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IIT Gandhinagar's Unique Fellowship Gives Students a Classroom Beyond Campus
IIT Gandhinagar launched the Explorer Fellowship 2026 to incentivise students to learn outside the classroom and experience culture across India. Participants of the six-week experiential learning program travel around the country to stretch their comfort level and interact with the community to learn essential skills that cannot be attained in school.
The Explorer Fellowship was the first of its kind in the Indian Institutes of Technology and was designed with the low-budget traveller in mind. Students learn to manage their resources and travel across the country while learning to be flexible and to make decisions independently.
IIT Gandhinagar chose 56 teams from a total of 63 teams that applied to the Fellowship to leave the classroom and broaden their learning horizons and experiences for the 2026 program.
This Fellowship Requires Travelling to Six Different States
This program is available to students at IIT Gandhinagar who are over 18 at the time of participation. The program requires students to travel to six states, with at least one state being from the North, South, and North-East regions of India. Students must travel in sleeper-class train coaches or via state-operated buses. Students are also required to stay at youth hostels and homestays.
As per Professor Manish Kumar, who is the Dean of Student Affairs at IITGN, the program is designed to help students gain various life skills, such as self-confidence and empathy, by exposing students to new and diverse social situations. This program is one of the steps taken by IITGN to develop students in all aspects of life beyond the classroom.
Students have the opportunity to study local businesses, culture, arts and crafts, local cuisine, community-based social enterprises, and much more. The fellowship provides students with a way to integrate learning during their travels with social realities outside of the classroom.
Traveling Offers Students New Skills
An exciting and unique aspect of the Explorer Fellowship is that students are allowed to develop their own travel theme. Several different travel topics have been used over the years, including regional cuisine, architecture, community-based social enterprises, cultural practices, dams, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Previous participants overwhelmingly believe the program has had an incredibly positive impact on their lives. Travelling with limited financial resources has taught participants effective communication and teamwork skills, as well as how to be flexible. The participants have all come to believe this fellowship has been an incredibly transformative experience by exposing them to a new level of confidence, encouraging them to travel, while also helping them understand the vast cultural differences found within India.
Key Features of IITGN Explorer Fellowship 2026
- Six-week-long program
- Covers six Indian states
- North, South, and North-East states of India are compulsory
- IIT Gandhinagar covers the travel expenses
- Focuses on the real world and culture
- 56 teams for 2026
- Promotes self-thinking, flexibility, and a group dynamic
Significance for Students
The Explorer Fellowship is a great example of a program that is creating a new model of learning within the university system. It offers students the opportunity to develop cultural and leadership skills along with personal resilience and the ability to undertake practical problem-solving, all of which are extremely difficult to achieve in the traditional classroom. It is no wonder that the fellowship is garnering such great interest.
The new model of experiential learning, cross-disciplinary methods, and attention to the overall development of the learner, which is seeing such great popularity in the Indian education system, is a model that IIT Gandhinagar is proud to spearhead and lead. IIT Gandhinagar is positioning itself as a university that promotes the value of learning from lived experience, community engagement, and beyond the classroom.
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