President: National Teachers Awards at Vigyan Bhawan

President of India Droupadi Murmu addressed the National Teachers Awards ceremony at Vigyan Bhawan on 05 September 2026, Teachers Day. The official Presidential address PDF congratulated every awardee honoured with the National Teachers Awards and linked the day to the birth anniversary of India's second President, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The speech text is the primary file for this desk item.

The President said a society that respects teachers is progressive in the true sense. She recalled her own teachers and the students she taught at Sri Aurobindo Integral School in Rairangpur, Odisha, and said she feels a special kinship with the teaching community because she once belonged to it. The address stays ceremonial and policy-facing. It is not a recruitment notice, a scholarship list, or a state education department circular.

Ceremony themes, geography and classroom examples

The President paid tribute to Savitribai Phule as a pioneering woman school teacher, to Rabindranath Tagore's work at Shantiniketan in Bolpur, and to Pandit Gopabandhu Das's open-air school tradition in Odisha. She noted that awardees present in the hall represented teaching excellence from Ladakh to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and from Arunachal Pradesh to Gujarat. She expressed satisfaction that many awardees teach in village schools and hoped their methods would push other teachers toward excellence.

Films on awardees' work, she said, reinforced her belief that dedicated teachers are front-line nation builders. Citing time limits, she highlighted one example: a village school in Jhalawar district, Rajasthan, where children study biology with modern tools under their teacher's guidance. The point in the speech is that strong intent and curious students can raise classroom quality even in small places.

The address records that the Ministry of Education recognises outstanding teachers from schools, higher education institutions and polytechnics, while the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship recognises able trainers. Academic excellence, skill development and entrepreneurship, the President said, sit among national priorities as India works toward knowledge and skill leadership.

School foundation, dropouts and the call that closes the speech

Turning to school education as the base of the system, the President quoted Dr Rajendra Prasad on nurturing children like watering plants. She stressed early moral education, support for first-generation learners, students who feel out of place after moving from village schools to larger city schools, shy learners, high-ability students who lack confidence, and children with special needs. Drawing on the Sanskrit sense of uddhaar as lifting someone up, she called that support a sacred opportunity available especially to teachers.

She noted that the primary school dropout rate, about four and a half percent twelve years earlier, is now almost negligible, and credited teachers for that national gain. Closing, she said a developed India needs a world-class education system, that teachers are the system's life-breath, and that no student should remain without access to good education. She asked teachers to pass on knowledge, inspiration, ethics and sensitivity, and ended with thanks, Jai Hind and Jai Bharat.

Read the ceremony through the Vigyan Bhawan address of 05 September 2026 rather than through unofficial awardee count forwards. The Presidential PDF is the text locked for this Education desk item. Related garden visits to Amrit Udyan on Teachers Day belong to a separate UGC circular and should not be folded into this awards story.