New Delhi: President Draupadi Murmu on Thursday conferred the first ‘Vigyan Ratna Award’ to renowned biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Govindarajan Padmanabhan. The government has instituted this highest award in the field of science this year.
The President also presented 13 Vigyan Shri Awards, 18 Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awards and one Science Team Award at the award ceremony held at the ‘Ganatantra Mandapam’ of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The team of scientists and engineers working on the Chandrayaan-3 mission were honoured with the ‘Science Team’ award. The award was received by the mission’s project director P Veeramuthuvel.
All the awardees were given a medal and a citation for outstanding achievements in their respective fields. The scientists honoured with the ‘Vigyan Shri’ award include Annapurni Subramaniam, Director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru; Anand Ramakrishnan C, Director, National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram; Aavesh Kumar Tyagi, Director, Chemistry Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Institute; Professor Syed Wajih Ahmad Naqvi, CSIR-National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow.
Biologist Umesh Varshney of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Professor Jayant Bhalchand Udgaonkar of Pune-based Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Emeritus Professor Bhim Singh of IIT Delhi, Director of Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Science and Technology Sanjay Bihari, Professor Adimurthy Adi of IIT Kanpur, Rahul Mukherjee of IIM Kolkata were also awarded the Vigyan Shri Award.
Apart from these, physicist Naba Kumar Mandal of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and Lakshmanan Muthuswami of Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli and Prof. Rohit Srivastava (Technology and Innovation) were awarded Vigyan Shri.
The Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize was awarded to Roxy Mathew Kole, climate scientist at the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Professor Vivek Polshettywar of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Professor Vishal Rai of IISER-Bhopal, Krishnamurthy S L of the Indian Institute of Rice Research and Swarup Kumar Parida of the National Plant Genome Research Institute.
Professor Radhakrishnan Mahalakshmi of IISER-Bhopal; Abhilash of CSIR-National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur; Radha Krishna of IIT-Madras; Purabi Saikia of Central University of Jharkhand; Bappi Paul of National University of Forensic Sciences, Gandhinagar were among the recipients of the Science Yuva Puraskar.
Apart from these, Pragya Dhruv Yadav of ICMR-National Institute of Virology, Pune, Professor Jitendra Kumar Sahu of Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh; Mahesh Ramesh Kakde of IISc, Bangalore were among the recipients of the Science Yuva Puraskar.
Urvashi Sinha of Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, Digendranath Swain of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, Prashant Kumar of Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad and Professor Prabhu Rajagopal of IIT-Madras were also awarded the Science Yuva Puraskar.