A blueprint accounts for every bag of cement and every steel bar, but not for a worker’s life,” says Shiv Mandlik. “I could not have saved my great-grandfather. But the man about to climb today should get home this evening. The day no worker dies from a fall, Project Wave will no longer be needed. That is the day I am working towards.”
Laxman bhai never had a harness. On every site where the light pole now comes down to the worker, the story that began in 1956 is being reversed. Until now, every building has stood on a sacrifice. Shiv Mandlik’s stubborn aim is that the next one will not.
