Prof. Rajkumar S. Pant

IIT Bombay Professor Brings Flight Science to Rural Punjab Students

Image Courtesy: Bedford Today

IIT Bombay’s Prof. Rajkumar S. Pant, from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and currently a visiting professor at Plaksha University, Mohali, led an engaging session on the Principles of Flight for students at Drishti Dr. R. C. Jain Innovative Public School, Narangwal, Punjab. The event was conducted under the aegis of SEVA Trust UK (India), a charity focused on education and social welfare in rural areas.

The school honoured Dr. Pant and SEVA Trust Founder Charan Sekhon MBE, who attended the event along with Mr. Baljinder Singh Grewal, SEVA Trust Coordinator and Social Activist. School Principal Dr. Manisha Gangwar called the session a model for making complex science both accessible and fun. She has requested follow-up workshops to train teachers in replicating this interactive style in regular classrooms.

Curious how thermocol gliders and big questions about flight are opening up new horizons in rural India?

Click for the full story here: Bedford Today

Forbes India Spotlights IIT Bombay Faculty as India’s Top AI Trailblazers

As India charts its course through the rapidly evolving world of AI, Forbes India has spotlighted 30  trailblazers driving transformative change across diverse domains.

IIT Bombay is delighted that several of its faculty members made this illustrious list.

They include:

Prof. Sunita Sarawagi

A pioneer in machine learning, Prof. Sunita Sarawagi has transformed how computers process unstructured data through innovations like semi-Markov conditional random fields. As a professor at IIT Bombay and founder of its Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science, she’s shaped both research and real-world applications—impacting sectors from logistics to finance.

Associate Prof. Preethi Jyothi

Prof. Jyothi is advancing speech and language technologies to make AI more inclusive for low-resource Indian languages. As an associate professor at IIT Bombay, her work in ASR and machine learning addresses challenges like accent diversity and code-switching.

Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan is leading BharatGen, India’s open-source multilingual AI initiative. His team developed Param 1, a bilingual LLM with 25% Indic data, and tools like Bharat Data Sagar and AIKosha to support public data lakes and digital sovereignty.

Prof. Ramakrishnan was also featured in an interview with Straits Times, a Singapore-based newspaper, where he said, “We want to move away from annotation as a drudgery-driven exercise to an expertise-driven one in India”. He heads BharatGen, an Indian government-funded initiative to build indigenous large language models (LLM).

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Whether it’s taking aerospace science to schoolchildren in rural Punjab or pushing the boundaries of AI research on the global stage, IIT Bombay’s faculty continues to educate, innovate, and inspire. From classrooms to cutting-edge labs, their impact spotlights the Institute’s commitment to shaping a smarter, more inclusive future for India and the world.