On 23 August 2026, IIT Roorkee opened the Gargi Block at its Lecture Hall Complex to a group of school students from Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Dehradun. They had come for STC Tech Fair 2026, the annual showcase run by the institute's Student Technical Council.
VT Netzwelt sponsored their visit. Surender Vikram Singh, Founder and Managing Director at VT Netzwelt, attended as Chief Guest.
The fair ran under the theme "Inspiring Young Minds through Science, Innovation and Research." It delivered on that name in a fairly literal way. Students who had studied engineering concepts on paper spent the day standing next to working machines built by people only a few years older than them.
The JNV Dehradun group shared the venue with IIT Roorkee students, faculty members, and technology enthusiasts from across the campus.
Prof. Dr. Varun Sharma, Faculty Advisor to the Student Technical Council, opened the program with a welcome address and set the context for the day. Surender Vikram Singh followed with an address to the gathering.
Prof. Vivek Malik, Dean SRIC, and Prof. Amit Agarwal, Associate Dean Corporate Interaction, were both present. Their attendance says something about how seriously IIT Roorkee treats the link between student innovation and its real-world application.
Surender's address came back to a single idea. Innovation does not begin with sophisticated tools. It begins with curiosity, and with the willingness to keep looking for an answer after the obvious ones run out.
That framing was useful given who was listening. The students in the room were about to spend the afternoon looking at a Mars rover and a set of underwater drones, machines that can easily read as the product of budgets rather than thinking. The equipment arrives later. The habit of asking comes first.
He also spoke about what a day like this does for a student who has questions but nowhere to take them. Put that student in a room where twenty-eight teams are ready to explain their work, and the questions keep coming long after the event ends.
The STC Stalls Exhibition was the centerpiece of the day. Around 28 Student Technical Councils set up stalls across the venue, each showing what its members had built over the year.
The lineup included a Mars rover, underwater drones, and a drone test rig, alongside a long list of other prototypes still in development.
For the visiting students, the value sat in the conversations rather than the displays. They could ask the people who built each machine how it worked, what broke during development, and how the problem eventually got solved. That kind of exchange is hard to reproduce in a classroom.
One thread running through the exhibition was defence sector application. Several teams walked visitors through operational challenges that still need solving and the technology being explored to address them.
The program also featured a lecture by Prof. Parikshit Pareek, titled "AI & AI for Bharat: What it Means for Your Career?"
For a room of school students who will pick a stream within a couple of years, the timing was hard to fault.
A technology ecosystem depends on people choosing technical work in the first place. That decision usually gets made long before anyone fills out a college application, often on the strength of a single experience that made the field feel reachable.
Sponsoring the Young Minds Visit put a group of students inside a working research institution for a day. Some of them will remember the underwater drone. A few will remember a conversation at a stall.
Speaking after the event, Surender Vikram Singh noted that innovation starts with curiosity and the willingness to look for an answer, well before sophisticated tools enter the picture. Days like this one create the conditions for that curiosity to develop.
STC Tech Fair 2026 worked because it put two groups of students in the same room and let them talk. On one side, school students from Dehradun with no prior exposure to a research campus. On the other, IIT Roorkee students with a year of build work behind them and something to show for it.
What passed between them was something a syllabus cannot deliver. The gap between the two positions turned out to be smaller than it looks from a classroom, and it closes through work rather than talent alone.
VT Netzwelt was glad to sponsor the visit, and our thanks go to Prof. Amit Agarwal, Prof. Vivek Malik, Prof. Dr. Varun Sharma, and everyone on the Student Technical Council who put the day together. We will keep backing programs that bring students into direct contact with research institutions and the people working inside them, because this is the part of our CSR work in education that produces the clearest results.
If you are running a similar initiative and looking for a technology partner to support it, get in touch.
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