🇮🇳 Svarit Joshi

First held in 1967, the International Physics Olympiad is the pre-eminent physics competition for pre-university students. Its examination has two halves, sat on separate days and each lasting five hours. The theoretical paper is three extended problems; the experimental paper is a laboratory investigation with unfamiliar apparatus. Together they cover mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, optics, relativity and quantum physics, but only in the sense that a research paper covers a syllabus. What is really being tested is whether a student can reason about a system nobody has taught them.

Grading is meticulous and adversarial in a productive way. Every script is read by coordinators from the host country and then re-read alongside the leader and deputy leader of the student's own delegation. Partial credit is negotiated point by point against a published marking scheme. A correct final answer with a broken chain of reasoning does not score full marks, and a wrong answer reached by sound physics with one arithmetic slip usually does better than contestants expect. The system rewards clarity of exposition as much as speed.

The 2026 competition brought 381 students from 87 countries to Bucaramanga, in Colombia's Santander department. Six countries finished level at the top of the table: India, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan. India's five students all won gold — Joshi together with Kanishk Jain of Pune, Riddhesh Anant Bendale of Indore, Rishit Garg of Dwarka in New Delhi and Shresth Suraiya of Mumbai. Five cities, five states, one medal colour.

The route to that team runs through the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai, a national centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and an aided institution under the Department of Atomic Energy. HBCSE identifies, mentors and trains India's olympiad contestants through a rigorous multi-stage process — a national screening examination, a national olympiad paper, and an orientation-cum-selection camp that combines intensive theory with laboratory work before the final cut to five. The camps draw on a mentor pool of university physicists and former olympians who return year after year.

In Colombia, Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr. Leena Joshi of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, led the delegation, with Prof. Ananda Dasgupta of IISER Kolkata and Ms. Nisha Kelkar of Gogate-Joglekar College, Ratnagiri, as scientific observers. The Department of Atomic Energy publicly credited them alongside the students when the result was announced, which is a fair reflection of how olympiad results are produced: the marks are the student's, but the defence of those marks is a team effort.

The announcement came on 12 July 2026. It noted that every Indian participant over the preceding decade had finished on the podium, and quoted HBCSE's centre director, Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya, to the effect that this reliability was the product of patient growth and mentoring over many decades rather than a sudden surge of talent. Svarit Joshi's gold is one data point in that series — and, in a year when six countries could not be separated at the top, an indispensable one.