STATE TIMES NEWS
NEW DELHI: President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday conferred the first-ever Vigyan Ratna Puraskar — India’s top most science award — on noted biochemist and former director of the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science Govindrajan Padmanabhan.
The Minister of Science & Technology, Dr. Jitendra Singh thanked President Draupadi Murmu for sparing her valuable time to present the first edition of Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar-2024, beginning from this year.
He said, the awards aim to recognise India’s scientific talent and the extraordinary achievements of Indian scientists in Science, Technology and Innovation.
At an award ceremony in the Ganatantra Mandapam of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the President also conferred 13 Vigyan Shri Puraskar, 18 Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes and one Vigyan Team award, marking the first investiture ceremony for science awards.
The team of scientists and engineers who worked on the Chandrayaan-3 mission were honoured with the Vigyan Team award, which was received by project director of the mission P Veeramuthuvel.
All the awardees received a medal and a citation for their outstanding achievements in their respective fields.
Annapurni Subramaniam, director of Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics; Anandharamakrishnan C, director of Thiruvananthapuram-based National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology; Avesh Kumar Tyagi, director of the chemistry group at the Bhabha Atomic Research Institute; Prof Syed Wajih Ahmad Naqvi of Lucknow-based CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute were among the 13 recipients of the Vigyan Shri awards.
Biologist Umesh Varshney from Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science; Prof Jayant Bhalchandra Udgaonkar of the Pune-base Indian Institute of Science Education and Research; Prof Bhim Singh, Emeritus Professor of IIT-Delhi; Sanjay Behari, director of the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology; Prof Adimurthi Adi of IIT-Kanpur, Rahul Mukherjee of IIM-Kolkata also received the Vigyan Shri awards.
Physicists Naba Kumar Mondal of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and Lakshmanan Muthuswamy of the Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli; Prof Rohit Srivastava, IIT Bombay also received the Vigyan Shri awards.
The Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards were given to climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll of the Pune-base Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology; Prof Vivek Polshettiwar of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Prof Vishal Rai of IISER-Bhopal; Krishna Murthy S L of Indian Institute of Rice Research and Swarup Kumar Parida of National Institute of Plant Genome Research.
Prof Radhakrishnan Mahalakshmi of IISER-Bhopal, Aravind Penmasta of IISc, Bengaluru; Abhilash of the CSIR-National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur; Radha Krishna Ganti of IIT-Madras; Purbi Saikia of Central University of Jharkhand; Bappi Paul of the National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar were among the Vigyan Yuva awards.
Pragya Dhruv Yadav of the Pune-based ICMR-National Institute of Virology, who played a key role in development and evaluation of Covid-19 vaccines; Prof Jitendra Kumar Sahu of Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh; Mahesh Ramesh Kakde of IISc, Bangalore were among the recipients of the Vigyan Yuva awards.
Urbasi Sinha of the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore; Digendranath Swain of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram; Prashant Kumar of the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad; and Prof Prabhu Rajagopal of IIT-Madras also received the Vigyan Yuva awards.
These new sets of awards — Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar — were instituted last year by the government after scrapping all existing science awards.