🇮🇳 Kanishk Jain

The International Physics Olympiad has run annually since 1967 and is the senior competition of its kind in the physical sciences. Its format is deliberately punishing. Contestants sit two separate five-hour examinations on different days: a theoretical paper built from three long, multi-part problems, and an experimental paper conducted at a laboratory bench with apparatus the student has never seen before. The theory questions typically draw on mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, optics, relativity and quantum physics, and they are not exercises in recall. Each one is a research problem compressed into a form a secondary-school student can attack in ninety minutes, with the physical setup described from first principles and no formula sheet worth leaning on.

The experimental paper is what separates olympiad physics from examination physics. A contestant is given equipment, a phenomenon and a target quantity, and must design the measurement, execute it, propagate the uncertainties honestly and present the analysis — all in a language that is, for most of the field, not their own. Marks are lost for a beautiful measurement with an unstated error term as readily as for an arithmetic slip. Coordinators from the host country grade every script alongside the leader and deputy leader of the contestant's own delegation, and disagreements are argued out line by line before a mark is agreed.

The 56th edition was held in Bucaramanga, in the Colombian department of Santander. The field numbered 381 students from 87 countries. India finished joint first in the world, sharing the top rank with China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan, after all five of its students returned gold medals. Kanishk Jain was one of them. The other four were Riddhesh Anant Bendale of Indore, Rishit Garg of Dwarka in New Delhi, Shresth Suraiya of Mumbai and Svarit Joshi of Ahmedabad — five cities, five states, one result.

Reaching the team at all is the longer contest. India's olympiad pipeline is 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 link to the international olympiad community, and it selects through a multi-stage process: a national screening examination taken by tens of thousands of students, a second national paper, and then an orientation and selection camp at which a shortlist is trained intensively and cut down to the five who travel. The camps are taught by university physicists and former olympians, and the laboratory training is the part that shows up in the medal table.

The Indian delegation in Colombia was led by Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr. Leena Joshi of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, with Prof. Ananda Dasgupta of IISER Kolkata and Ms. Nisha Kelkar of Gogate-Joglekar College, Ratnagiri, serving as scientific observers. Leaders and observers are not spectators at an olympiad: they translate the papers into the national language overnight, then defend their students' scripts point by point during coordination. A delegation that sweeps gold has usually been well argued for as well as well taught.

The result was announced in India on 12 July 2026 by the Department of Atomic Energy, which noted that every Indian participant over the previous decade had finished on the podium. That consistency is the real story behind an individual medal. A single gold can be a talented year; ten years without a contestant falling off the podium is a system. Kanishk Jain's medal belongs to a cohort that has made the Indian physics team one of the small handful expected, every summer, to finish in the leading group — and in 2026 that group had no clear leader at all, because six countries finished level at the top.