Third place at IIT Delhi: three BHU students take a handloom idea to the national podium

A textile idea worked out in Banaras has come home with a national prize. Three students from Banaras Hindu University finished third in the Sustainability and Environmental Impact category of the National Handloom Hackathon 2026, run by the Office of the Development Commissioner for Handlooms under the Ministry of Textiles. The team was led by Aseem Mandal, a research scholar in Textile Design at the Department of Painting, Faculty of Visual Arts, and included Kriti Mishra and Abhideepsh Prashant Sagar of the Faculty of Law — a mix of design and law that says something about how the handloom question is being approached now. Around 2,500 participants entered from across the country, and the contest ran in three stages: the BHU entry was picked among the first hundred ideas, then among the top forty, after which the shortlisted teams were given expert mentoring before the final presentation at the IIT Delhi R&D Park on 1 August. The medals and certificates were handed over on National Handloom Day. For a city whose looms are its oldest working inheritance, the result reads well. Young Banarasis competed here not on the weave itself but on the harder question around it — how the craft can be made cleaner and steadier as a livelihood — and came back with a place on the national podium.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi · BHU Diaries