Hardik Chadda

In 2016 I was a B.Tech student in Agra. A 3D printer was the most remarkable machine a classroom could have, and almost no Indian school could buy one. So I built affordable ones.

In 2017 that project became Hankernest Technologies, registered in Dayalbagh, Agra, where we still are. I thought I was starting a hardware company. I was wrong, and it took me a few years to find out.

Under the Atal Innovation Mission's scheme I set up Atal Tinkering Labs across northern India. The rooms were built, the equipment came, the inaugurations were photographed. In 2019 I also taught my first classroom outside India, in Japan.

Those years taught me the one thing no course had: what happens to a school lab after everyone goes home.

From 2022 Hankernest stopped helping schools get labs and started helping them use what they have. Labs get built anyway; a national mandate now guarantees it. What does not get built is the curriculum that fits the timetable, the teacher who can hold a room where the answer is not known, and the record that shows what the children learned.

That year I ran the first Learncation, a residential week in the hills, and the first electronics workshops for educators rather than for children. In 2025 I taught in China, my third country.