Divya Agarwal
When 1.12 lakh students across Telangana were assessed not on what they memorised, but on how they think, it marked the quiet beginning of a national reckoning with how India defines merit.
Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], May 14: In a country where a child’s worth has long been measured in percentages and rank lists, something unusual happened in Hyderabad on the 9th of May, 2026. In a room filled with students, parents, educators, and policymakers, the applause was not for those who scored highest on an exam. It was for those who demonstrated how they think.
The CogniCHAMP India Scholarship — Telangana Edition 2026 — is not a quiz competition, nor a board topper felicitation. It is, by design and by philosophy, something fundamentally different: a state-wide cognitive assessment that evaluated over 1.12 lakh students across 387 schools on the skills that the next decade of work will actually demand — reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and independent thought.
The initiative is the flagship programme of CognitiveScore.ai, co-founded by Kirti Kumar Jain and Vikram Singh Negi. Their central argument is one that educators have whispered for years, but few have had the institutional courage to act on: marks can be memorised, answers can be generated by artificial intelligence, but thinking cannot be outsourced.
“In a world where AI can answer any question, the real differentiator is how a child thinks. CogniCHAMP is a step towards recognising and nurturing that ability at scale.”
— Kirti Kumar Jain, Co-Founder, CognitiveScore.ai
That the initiative chose Telangana as its first canvas is itself significant. The state, already established as a national leader in technology and innovation, is now beginning to ask harder questions about what its future workforce should look like — and how education must evolve to meet that demand.
Recognising the Right Minds
The CogniCHAMP Awards 2026 celebrated the top performers across four academic categories — Foundational, Preparatory, Middle, and Secondary — alongside the three schools that demonstrated the highest collective cognitive performance across their student body.
Delhi Public School, Hyderabad, claimed the top school ranking, followed by St. Alphonsus High School, Nalgonda, in second place and St. Andrews School, Hyderabad, in third, a result that notably placed a school from a smaller district ahead of several established metropolitan institutions, underlining that cognitive potential is distributed across Telangana, not concentrated in its capital.
Among students, the recognised scholars spanned every level: Zayan Ashar, Rrishan Jain, and Suhakshitha in the Foundational category; Akinepally Rukmini Krishna Atharv, Anthadpula Isaac, and Shaik Hafsa in the Preparatory category; Yuvana Mavuram, Cheerla Abhi Ram, and Melissa Susai in the Middle category; and Vangala Dhruvanath, Naikoti Bharath Chandr, and Moksh Jain in the Secondary category. Their names will be recorded in the first chapter of what their founders believe will become a national movement.
A Signal from the State
Gracing the occasion as Special Guest of Honour was Shri Jayaprakash Narayan Garu, Founder and President of the Loksatta Party, whose decades of advocacy for systemic reform in governance and education lent the event an intellectual gravity rarely seen at school award ceremonies.
CogniCHAMP’s first edition is a Telangana story. But its founders are explicit about where it is headed: a national initiative that eventually reframes how every state, every school, and every parent understands what it means for a child to be bright. In the AI era, the most important thing a student can develop is not a better memory; it is a sharper mind.
