From an asteroid hunter to a math wizard, 82 educators will receive national teacher awards
Asteroid Hunter. Math wizard. A pioneer in the coal community. Special Olympics hockey coach. These are among 82 educators from across the country who will receive national teacher awards on September 5. The awards will be presented by the President of India Droupadi Murma.
The awardees include 48 school teachers, 21 university lecturers and 13 trainers from the Union Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Among faculty in higher education are proponents of Indian knowledge systems, including Vaastu Shastra, the Bhagavad Gita, and the integration of Sanskrit with AI.
One of the awardees, Anil Kaushik from Haryana, known as the ‘Math Wizard’, has built a state-of-the-art physical maths lab containing over 40 original learning models, alongside a 12-part virtual maths lab with 30 ‘Harbans puzzles’. He has co-authored textbooks on Vedic Mathematics and published 22 tutorial modules on the national DIKSHA portal.
Rajasthan’s Divyendu Sen, another laureate, is a government school teacher who connected rural classrooms to deep space science by training local students to track and hunt for asteroids. It has pioneered low-cost solutions, including an AI-powered biology education model, a virtual biology lab, and “Tree Talk,” a QR-based botanical education system.
Vartika Gulati, a Rajasthan-based teacher, is an award-winning teacher at a government girls’ primary school in Jaipur. It turns abstract concepts into everyday experiences — it teaches algebra with peanuts and geometry with kites. Her initiative ‘Prashno Se Vigyan’ (Science through Questions) replaces rote learning with student-led inquiry.
Odisha-based teacher Padaraj Nayak, based at Government High School in Alipingal, receives the award for guiding students to build more than 50 prototypes, including a low-cost automatic dishwasher that received a patent from the Indian government.
Another awardee, Jharkhand-based Munmun Bhattacherjee, working at Government High School, Barmasia, Dhanbad, Bihar, led an institutional turnaround in a vulnerable coal community. In line with the goals of NEP 2020 and NIPUN, Bharat introduced low-cost Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) tools; integrated children with special needs (CwSN); prevented early departures through home visits; and guided students to win state art awards, NEET preparation and professional independence.
Similarly, Maharashtra’s Kavita Gitte, head teacher at Sane Guruji Nivasi Vidyalaya, Beed, is being felicitated for spending nearly three decades integrating children of migrant sugarcane workers into mainstream education through initiatives like ‘Balrakshak’ and ‘Shikshan Aaplya Dari’. As the national softball and baseball coach, she also guided nearly 210 students to state and national success.
Another awardee, Gujarat-based Nitinkumar, transformed a resource-constrained tribal primary school in Vansda, Navsari, into a national center for digital education. He built a 45 PC IT lab, a 7D VR/AR lab, an offline “Rangpur Server” and a student journalism studio called “R NEWS”. His project ‘QR Code Book’ and ‘Touchable PDF’ reached more than 112,000 students across Gujarat during the pandemic.
Goa-based Mahadev Shinde, a national awardee, is a pioneer of adaptive sports at the Gujarati Samaj Special School in South Goa. Mr. Shinde coached the Indian floor hockey team to four gold medals and one bronze medal at the 2017 Special Olympics World Winter Games. He served as the Sports Moderator for Boccia at the 2023 World Games and mentored 14 athletes at international level who secured 13 medals for India.
Among the college faculty members receiving the award is Kirti Chandra Sahu of the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, whose pioneering research on the shape and size distribution of raindrops at different altitudes is contributing to more accurate rainfall forecasting. “He has developed a unique experimental device from scratch that simulates the atmospheric conditions experienced by raindrops as they descend from clouds to the ground, with potential applications in weather forecasting and climate modelling,” said a spokesperson for the Union Education Ministry.
Another awardee, Avlokita Agrawal of IIT Roorkee, is an advocate of Vaastu Shastra and the “Indian Knowledge System in Architecture” through rational and scientific studies.
Vinay Chamola of Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, receives the award for the courses he has developed in Internet of Things (IoT) and drone technology and for setting up a hands-on IoT Tinkering Lab that translates cutting-edge research into project-based learning. “He also runs an interdisciplinary Shrimad Bhagavad Gita course that has proven to improve student well-being, combining technical excellence with compassion, values and purpose,” the spokesperson said.
Ankuran Dutta, Head, Department of Communication, Gauhati University, who founded the first community and web radio stations in Northeast India, is recognized for his contribution to participatory communication and cultural outreach.
Another honoree, Shivani V., a faculty member at Karnataka Sanskrit University, Bengaluru is recognized for her work bridging traditional Sanskrit scholarship with computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital humanities and Indian knowledge systems.
“Her research on a computational model for the linguistic study of Sanskrit reflects her pioneering efforts to connect Paninian grammar with modern language technology. She has contributed to major academic and technological initiatives, including Mahakosha, National Language Translation Mission, Shastrakosha, Pythonskrit and Academic GPS, which have advanced the digitization and computational study of Sanskrit,” said a Sanskrit spokesperson for the Ministry of Education.
Published – 04 Sep 2026 22:54 IST