🇮🇳 Shresth Suraiya

The olympiad has been held every year since 1967, and its examination is unusually honest about what it is testing. Two papers, five hours each, on separate days. The theoretical paper poses three long problems built from the standard undergraduate-adjacent core of physics but solvable with school mathematics. The experimental paper hands a student unfamiliar apparatus and a quantity to determine. Between them they cover the two things a working physicist actually does: construct a model, and get nature to give up a number with a defensible uncertainty attached.

Preparation for the theoretical paper is largely a matter of problem volume — a strong contestant has worked through several thousand problems before arriving. The experimental paper resists that approach. There is no bank of past apparatus to memorise, so training has to build a general laboratory instinct: how to spot the dominant source of error early, when to take more repeats rather than more points, how to write an analysis that a grader from another country can follow without asking a question. Delegations with laboratory-heavy camps consistently outperform those without.

Bucaramanga hosted the 2026 edition in the Colombian department of Santander. The field of 381 students represented 87 countries, and the top of the table was unusually crowded: India, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan all finished joint first. India's contribution was five golds from five students — Suraiya alongside Kanishk Jain of Pune, Riddhesh Anant Bendale of Indore, Rishit Garg of Dwarka in New Delhi and Svarit Joshi of Ahmedabad.

Those five were chosen by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a national centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research operating as an aided institution under the Department of Atomic Energy. HBCSE runs India's national olympiad programme and serves as the country's link to the international olympiad community. Its selection ladder starts with a national screening examination open to school students across the country, continues through a substantially harder national paper, and ends at an orientation-cum-selection camp where the shortlist is trained and then cut to the travelling five.

The delegation to Colombia was led by Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr. Leena Joshi of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Prof. Ananda Dasgupta of IISER Kolkata and Ms. Nisha Kelkar of Gogate-Joglekar College, Ratnagiri, accompanied the team as scientific observers. Their work at the competition is mostly invisible from outside: overnight translation of the papers, then coordination sessions in which every script is read against the official marking scheme with the host graders, and every point of partial credit argued.

India's Department of Atomic Energy announced the result on 12 July 2026. Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya, the centre director at HBCSE, made the point that these outcomes are no longer surprising precisely because they were built slowly — decades of mentoring, sustained funding and a mentor pool that keeps returning. Every Indian participant in the previous ten years had finished on the podium. Shresth Suraiya's gold sits inside that record, earned the only way the competition allows: alone, at a desk and then at a bench, for ten hours.