Pratish Datta, Blind Student, Tops IIT Kharagpur and Wins President's Gold Medal

Pratish Datta was born without vision. On September 15, 2012, the 23-year-old stood at the IIT-Kharagpur convocation as President Pranab Mukherjee presented him with the Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose Memorial Gold Medal — awarded for topping his M.Sc. Mathematics batch with a score of 9.87.

Datta suffers from retinoschisis, an eye disease characterized by abnormal splitting of the retina's neuro-sensory layers, resulting in loss of vision. He does all his mathematical calculations mentally and dictates them to a scribe during examinations. Born at Batanagar, about 20 km southwest of Kolkata, to Prabir, a civil engineer with a government undertaking, and Ranjana, a homemaker, he has depended on his mother for his studies — she would read out his lessons and he would memorize them.

"If I studied for 10 hours, it was my mom who worked 15 hours to ensure that I successfully memorised my lessons. And dad was always there to encourage me whenever I was low on confidence," he told The Hindu BusinessLine.

After completing his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Kolkata's St. Xavier's College with 88% marks, he joined IIT-Kharagpur, where he went on to top his Master's batch. The gold medal at the convocation, before a 2,000-strong audience, was the public recognition of a private discipline: years of listening, memorizing, and calculating entirely in his head.

His story is a personal triumph, and also an institutional prod. India's classrooms, examination halls, and universities still place most of the burden of accessibility on disabled students and their families. Datta's success prompted disability-rights advocates to press IITs and other premier institutions to lead by example in building genuinely accessible learning environments — not as charity, but as recognition that talent is distributed without regard for physical limitation.