🇮🇳 Rishi Shiv Prasanna

The award, and what it was for

The Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar is conferred by the government of India on children for achievement in fields including innovation, scholarship, sport, art and bravery. Recipients are announced in January and honoured in Delhi.

Rishi's citation rested on software. He had written Android applications, among them an IQ test app and CHB, short for COVID Help for Bangaloreans, built during the pandemic to help people in his city find information. India TV reported the award on 25 January 2023, and DNA India, WION and Interesting Engineering covered him around the same period.

The IQ claim, handled carefully

Indian outlets report that he has an IQ of 180 and became a member of Mensa at four. Those figures come from press reports, and geniuses.club states them as reported rather than as measured facts.

The headlines went further, framing him as having an IQ higher than Albert Einstein's. That comparison is journalistic shorthand rather than a measurement: there is no directly comparable score for Einstein. WION at least put its version of the headline as a question, which is more than most of the coverage did.

The apps and the books

The work itself is more interesting than the score. CHB was written in response to a specific local problem during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bengaluru, which is a different proposition from a tutorial exercise: it had users, a purpose and a moment.

He has also written books, including titles reported as Learn Vitamins with Harry Potter and Elements of Earth, which suggest a child interested in explaining things as much as building them. The pairing, software plus explanatory writing, is the most consistent thing in his record.

CHB belonged to a category of small, local, volunteer software that proliferated across India in 2020 and 2021, when information about hospital beds, oxygen supplies and testing was scattered and changed daily. Almost all of it was written by adults.

What is documented, and what is not

The award, the applications and the books are documented across several Indian outlets. The IQ figure and the Mensa membership are reported, not verified in this record; no testing body is named and no certificate is published in the sources used here.

He is a child, and geniuses.club reports nothing about his schooling, his family circumstances or his daily life beyond what has been published. The most recent source used here dates from 2023, and nothing since is claimed.

Mensa does not publish membership lists, so a claim of that kind cannot be checked from outside without documentation from the family, and none appears in these sources.

Why the Einstein comparison keeps appearing

The formula is a fixture of coverage of gifted children in every country: a number, a famous name, and an implied league table. It travels because it needs no explanation and because it converts a complicated assessment into a single figure a reader can rank.

What it obscures is the work. An eight-year-old who shipped an application used by people in his city during a pandemic has done something specific and checkable; an eight-year-old with a reported score of 180 has been assigned a number whose provenance the reader cannot inspect. This page gives both, in that order of confidence.