The 22-year-old student received the Dr Jai Krishna Gold medal for contribution in the field of youth leadership and academic excellence from President Ram Nath Kovind.

Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (IITR) student Anant Vashistha received the Dr Jai Krishna Gold medal for contribution in the field of youth leadership and academic excellence from President Ram Nath Kovind at the institute’s 19th convocation ceremony held on October 4.

The 22-year-old student who completed his B-Tech in production and industrial engineering this year taught economically under-privileged students for a year besides initiating over 150 projects in various capacities at two of the institute’s 15 plus student-driven technology-based societies. With a cumulative grade point average (CGPA) score of 9.485, Anant also topped his department consisting of 61 students. The prestigious Dr Jai Krishna gold medal is awarded to students recording consistent academic excellence as well as displaying exceptional leadership qualities.

Vashistha is the only son among the three children of Krishan Kumar Sharma, an ex-telecom official and Sangeeta Sharma a school teacher. Keen on spending his weekends fruitfully, Vashistha who joined the institute in 2015 joined the national social service’ (NSS) Navodaya cell that taught under-privileged primary school students writing the Central government-run Navodaya Vidyalaya entrance exams held in January each year. For a year Vashistha taught mathematics to about 15 students aged 8-9 years near his university. He later expanded his reach to similarly underprivileged students of Kaliyar village situated eight km from the university.

When IITR’s Tinkering lab – a technical facility open to all IITR students was inaugurated in 2016, Vashistha was quick to get involved with the establishment of the lab and was later elected as its secretary in April 2018. The lab has since completed 160 projects and has another 204 ongoing projects. Vashistha was instrumental in representing the voice of students with regards to the lab’s constitution and policy framing with regards to use of workstations etc., launching a rethink portal that helps 7000 plus IITR students undertake online project creations, and introducing a series of corporate lectures and workshops on design thinking. As convener of IITR’s annual technology exhibition, ‘Srishti’ which gives IITR students a platform to showcase their creative ideas as well as practical solutions Vashistha supervised the work of all participating technical groups.

Vashistha’s consistently super performance at the academic front and outside of it made him one of the first students in his batch to be selected by Mastercard India Services pvt. Ltd for the position of a consultant during campus placement. While Vashistha has already spent 5 months one the job, he is keen on pursuing higher studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States of America after which he plans to return to the country. “My exposure to diversified fields during my BTech journey was exciting but I would really like to play with data and want to contribute to the field of data science by working on algorithm development. While teaching I realized that in low-income homes, the resistance to educating the children was from parents who saw them as potential income earners despite the little they actually contributed. I am hoping to find solutions to such societal problems through data science which will help to take the right policy decisions,” says Vashistha.