National Science Day
India marks 28 February as the day C. V. Raman found the effect that carries his name. IIT Jodhpur marks it across the campus, and the lab opens its floor: student-built RC cars, a pick and place bot, drone frames and RC planes, with the people who made them there to explain how.
On 28 February 1928, C. V. Raman shone light through a liquid and found that a small part of it came back at a different wavelength, shifted by the molecules it had passed through. The Raman effect won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 and gave chemistry a way to identify a substance from the light it scatters. India has observed National Science Day on that date since 1987.
IIT Jodhpur observes the day institute-wide. The 2026 observance was an Institute Lecture, "Managing Science, Empowering India: The Aswal Model", delivered by Prof. Dinesh Kumar Aswal of the National Disaster Management Authority.
Everything the lab puts on the floor that day was built by students here, not bought in. An RC car, designed and wired from parts rather than assembled from a kit. A pick and place bot running its cycle on the bench, lifting an object and setting it down somewhere else, which sounds trivial right up until you have to solve the kinematics behind it. Drone frames and RC planes, airframes included, cut and put together in this room.
The builds are presented as well as shown. Each one gets a short talk from the people who made it: what the brief was, what the first version got wrong, and what the current one does instead. The laser cutter and the desktop mill keep running through the day, so there are parts being made in front of you and not only finished ones sitting on a table.
It is open to anyone on campus, and to school groups visiting for the day. Nothing needs to be booked. Ask a coordinator if you want a walkthrough rather than a look around.