India’s Grandmaster tally has risen to 93, with 17-year-old Aarav Dengla earning the prestigious title after completing all formalities this month.
The Mumbai youngster secured his third and final GM norm and saw his classical live rating climb to 2506, comfortably crossing the 2500 mark required for the title.
Dengla achieved the milestone with back-to-back victories at the GM Mix Bijeljina and GM Norm Round Robin tournaments in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He earned his first GM norm at the 1st International Grandmaster Tournament in Bijeljina in 2022 and his second at the Zupanja Celebrates Chess GM-Norm Round Robin in Croatia in 2025. In 2024, he also won the prestigious Grand Paris Masters Championship, the oldest chess tournament in France, scoring a perfect 7/7 against a 250-player field at Blanche de Castille High School near Paris.
Introduced to chess by his mother at five, Dengla turned a hobby into a serious pursuit of the Grandmaster title. A student at Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai, he also won gold at the 2024 FIDE World Schools Rapid and Blitz Championships. He is India’s second Grandmaster of 2026, after Aaryan Varshney, while Viswanathan Anand was the country’s first GM in 1988.
