FOUNDER

Hardik Chadda

Founder of Hankernest. Educator. PhD candidate researching how creative thinking develops inside Indian classrooms.

I started Hankernest in 2017 as a final-year B.Tech project — a low-cost 3D printer I wanted Indian schools to actually be able to afford. Eight years later, Hankernest is a creative-education company. The printers are gone. What’s left is the part I should have been doing all along: helping schools and colleges teach creative thinking as a skill students can build.

This page is the longer version of how that shift happened and what Hankernest is now. It’s first-person on purpose. Hankernest is a small company built around a clear point of view, and that point of view is mine.

I’ve kept it to the things that matter. The arc, what I’m working on now, the credentials, and a short note at the end.

THE ARC

How I got there.

2016-2017

Final-year project, then a company.

The first version of Hankernest made desktop 3D printers for Indian schools. I built the first prototype during my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at Dayalbagh Educational Institute. A few schools bought the printers. They worked well.

But spending time inside those schools, watching what happened after the printers were installed, taught me something the printers themselves couldn’t. The teachers were nervous. The students were curious for two weeks and then bored. The printer became expensive office furniture.

None of this had anything to do with the printer. It had everything to do with what was around it.

2019-2021

Atal Tinkering Labs, and a pattern.

In 2019, the Atal Innovation Mission rolled out ATLs across the country, and Hankernest became a partner setting them up. The work expanded quickly. By the end of 2019 we’d touched dozens of schools across north India.

The pattern from the printer days held. The labs were beautiful. The kits arrived. The teachers were nervous. The labs went quiet within six months.

I started to understand that what I was watching wasn’t a failure of equipment, or of training. It was a deeper failure — of an assumption that creativity was something some students had, and that the right room with the right kit would let it come out.

The first time I said the sentence “creativity is a skill, not a personality trait” out loud, it was a working hypothesis. By the end of 2020 it was the only thing I could see.

2022 Onwards

The methodology, and the work today.

I continued at DEI through an M.Tech in Computer Science and then into a PhD studying the cognitive markers of creative thinking. The research and the company moved closer to each other than I’d expected — the research gave me the foundations for a pedagogical framework, and the framework needed real classrooms to test it.

Hankernest today is a creative-education company. What we do now is programmes for schools, faculty development and online internships for colleges, and cohort-based work with individual educators. All of it grounded in the same idea: creativity is a skill, and Indian classrooms can teach it.

THE POINT OF VIEW

Why I built Hankernest the way I did.

Most education companies in India sell something into a school: a kit, a curriculum, a software subscription, a certification. The companies are structured around the thing being sold. Their incentives line up with selling more of it.

This made sense to me for a few years and then stopped making sense. Watching ATLs go quiet across the country was the moment it stopped. The companies selling into those labs had done their job; the labs were installed, the kits were delivered, the contracts were closed. And the labs were dead anyway.

Creativity is a skill, not a personality trait. It can be taught, practised, and built into the rhythm of an ordinary school week.

Hardik Chadda

Founder

So Hankernest is built around something different. Not a kit, not a curriculum-as-product, but a pedagogical claim — the one above — and the long, unglamorous work of helping schools make it real. We don’t sell hardware. We don’t have a subscription model. We don’t optimise for installations or seats sold. We optimise for whether the work is still happening in your school in Year Three, when nobody is watching.

This is a slower business than the alternatives. It has stayed small on purpose. And I run every cohort, FDP, and consulting engagement myself, because right now the methodology and the person aren’t separable.

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

B.Tech Mechanical Engineering, DEI

Dayalbagh Educational Institute. The B.Tech project that started Hankernest.

M.Tech Computer Science, DEI

Pivot into the technical foundations now underpinning Hankernest’s curriculum and tooling work.

PhD candidate, DEI

Cognitive markers of creative thinking; pedagogical model for Indian classrooms. Defence targeted late 2026.

Active work with LLMs and Modern AI

Cognitive markers of creative thinking; pedagogical model for Indian classrooms. Defence targeted late 2026.

WORK DELIVERED

Technology Lab Setup
FDPs and Teachers’ Training
Workshops and Seminars
Learncations and other unique programmes.
Curriculums Designed and Delivered.

ABOUT HANKERNEST

Founded in 2017
ISO 9001:2015 certified.
Recognised under Startup India.
Founder and CEO from inception.
Sole pedagogical lead.

IF SOMETHING HERE RESONATED

The easiest thing to do is talk.

A 30-minute conversation, no deck, no sales pitch. If you’re a school leader, a college dean, an educator considering a cohort, or someone who just read all of this and wants to discuss it — I’d be glad to talk.