It was built by Electronics Corporation of India, Hyderabad, for the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and was assembled at the campus of Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle.

The telescope is named after the Soviet scientist Pavel Cherenkov, who predicted that charged particles moving at high speeds in a medium emit light.

The high-energy gamma rays emitted from black holes, centers of galaxies and pulsars do not reach the land as they get absorbed in the atmosphere.

Upon interaction with the atmosphere, these photons produce electron–positron pairs, leading to a cascade of particles which while moving at very high speed give rise to Cerenkov radiation.

A high-resolution imaging camera weighing about 1200 kg, for detection and characterization of the atmospheric Cherenkov events, forms the focal plane instrumentation of the telescope.