The gold that India had never won

Swasti Patil of Pune — “Unschooled” in every official listing — won bronze at the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics in 2025, then gold in Italy in 2026: India’s first ever at the event, in the organisers’ own words.

By The Young Achievers2 min readSources checked 23 October 2026

Swasti Patil · No age published by any source; Class 9 at INOI-2026 (February 2026)

Filed under: Science & Technology · Maharashtra · Competitive programming (informatics olympiads)

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The achievement

In May 2026, in Cesenatico, Italy, Swasti Vitthal Patil won a gold medal at the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI). IARCS, the body that runs India’s computing olympiad programme, recorded the result in words that carry their own weight: it was “India’s first ever gold medal at EGOI”.

She was part of a four-member Indian team in which every contestant was recognised — Mansi Sane won silver, Diya Sathishdev bronze, and Lyra Floyd Gonsalves an Honourable Mention.

The road there

Her official listings describe her schooling in just two words — “Unschooled, Pune” — and she reached Italy through the standard national pathway. At INOI-2025, the national olympiad, she won a bronze medal as a Class 8 student and qualified for the IOI Training Camp.

Shortlisted for the EGOI-2025 team, she was selected, travelled to Germany in July 2025, and came home with a bronze medal. A year later the pattern repeated a level higher: INOI-2026 bronze in Class 9, a second training-camp qualification, a second EGOI selection — and this time gold.

✳ A spark to explore

Her route into computing began with mathematics. Vichar Vatika, which runs the Ganit Manthan programme, records that Swasti was part of Ganit Manthan for multiple years, that her passion for maths led to a deeper passion for computer science, and that she spent more than a year as a teaching assistant on the course — teaching the subject she was still rising in herself. A first-ever gold usually changes what the next group of students believes is possible — what would you attempt if you stopped assuming it could not be done by someone from your school, or from no school at all? That is a question from us, not part of her record.