From asteroid hunter to Maths wizard, 82 educators to receive National Teachers’ Awards

An asteroid hunter. A Maths wizard. A trailblazer in a coal mining community. A Special Olympics hockey coach. These are among the 82 educators from across the country who will receive the National Teachers’ Awards on September 5. The President of India Droupadi Murmu will confer the awards. Among the awardees are 48 school teachers, 21 faculty members in higher education, and 13 trainers from the Union Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Among the 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, Haryana-based Anil Kaushik, known as the ‘Math Wizard’, built a state-of-the-art physical Maths lab containing over 40 original learning models, alongside a 12-section virtual mathematics lab with 30 ‘Harbans puzzles’. He has co-authored textbooks on Vedic Mathematics and published 22 teaching modules on the national DIKSHA portal.Divyendu Sen from Rajasthan, another recipient of the award, is a teacher in a government school who bridged rural classrooms with deep-space science by training local students to track and hunt asteroids. He has pioneered low-cost solutions, including an AI-enabled Biology education model, a Virtual Biology Laboratory, and ‘Tree Talk’, a QR-based botanical learning system.Rajasthan-based teacher Vartika Gulati is an awardee who teaches at the Government Girls Upper Primary School in Jaipur. She turns abstract concepts into everyday experiences — teaching Algebra with groundnuts 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 the Government High School, Alipingal, is receiving the award for guiding students to build over 50 prototypes, including a low-cost automatic plate-washing machine that earned a Government of India patent.Another awardee, Jharkhand-based Munmun Bhattacherjee, working at the Government Middle School in Barmasia, Dhanbad, Bihar, has spearheaded an institutional turnaround in a vulnerable coal mining community. Aligning with the NEP 2020 and NIPUN Bharat goals, she introduced low-cost Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) tools; integrated Children with Special Needs (CwSN); prevented dropouts through home visits; and guided students toward State arts awards, NEET prep, and vocational independence.Similarly, Maharashtra-based Kavita Gitte, head teacher at the Sane Guruji Nivasi Vidyalaya in Beed, is being felicitated for spending nearly three decades integrating children of migrant sugarcane workers into mainstream schooling via initiatives like ‘Balrakshak’ and ‘Shikshan Aaplya Dari’. As a national softball and baseball coach, she has also guided nearly 210 students to State and national achievements.Another awardee, Gujarat-based Nitinkumar, converted a resource-constrained tribal primary school in Vansda, Navsari, into a national hub for digital learning. He built a 45-computer IT lab, a 7D VR/AR lab, an offline ‘Rangpur Server’, and a student journalism studio called ‘R NEWS’. His ‘QR Code Book’ project and ‘Touchable PDFs’ reached over 112,000 students across Gujarat during the pandemic.Goa-based Mahadev Shinde, who is among the national awardees, is a pioneer in adaptive sports at the Gujarati Samaj Special School, South Goa. Mr. Shinde coached the Indian floor hockey team to four Gold Medals and one Bronze at the 2017 Special Olympics World Winter Games. He served as a Bocce Sports Presenter at the 2023 World Games and has mentored 14 international-level athletes who secured 13 medals for India.Among the higher education faculty members receiving awards is Kirti Chandra Sahu from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, whose pioneering research on the shape and size distributions of raindrops at different altitudes contributes to more accurate rainfall prediction. “He has developed a unique experimental facility from scratch that simulates atmospheric conditions experienced by raindrops as they descend from clouds to the ground, with potential applications in weather forecasting and climate modelling,” a spokesperson from the Union Ministry of Education said. Another awardee, Avlokita Agrawal of IIT Roorkee, is a proponent of Vaastu Shastraand ‘Indian Knowledge System in Architecture’ through rational and scientific studies.Vinay Chamola at the Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, is receiving the award for the courses he has developed in the Internet of Things (IoT) and drone technology, and for establishing a hands-on IoT Tinkering Lab, translating cutting-edge research into project-based learning. “He also leads an interdisciplinary Shrimad Bhagavad Gita course that has demonstrably enhanced student well-being, blending technical excellence with compassion, values and purpose,” the spokesperson said. Ankuran Dutta, Head of the Department of Communications, Gauhati University, who has founded Northeast India’s first community and web radio stations, is being awarded for his contribution to participatory communication and cultural outreach.Another awardee, Shivani V., a faculty member at the Karnataka Sanskrit University, Bengaluru is being felicitated for her work in 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, advancing the digitisation and computational study of Sanskrit knowledge,” the Education Ministry spokesperson stated.