🇮🇳 Rishit Garg

The competition dates to 1967 and has settled into a format that has resisted modernisation for good reason. Contestants face a five-hour theoretical paper of three multi-part problems and, on a separate day, a five-hour experimental paper. The theory is drawn from the standard pillars — mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and statistical physics, optics, relativity, and quantum and modern physics — but the problems are constructed rather than remembered. A typical question introduces an unfamiliar physical system in its own terms and asks the student to model it, which is closer to research practice than to schooling.

The experimental paper is the discriminator. Each contestant receives apparatus, a target quantity and no procedure. They must design the measurement, take it cleanly, propagate uncertainties and defend the final number. Because the grading rewards method over outcome, a student who cannot explain the error bars will lose more marks than one whose central value drifts. Delegations that train only on theory reliably lose ground on day two, and the medal table each year reflects that division sharply.

The 56th edition took place in Bucaramanga, the capital of Colombia's Santander department, with 381 students from 87 countries in the hall. India finished joint first, level with China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan. Garg's gold was one of five Indian golds; the others went to Kanishk Jain of Pune, Riddhesh Anant Bendale of Indore, Shresth Suraiya of Mumbai and Svarit Joshi of Ahmedabad.

India's team comes out of a national programme run by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a national centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and an aided institution under the Department of Atomic Energy. HBCSE is the country's nodal centre for the olympiad movement, and its selection runs from a mass national screening examination through a second, much harder national paper to a residential orientation-cum-selection camp. The camp trains theory and laboratory technique together, then narrows the shortlist to the five students who travel. Everything visible at the international event is downstream of that camp.

In Colombia the delegation was led by Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr. Leena Joshi of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, with scientific observers Prof. Ananda Dasgupta of IISER Kolkata and Ms. Nisha Kelkar of Gogate-Joglekar College, Ratnagiri. Leaders translate the papers overnight into the delegation's language and then defend each script during coordination with the host graders — a process in which partial credit is negotiated in detail and where a well-prepared delegation recovers marks that a passive one leaves on the table.

The Department of Atomic Energy announced the sweep on 12 July 2026, adding that every Indian participant across the previous decade had finished on the podium. Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya, HBCSE's centre director, attributed the now-routine results to decades of patient mentoring and sustained institutional support rather than to any single cohort's brilliance. Read that way, Rishit Garg's gold is both an individual achievement — ten hours of examination survived at the highest level — and evidence that a training system built over decades is still working exactly as designed.