President Murmu presents first-ever Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar

New Delhi, August 22

President Droupadi Murmu on Thursday conferred the first-ever Vigyan Ratna Puraskar — India's top science award — on noted biochemist and former director of Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Govindrajan Padmanabhan.

At a ceremony in the Ganatantra Mandapam of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the President also conferred 13 Vigyan Shri Puraskars, 18 Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes and one Vigyan Team award, marking the first investiture for these 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 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 and 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 the Bangalore-based IISc; Prof Jayant Bhalchandra Udgaonkar of the Pune-base Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (ISER); 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 and Rahul Mukherjee of IIM-Kolkata also received the award. Physicists Naba Kumar Mondal of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and Lakshmanan Muthuswamy of the Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli and Prof Rohit Srivastava of IIT-Bombay were also honoured with the Vigyan Shri award.

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, were among the recipients.

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 and Bappi Paul of the National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar, were among the yuva awardees.

Pragya Dhruv Yadav of the Pune-based ICMR-National Institute of Virology, who played a key role in the development and evaluation of Covid-19 vaccines; Prof Jitendra Kumar Sahu of Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh and Mahesh Ramesh Kakde of IISc, Bangalore were among the recipients of the yuva awards, too.

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 other science awards.