President Droupadi Murmu gives away first-ever Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar

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.

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.