Students turn IIT-H professor’s ‘impossible’ idea into reality | Hyderabad News

Hyderabad: When a company told IIT Hyderabad professor Kirti Chandra Sahu that the Raindrops Research Facility he had spent years designing was impossible to build, he was devastated. For nearly a week, his PhD students watched their usually interactive mentor retreat into his office and return home quietly. Then they walked in and asked what was wrong.When Sahu explained that the company could not build the facility despite years of work on its design, his students offered to do it themselves. Three of them went back to the drawing board, divided the design into parts and worked out how each could be built. One travelled to Ahmedabad, another to Bengaluru, while the third worked with a local team in Hyderabad.The episode offers a glimpse into the teaching philosophy of Sahu, who is among 21 faculty members from higher education institutions and polytechnics who received the National Teachers Award 2026 on Teachers’ Day. A founding faculty member of IIT-H, he was the first faculty member of its chemical engineering department and the institute’s 11th faculty member overall. For Sahu, teaching has never been about simply passing on knowledge. “I see teaching as co-learning. I encourage students to question my ideas, debate them and arrive at their own conclusions. I am equally open to learning from them,” he said.That philosophy came alive when the proposed Raindrops Research Facility seemed impossible to build. Sahu began working on the project in 2013 to study raindrop size distribution under atmospheric conditions, an important input for weather radar and rainfall estimation. After a company spent nearly a year working on the design before declaring it impossible to build, his students stepped in.The facility was eventually established in 2023, after a decade of work. The research could help improve rainfall prediction and has applications in water management, disaster mitigation and the study of extreme weather events such as cloudbursts. Sahu’s own journey began in a village in Odisha, where education initially meant getting a job and supporting his family. After completing mechanical engineering, he turned down campus jobs and chose to pursue research, completing his master’s at JNCASR in Bengaluru before going on to do his PhD and postdoctoral work.His interest in raindrops grew after floods and extreme weather events in Odisha and elsewhere made him wonder whether his background in fluid mechanics could help. “With encouragement from my mentor, Prof R Narasimha, I took up the challenge. I thought we needed a facility to estimate the damage so we could improve and prepare our disaster management systems,” he told TOI.His approach to teaching was also shaped by his father, a primary-school teacher who could explain class 10 mathematics to him despite his own limited formal education. Today, Sahu believes teachers face a different challenge. AI and the internet have given students access to an almost limitless amount of information. The teacher’s role, he says, is increasingly to help students question, filter and use that information meaningfully. “Following one textbook and teaching from it is no longer enough. We have to be innovative and interdisciplinary, helping students understand what information is reliable and how to use it meaningfully,” he said.