From Ankleshwar to AI Innovation: Nisharg Nargund’s Journey from Obscurity to Impact

A small industrial township of Ankleshwar in Gujarat that prides itself more on its factories than ideas, a young boy was silently getting fascinated by a whole new world that was poles apart from the one he could see through the window. Flanked by rusting equipment and the omnipresent hum of chemical factories, Nisharg Nargund would sit before an ancient computer cadged off relatives, working his way through the finicky connections of the internet, from time to time venturing into lines of code that nobody in his vicinity even comprehended.

He had no elite mentors or bootcamps to welcome him, only YouTube videos, badly written blogs, and constant crashing. Days and nights would be alike, and curiosity was all he had as a real possession. He was not raised in privilege—he was raised in failure, retry, and resolve. He did not have a privileged background; he had a background of sleepless nights, he says. That was the basis. No stretchy business plan. Not even a golden opportunity. Only frustration against creativity.

Films such as Swades were not just entertainment. A weird fire was kindled in him. Whenever Mohan Bhargav came back to his village to change something, Nisharg experienced a similar urge to go back to his desk. Not to avoid, but to create. He did not simply want to code but to make tech matter. The things that were wrong were not theoretical exercises in logic, but concrete, intimate—and someone had to give them a try.

When he wrote his first research paper and won the best paper award in one of the best colleges in India, to co-authoring a book on convolutional neural networks, he had no script to follow. Only an uneasy feeling to dig underneath the superficial victories. It was the day when he realised that they can do anything they want, he recalls. It was not applause—it was vindication. Vindication that something significant can be created by the person who is not supposed to be able to do such things.

The boy from Ankleshwar stood in front of 100s in a PAN India Generative AI Hackathon, answering questions live on Google Meet, guiding others who once stood where he did. The same kid who began alone, with a hand-me-down computer and doubt in his pocket, now offers hope to those who think their hometown, background, or silence is a limit.