🇮🇳 Riddhesh Anant Bendale

Founded in 1967, the International Physics Olympiad is the oldest of the international science olympiads after mathematics, and its examination has kept the same shape for decades. Day one is theory: three extended problems, five hours, no formula sheet that would help. Day two is experiment: five hours at a bench, with apparatus the contestant has never handled, a phenomenon to characterise and a number to extract. The syllabus is nominally secondary-school physics. The difficulty lies in what the examiners do with it — problems are often built from a published research result, stripped back until the physics can be reached without university mathematics but not without genuine insight.

The experimental paper is the harder half for most delegations, and it is where preparation shows. A student must decide what to measure before measuring it, keep a legible record while the clock runs, and carry uncertainties through every step to a final figure with an honest error bound. Marks are awarded for the reasoning, not the answer. A contestant who reports the right value with an unjustified uncertainty scores less than one who reports a slightly worse value and shows exactly how confident the apparatus allows them to be.

Bucaramanga, in the Colombian department of Santander, hosted the 56th edition. The field was 381 students from 87 countries — one of the larger gatherings in the competition's history. India finished joint first in the world alongside China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan. Bendale's gold was one of five: his teammates Kanishk Jain of Pune, Rishit Garg of Dwarka in New Delhi, Shresth Suraiya of Mumbai and Svarit Joshi of Ahmedabad all reached the same threshold.

The Indian team is assembled by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a national centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research operating under the Department of Atomic Energy. HBCSE runs the national olympiad programme end to end: a screening examination sat across the country, a harder national paper, and then a residential orientation and selection camp where a shortlist is trained on theory and laboratory work before being cut to five. The camp is the decisive filter — it is the only stage at which experimental competence can be measured properly, and it is the reason Indian delegations rarely lose ground on day two.

Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr. Leena Joshi of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, led the delegation in Colombia; Prof. Ananda Dasgupta of IISER Kolkata and Ms. Nisha Kelkar of Gogate-Joglekar College, Ratnagiri, served as scientific observers. During the coordination sessions that follow each paper, leaders sit with the host country's graders and argue their students' scripts mark by mark. A sweep like India's is a sign both of well-taught students and of a delegation that made every defensible point count.

The Department of Atomic Energy announced the result on 12 July 2026 and noted a longer pattern behind it: every Indian participant in the previous decade had finished on the podium. For a country sending five students a year into a field of several hundred, that is a striking degree of reliability, and it reframes what an individual medal means. Riddhesh Anant Bendale did not win in isolation; he won inside a programme that has made this outcome close to expected, and in a year when six national teams finished level at the very top of the table.