From survival to science: How this teacher went from rural Odisha to IIT Hyderabad

In a small village in Odisha’s Subarnapur district, a young Kirti Chandra Sahu would sometimes go to school without food or a proper change of clothes. In his own words, he had “no way other than studying to get a job.” He could hardly have imagined then that decades later, he would stand before the President of India to receive one of the country’s highest recognitions for teachers — an honour for a career shaped by curiosity, research and a fascination with the physics of a falling raindrop.

Sahu, now a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, is among 21 faculty members from higher education institutions and polytechnics selected for the National Awards to Teachers 2026.

President Droupadi Murmu will confer the awards on September 5. For Sahu, the journey from a village in Odisha to the classrooms and laboratories of one of India’s premier institutes has been anything but ordinary. What began as a search for a job eventually became a career devoted to asking questions and solving problems that often have no obvious answers.

Sahu’s father was a primary school teacher — a dedicated man who, as Sahu remembers, “always taught us never give up.” Studying, however, was not a passion for Sahu at first. It was the most visible route to a job and, eventually, a better life.

He cleared the Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) and joined the Government College of Engineering, Burla, the oldest engineering college in the state, to study mechanical engineering. After completing his undergraduate degree, Sahu took up a job.

But he soon realised he was not satisfied. Around the same time, he cleared the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and decided to pursue higher studies. He told his father about his plans despite knowing the family could not easily afford it.

His father agreed, but with one condition: he was due to retire in 2007, and after that Sahu would have to support the family. Sahu went ahead. He joined a master’s programme on a stipend of Rs 5,000, saving whatever he could to send home.

It was only a year later that he discovered just how much his family had sacrificed for his education. His younger brother, four or five years his junior, had quietly left his studies after Class 12 and taken up driving a taxi to help fund Sahu’s education.

He had never told his brother about it. The revelation stayed with Sahu as his own academic journey progressed. At the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bengaluru, Sahu discovered something he had not initially set out to pursue — a fascination with research.

He completed his PhD and moved to Imperial College London for a postdoctoral position in 2006. He had submitted his thesis before leaving India and did not stay back for the formal defence. In 2009, he returned to India and joined IIT Hyderabad as the institute’s first faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

At the time, IIT Hyderabad was still operating out of an old ordnance factory school building. There was little of the infrastructure that would eventually come to define the institute. Sahu helped build laboratories and classrooms from scratch.

At night, when the campus had quietened down, he worked on research papers, often writing single-author papers. “I planned and executed in a way that I’m very happy today that I could do both,” he says. The young institute gave him something else: the freedom to identify problems he wanted to pursue and build research around them.