About 400 students from 84 countries participated in the IPhO including five students from India, who secured medals, Dr Vijay Singh, National coordinator of the Science Olympiad said here.
"There is no official ranking of nations. However in terms of medals tally India stood at the fifth position among 84 nations. Our students were competing with the best students from other countries and in-spite of the stiff competition, we did well," he said.
Sumegha Garg from Bhatinda, who won the gold medal, topped the girls category in IPhO and stood 11th among 393 students who won medals. Other two gold medal winners are Shubham Mehta from Kota, Rajasthan and Burle Sai Kiran from Hyderabad.
Another student, I Prudhvi Tej from Dwaraka Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh missed the gold medal by a slender margin of 1.1 marks, Singh said.
Incidentally, Prudhvi stood first in the IIT- JEE exam. Nisheeth Lahoti from Jaipur, Rajasthan also secured a silver medal.
Sumegha was a topper among girls in IIT-JEE while Mehta secured second rank and Kiran got fourth rank in the IIT joint entrance exam. Lahoti had stood ninth, Singh said.
All the five meritorious students were trained for over a month at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), he said.The five students were selected via three-tier process. The first-tier consisted of a nation wide examination in Physics in which over 36,000 students appeared.
The remaining two-tiers comprised series of difficult selection tests both theoretical and practical.
The team was led by two leaders Prof Charudatt Kadolkar, College of Engineering, Pune and Dr M K Raghavendra, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and a scientific observer Praveen Pathak, HBCSE, Mumbai.