Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar | Former IISc director G Padmanabhan first to receive Vigyan Ratna

New Delhi: Noted biochemist Govindrajan Padmanabhan, a former director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru on Wednesday has been named as the first recipient of Vigyan Ratna – India’s top most science award instituted by the union government.

The Vigyan Ratna is among the 33 Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (national science awards) that are given to eminent as well as young scientists in 2024.

These awards will be given every year by the government, which has decided to come out with a uniform set of awards rather than having over 300 awards by different scientific departments.

Apart from the lone Vigyan Ratna, there are 13 Vigyan Shri and 18 Vigyan Yuva awards this time. Also a Team Vigyan award has been announced for ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 team.

Padmanabhan, internationally acclaimed for his research on malaria parasites, is also a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, Padma Shri and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards.

The 13 Vigyan Shri awardee includes Annapurni Subramaniam, director of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru (space science and technology) and IISc professor Umesh Varshney (biological sciences).

Other Vigyan Shri awardees are agriculture scientist Anandharamakrishnan C, Avesh Kumar Tyagi (atomic energy), Jayant Udgaonkar (biological sciences), Syed Wajih Ahmad Naqvi (earth sciences), Bhim Singh (engineering sciences), Adimurthi Adi and Rahul Mukherjee (mathematics and computer science), neurosurgeon Sanjay Behari (medicine), Lakshmanan Muthusamy and Naba Kumar Mondal (physics) and Rohit Srivastava (technology and innovation).

The Vigyan Yuva awardees for young scientists are Krishna Murthy S L and Swarup Kumar Parida (agricultural science), Radhakrishnan Mahalakshmi and Aravind Penmatsa (biological sciences), Vivek Polshettiwar and Vishal Rai (chemistry), Roxy Mathew Koll (earth sciences), Abhilash and Radha Krishna Ganti (engineering sciences), Purabi Saikia and Bappi Paul (environmental science), Mahesh Ramesh Kakde (mathematics and computer science), Jitendra Kumar Sahu and Pragya Dhruv Yadav (medicine), Urbasi Sinha (physics), Digendranath Swain and Prashant Kumar (space science and technology) and Prabhu Rajagopal (Technology and Innovation).

According to the norms, a 17-member panel headed by the Principal Scientific Advisor Ajay Sood selected the winners. Other members of the panel are six science secretaries, four presidents of science and engineering academies and six distinguished scientists.

In 2022 Union Home Ministry asked the science departments to drastically cut down on the number of awards they confer and institute “new awards with high stature” including a special Nobel Prize like award (Vigyan Ratna) that would be open to all.

President Droupadi Murmu is expected to confer the awards on August 23, the National Space Day, to mark the landing of Chandrayaan-3 near the south pole of the moon.