Society
Sonam Wangchuk: Educator, Engineer, and a Legal Fight Still Unfolding
Educator, engineer, hunger striker, NSA detainee — is Sonam Wangchuk a rebel, a hero, or both? A data-checked profile of the man and the unresolved fight around him.
Sonam Wangchuk turned a 5% pass rate into 75%, engineered an artificial glacier that needs no electricity, and seeded a university with his own prize money. He has also spent six months in jail under India’s National Security Act, and this July was hospitalized after a three-week hunger strike in Delhi. This profile separates the engineering record from the ongoing legal and political fight — and reports both without resolving either.
Sonam Wangchuk has spent nearly four decades building things designed to work without him: a school where students, not staff, set the rules; an artificial glacier that needs no electricity or pump; a university seeded with his own prize money rather than a donor’s. He has also, over the past two years, been jailed under one of India’s most restrictive security laws, had his organisation’s foreign-funding licence revoked by the federal government, watched a protest he was supporting while on hunger strike descend into violence in which four people were killed. Both of these are true, and both are part of the record.
This piece separates the two. It sets out, with as much precision as the public record allows, what Sonam Wangchuk actually built and measured in education and engineering — and then reports, without taking a side, on the legal and political conflict that has consumed much of the last eighteen months of his public life.
The education crisis that inspired Sonam Wangchuk. The diagnosis: 1988
Sonam Wangchuk was born in 1966 in a village near Alchi, in what was then Jammu and Kashmir’s Ladakh region. He trained as a mechanical engineer at what is now the National Institute of Technology, Srinagar. In 1988, together with his brother and five friends, he founded the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL).
The problem they set out to address was specific: at the time, close to 95% of Ladakhi students were failing their Class 10 board examinations. Wangchuk’s explanation, restated in interviews for decades since, was that the curriculum was the wrong one for the place — children who spoke Ladakhi or Tibetan at home were taught in Urdu and English, memorising material with no relevance to a high-altitude cold desert.
SECMOL’s campus near Leh took students who had already failed their board exams — failure was the admission criterion, not marks. The school ran on student self-governance: pupils cooked, budgeted, and voted on rules. Wangchuk designed the buildings himself: passive-solar structures of rammed earth that held an interior temperature of roughly 15°C even when it was minus 15°C outside, without any purchased heating.
| The two sides |
|---|
| Regional Class 10 pass rates in Ladakh rose from roughly 5% to 75% over two decades under Operation New Hope, a multi-agency effort in which Wangchuk’s SECMOL school was one contributor, not the sole architect. |
| His Ice Stupa design stores meltwater as a cone of ice using no electricity, pumps, or moving parts — but a 2019 academic study found the technique requires heavy labor and maintenance and can only store limited volumes relative to the effort involved. |
| In September 2025, a hunger strike Sonam Wangchuck led preceded a riot that killed four people; he was detained without trial under India’s National Security Act for nearly six months, while his organization’s foreign-funding license was revoked and a university land lease was cancelled. |
| The government maintains his rhetoric contributed to the violence; he and his wife maintain the detention was retaliation for his activism — a dispute that reached the Supreme Court and remains legally unresolved even after his release in March 2026. |
| www.edpublica.com |
Regional pass rates climbed from around 5% to close to 75% over the following two decades, according to figures compiled by SECMOL and the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives. That reversal is not attributable to SECMOL alone. It happened under Operation New Hope, a joint effort involving the state government, the local school system, and several NGOs, of which SECMOL was one. What is specifically attributable to Wangchuk is the diagnosis that anchored the wider reform, and the SECMOL campus itself, which functioned as both training ground and proof of concept for it.
The Ice Stupa: What the Record Shows, and What Critics Say
Ladakh’s farmers face a seasonal mismatch: glacial meltwater arrives in June, sowing season starts in April. In January and February 2014, Sonam Wangchuk and a group of SECMOL students built a test structure in Leh — a roughly six-metre cone holding about 150,000 litres, built with no shade, no machinery, just gravity-fed piping and freezing night air. Piled water froze into a cone rather than spreading flat, the way earlier artificial glaciers had; a cone’s smaller surface-area-to-volume ratio means it loses less ice to direct sun. The structure held until 18 May, weeks into a season with daytime temperatures above 20°C.
That result persuaded Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche, a senior Buddhist leader who visited and blessed the prototype, to offer land at Phyang village for a full-scale version. Built the following winter, it was roughly 20 metres tall and stored an estimated two million litres — more than ten times the first prototype. Figures compiled by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water put the count at 52 functioning ice stupas in Ladakh a few years after 2019, with additional pilot structures elsewhere, including a confirmed installation in Switzerland’s Val Roseg valley (2016) built with Wangchuk’s direct involvement, and an independently developed project in Chile’s Andes that has cited the Ladakh design as its starting point.
Independent researchers have raised real limitations. A 2019 study by the geographer Marcus Nüsser and colleagues, cited by the climate-adaptation research group climateinterventions.org, found that ice stupas require substantial ongoing maintenance, investment, and construction labour, can only store limited volumes of water relative to the effort involved, and — because they divert water that would otherwise flow into rivers — can carry knock-on effects for communities and ecosystems downstream. None of this contradicts the basic engineering result Wangchuk demonstrated; it does complicate the more sweeping claims sometimes made on his behalf about the technique as a scalable, general-purpose fix for Himalayan water scarcity.
HIAL, and the funding fight that followed
Sonam Wangchuk’s plans for a university predate his exit from SECMOL’s day-to-day leadership. By the time he collected the 2016 Rolex Award for Enterprise — 100,000 Swiss francs, then worth roughly ₹67–68 lakh (about US$104,000) — reporting from the ceremony described him as already “busy establishing” the new institution, with the Leh Autonomous Hill Development Council and the Drikung Kagyu Cultural Welfare Society allocating land for it. He put the entire prize toward it as seed funding. The Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL) was formally founded with his wife and collaborator, Gitanjali J. Angmo, in 2017; Wangchuk stepped back from SECMOL’s leadership only in 2018, by which point HIAL was already underway. According to Angmo, more than 400 students had passed through the institute by 2025.
That funding relationship became contested in 2025. In August, the Ladakh administration cancelled a 40-year land lease it had granted HIAL in 2018, citing non-execution of a formal lease deed and lack of progress on construction. The Wire, examining official correspondence, reported that the delay in executing the deed stemmed from the administration’s own unfinished “New Lease Policy,” despite repeated requests from HIAL to formalise the agreement — an account the Ladakh administration disputes; officials have said HIAL violated the terms of the original allotment. Angmo has separately alleged that a federal minister told her the lease would stay frozen unless Wangchuk abandoned his campaign for Ladakh’s inclusion in the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule. That allegation could not be independently verified for this piece, and no official response to it appears in the public record reviewed here.
In September 2025, the federal Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled SECMOL’s licence to receive foreign donations under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, citing irregularities in its 2021–22 accounts — chiefly a cash deposit of ₹3.5 lakh that SECMOL said was the sale proceeds of an old bus bought years earlier with foreign funds, an explanation the ministry called insufficient. The Central Bureau of Investigation opened a parallel inquiry into HIAL’s foreign funding and into a trip Wangchuk made to Pakistan in February 2025. As of this writing, that inquiry’s outcome has not been made public.
The political fight: statehood, a hunger strike, and a riot
Since Ladakh’s 2019 reorganisation into a Union Territory without a local legislature, Sonam Wangchuk has campaigned for full statehood and for extending the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule protections to the region — protections that would give local bodies greater authority over land and resources. He announced a five-day fast in January 2023, led a 21-day fast in March 2024, and fasted again that October, each time pressing the same demand.
In September 2025, Wangchuk began a hunger strike in Leh in support of the same cause. On 24 September, after 14 days of fasting, protesters at the site moved away and clashes broke out elsewhere in the city; buildings and police vehicles were burned, and police opened fire. Four people were killed and, depending on the account, between 70 and 100 were injured — the worst unrest Ladakh had seen in years. Wangchuk ended his fast and publicly condemned the violence.
The federal government’s position, stated by the Ministry of Home Affairs, was that Wangchuk’s speeches — which it said had invoked the Arab Spring and the 2025 Gen Z protests in Nepal — had “guided” the crowd toward violence. Two days after the deaths, he was arrested and detained under the National Security Act, a law that permits preventive detention for up to twelve months without formal trial. He was held in Jodhpur Central Jail, more than 1,000 kilometres from Ladakh.
Sonam Wangchuk denied inciting the violence. In a letter released from jail, he called it “the saddest day of his life” and asked for an independent judicial inquiry into the four deaths, adding that he was prepared to remain in custody until one was held. His wife challenged the detention before the Supreme Court, arguing it relied on stale or unrelated police complaints — by her account, three of the five FIRs cited predated the September violence entirely, and three did not name Wangchuk at all.
The Court agreed to hear the case; a bench questioned why Angmo had not been given the grounds for the detention, as required by precedent. Before the matter was fully resolved in court, the federal government revoked the detention on 14 March 2026, “after due consideration,” and Wangchuk was released after nearly six months. It is not publicly clear whether any underlying charges against him were dropped.
Three months after his release, in June 2026, Wangchuk began a new hunger strike in New Delhi — this time in support of a youth-led protest group calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, demanding the resignation of India’s federal education minister over a series of examination paper leaks. He fasted for roughly three weeks before being taken to hospital by Delhi Police; opposition politicians had publicly urged him to stop, citing his health.
This account has tried to state the competing claims plainly rather than adjudicate them: the government’s position that Wangchuk’s rhetoric contributed to fatal violence, and Wangchuk’s and his wife’s position that the detention was a pretext to end his activism, are both matters of ongoing legal dispute, not settled fact. Readers wanting the fullest, most current picture of that dispute are better served by ongoing news coverage than by a profile written for an education and science audience.
The “3 Idiots” connection
In 2009, the Bollywood film 3 Idiots featured Phunsukh Wangdu, an inventor who rejects rote learning. Wangchuk has said the character was inspired by, rather than based directly on, his work, and has generally kept some distance from the comparison. It nonetheless made him recognisable to a much wider Indian public than his engineering or education record alone would have.
The awards record
By 2025, Wangchuk had received close to 15 national and international honours, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2018) — often described as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2016), the Fred M. Packard Award (2016) for protected-area leadership, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2017), an Ashoka Fellowship (2002), the Real Heroes Award (2008), and recognition as “Eminent Technologist of the Himalayan Region” from IIT Mandi (2018). He has also appeared as a panellist at Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm.
Two records, not one
Wangchuk’s engineering and education work has a clear, checkable structure: a defined problem, a low-cost intervention, and a mechanism — student self-governance at SECMOL, a maintenance-free physical design in the Ice Stupa — meant to let the fix outlast its inventor’s direct involvement. Independent researchers have found real limits to how far that model scales, particularly with the Ice Stupa, but the underlying results — the pass-rate shift, the functioning prototypes — are documented by more than his own organisations.
His political record over the past two years is a live, contested legal matter involving a federal law, a state government, a Supreme Court petition, and four deaths whose full circumstances have not been publicly settled. Presenting that record honestly means reporting the claims of both the state and the activist without resolving them — which is what this piece has tried to do, rather than folding one story into the other.
Society
Urban Women Hit by a Stark 8.7% Unemployment Rate
India’s unemployment rate rose to 5.4% in April–June 2026, but the sharpest divide was among urban workers: women faced 8.7% unemployment, while only 22.8% were employed compared with 70.7% of men.
India’s urban labour market continues to show a persistent gender imbalance, even as overall employment trends remain relatively stable. While unemployment rates are often used as the primary indicator of job stress, they do not fully capture who is able to access work in the first place.
India’s latest employment data reveal a divide larger than the headline unemployment rate. In April–June 2026, 8.7% of urban women aged 15 years and above who were in the labour force were unemployed, compared with 6.1% of urban men. But the sharper gap lies in employment itself: only 22.8% of urban women were working, compared with 70.7% of urban men.
The figures come as India’s overall unemployment rate rose to 5.4%, from 5.0% in January–March, according to the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Quarterly Bulletin released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Rural unemployment rose from 4.3% to 4.8%, while urban unemployment remained almost unchanged at 6.7%.
For urban women, unemployment actually fell from 9.1% to 8.7% over the quarter. Yet it remains considerably higher than the rate for men.
That makes the story less about a sudden rise in female unemployment and more about a persistent question: why are so few urban women participating in paid work?
The Bigger Divide is Participation
The unemployment rate counts people who are working or actively seeking and available for work. Those outside the labour force are not counted as unemployed.
That distinction is crucial. The urban Worker Population Ratio (WPR) stood at 46.8% overall in April–June. But the gender gap was stark: 70.7% for men and just 22.8% for women.
The nearly 48-percentage-point difference means that looking only at the 8.7% female unemployment rate captures only part of the employment problem. India can therefore have a relatively stable urban unemployment rate while still having a large pool of women who are not participating in the labour market.
Urban Jobs are Changing, But the Gender Gap Remains
The urban labour market itself is not showing signs of a broad collapse. Urban unemployment edged up only marginally from 6.6% to 6.7% during the quarter. At the same time, the share of urban workers in regular wage or salaried employment increased from 48.9% to 49.3%.
Urban employment is also dominated by services. The tertiary sector accounted for 62% of urban employment in April–June, compared with 61.7% a year earlier.
Yet these shifts have not translated into comparable employment outcomes for women.
Rural Unemployment Rose Faster
The national increase in unemployment was partly driven by rural India. Rural unemployment rose by 0.5 percentage points, compared with a 0.1-point increase in urban areas. At the same time, rural employment continued to shift away from agriculture: agriculture’s share fell from 55.8% to 52.9%, while the secondary sector rose from 22.6% to 24.4%.
The figures point to an economy undergoing changes in where and how people work, even as access to employment remains uneven.
Women’s Participation Also Fell
The gender gap extends beyond cities. Overall female labour-force participation declined from 34.7% in January–March to 33.2% in April–June. The overall LFPR for people aged 15 and above also fell, from 55.5% to 54.6%.
The latest figures should not be interpreted as proof that women simply lost jobs. LFPR measures participation in the labour force, while WPR measures actual employment.
But together, the indicators highlight a persistent challenge: India’s employment story cannot be understood through unemployment alone.
The Question of Gender Gap
The PLFS does not establish why urban women participate in the labour market at much lower rates than men. Factors such as childcare, household responsibilities, transport, workplace conditions, safety and access to suitable jobs require separate evidence and reporting.
What the data do establish is the scale of the divide. Urban female unemployment is 8.7%, compared with 6.1% for men. But the much larger gap is in actual employment: 22.8% of urban women were working, against 70.7% of urban men.
As India’s urban economy becomes increasingly service-led and regular salaried employment expands, the central employment question is no longer only how many jobs are being created. It is also who is able to enter the workforce and stay in it.
Society
From Bell Labs to the Classroom: Finding Purpose After Retirement
In the previous part of my story, I described how retirement led me to pursue certification as a high school mathematics teacher after my career at Bell Labs.
Second Act is Education Publica’s column on professionals who reinvent themselves after retirement or at major turning points in life. In the previous issue, former Bell Labs researcher Sudhir M. Ambedkar recounted his journey from IIT Bombay and the University of California, Berkeley to nearly three decades of research and innovation at Bell Labs. In this concluding part, he reflects on how retirement opened the door to an equally rewarding second career—as a mathematics teacher, mentor and lifelong learner.
In the previous part of my story, I described how retirement led me to pursue certification as a high school mathematics teacher after my career at Bell Labs. Standing in a classroom for the first time as a teacher marked the beginning of an entirely new chapter in my life.
After completing my certification, I taught mathematics full-time for about seven years. Teaching mathematics in the United States was a new experience for me, and it took some time to adjust to a different way of teaching. While teaching, I learned a few things about some fundamental mathematics concepts that I had never thought about before.
I used a hybrid approach, combining the Indian method and the American method of teaching mathematics. During my tenure as a teacher, I made several observations about the education system where I was teaching, although many of them were generally applicable to the education system in New Jersey as well. I documented those observations in a white paper and sent them to a few education professors at major universities. Some agreed with my observations but said I could not publish the paper in an academic journal because I was not an education researcher.
One observation was the amount of repetition in the curriculum across Algebra I, Algebra II and Pre-Calculus. I felt it would be better to build a stronger foundation in the earlier stages rather than repeat many of the same topics in subsequent courses.
I also noticed that calculators were introduced in very early grades. As a result, many students became overly dependent on them and often lacked the ability to perform mental mathematics. I believe it is important to build a strong understanding of basic mathematical operations and concepts—including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and solving equations—before relying heavily on technology.
The mathematics textbooks used in American schools are excellent. They contain colourful illustrations, graphics and worked examples that make concepts easier to understand. At the same time, students often expected teachers to explain every step in detail, rather than working through some of the reasoning independently.
Another aspect that interested me was the grading system. Homework and classwork accounted for a significant portion of students’ grades, while tests and quizzes carried comparatively less weight. In my opinion, this did not always accurately reflect a student’s mathematical skills and knowledge.
The students hardly ever received failing grades, and almost everyone progressed to the next level. On one occasion, I was under pressure to pass a student so that the school could maintain a 100 per cent graduation rate—a highly valued performance indicator.
These observations are not intended as criticism of the education system, but simply to illustrate how it differed from the one I had experienced in India. Bright students always rise to the top in this system as well.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching, and it was gratifying to see students succeed and gain admission to excellent universities. Unlike research, where results often take years to become visible, I could see the impact of my work immediately.
After about seven years of teaching, I underwent knee surgery. As a result, I gave up classroom teaching and began focusing more seriously on preparing students for the SAT and ACT, the standardised tests widely used for college admissions in the United States.
I worked with two learning centres that referred students to me for SAT and ACT coaching. Over the years, both examinations changed considerably in their format and content, so I had to keep up with those changes and adjust my teaching accordingly.
Initially, I taught students in person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, all instruction shifted to Zoom. Even after the pandemic, I continued teaching online because, since most of my classes were one-to-one, I found Zoom to be both efficient and physically less demanding.
As a result of teaching these examinations, I developed several practical strategies that enabled students to complete the tests accurately within the allotted time. Some students later told me they found these strategies useful not only in the SAT and ACT but also in their regular mathematics and English classes.
I eventually published these strategies as a series of guidebooks on Amazon. The feedback from students and parents has been consistently encouraging.
In terms of years, my teaching career has now lasted about 75 per cent as long as my engineering career. In both professions, I could see the results of my work, but teaching has been more gratifying because I had direct contact with the people who benefited from it.
I expect to continue this second career for as long as possible.
Sudhir M. Ambedkar is a mechanical engineer trained at IIT Bombay and the University of California, Berkeley. He spent nearly three decades at Bell Labs working in telecommunications research and development. After retirement, he became a certified mathematics teacher and now tutors students preparing for the SAT and ACT while authoring test-preparation guides.
Society
India’s Young Dream Is Changing. Are We Ready?
From skills and employment to entrepreneurship, purpose and global aspirations, India’s youth are redefining what a successful future looks like.
India’s young generation is navigating a changing job market, skills gap, career pressures and global ambitions. What can India do to build a more secure and purposeful future for its youth?
India’s youth are shaping the destiny of the modern nation state, and the country’s demographic dividend is often cited as its greatest economic advantage. Yet in the post-pandemic era, that advantage sits uneasily alongside a labour market being reshaped by technology, and alongside growing anxieties about work-life balance. Degrees and formal qualifications matter less than they once did; skills now decide who gets hired. The conventional career ladder is giving way to entrepreneurship, and local ideas are finding global audiences through a digitally connected world.
India’s Youth Face a Changing Job Market
Even in the age of the internet, young people in India’s remote villages need more than connectivity to compete for jobs. Better English communication, soft skills training and technical know-how could do much to empower farmers and young people in rural areas. The Union government’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, aimed at upskilling rural youth, is a step in this direction, but the scheme’s reach and impact deserve closer scrutiny than they currently receive.
Reducing unemployment cannot be the government’s job alone. It calls for a collective effort: a social reform movement that goes beyond electoral politics and pushes for constructive dialogue on the concerns of young people. Independent media has a role here too, in pursuing solutions-driven journalism, without fear or favour, that surfaces localised ideas for financial security and wellbeing.
Dignity of Work, Voice in Parliament
A social renaissance built on universal access to education and life-skills training, paired with a national minimum wage across sectors, would restore a basic sense of dignity to every working citizen. A national mission on youth concerns, one that cuts across party lines, is overdue. Greater youth representation in Parliament could combine the experience of older leaders with the energy of a younger population, in service of the Gandhian ideal of Sarvodaya, the upliftment of all through equal access to education, services and mentorship.
Life After the Civil Services Exam
Many young Indians aspire to the civil services, and a whole industry of coaching academies has grown around that aspiration. But only a small fraction of aspirants clear every stage of the examination and enter the service. For the rest, failure need not be an ending. Careers in media, academia and research are open to those willing to look beyond government employment. Aspirants would do well not to pour years into preparation alone; short courses and internships alongside exam preparation build a resume rich in the domains they actually care about, whatever path they eventually take.
Beyond the Rat Race
The pursuit of social prestige, at the expense of everything else, breeds burnout and a routine that feels mechanical rather than meaningful. A professional life worth having offers more than financial security; it offers peace of mind and a sense of contentment. That kind of self-reliance and purpose is possible, but it requires young people to define success on their own terms rather than borrow someone else’s definition of it.
The same is true of attention. Shrinking attention spans, a by-product of life on the smartphone, are a legitimate cause for concern in a hyper-connected era. A weekly or monthly digital holiday, however modest, can restore clarity of thought and make room for the kind of offline interaction that a screen cannot replace.
An Aspirational, Global Generation
India’s youth remain aspirational, drawn to opportunities in Europe, the Gulf and North America, and increasingly to frontiers beyond Earth. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and a volatile global economy have not dimmed that ambition. Policymakers could do more to meet it at home, by building India into a genuine hub for higher education, with international students, faculty and university campuses. That transformation has already begun in pockets. What is missing is a coherent, pan-Indian policy to carry it forward, and with it, India’s aspiration to become a genuine centre of global learning.
From a 12-Year-Old’s Robot to AI for India: Raul Aju John’s Journey
Urban Women Hit by a Stark 8.7% Unemployment Rate
Environmental Literacy, Not Tree Planting, Is What India’s Schools Need
Asiatic Lions See Remarkable 70% Rise in a Decade
How Assam’s Recurrent Floods Are Becoming an Economic Burden
The 2026 Fields Medals: Four Proofs, Four Decades-Old Problems Solved
After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood
Every Rumble Sounds Like the Mountain Falling Again: Inside Meppadi’s Second Landslide in Two Years
When the Monsoon Returns, Fear Returns: How Climate Disasters Are Reshaping Mental Health in Himachal Pradesh
Is Something Really Wrong With India’s Education System?
-
Math3 weeks agoThe 2026 Fields Medals: Four Proofs, Four Decades-Old Problems Solved
-
Climate2 weeks ago
After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood
-
Society1 month ago
West Asia Crisis: Can Kerala’s Returning Gulf Migrants Find a Future in the Green Economy?
-
Space & Physics2 months ago
India Semiconductor Mission: ‘It’s Not About Fabs. It’s About Building An Entire Ecosystem’
-
Climate2 months ago
The Climate World Cup? How Climate Change Could Affect Player Performance at the 2026 World Cup
-
Society1 month ago
What Is Civilisational Diplomacy? Understanding India’s Newest Foreign Policy Tool
-
Society2 months ago
From Bell Labs to the Classroom: A Second Career in Teaching
-
Space & Physics2 months ago
Engineers Develop Dual-Mode Propulsion System for Next-Generation Small Satellites
