The President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind, hosted a Conference of Vice-Chancellors of Central Universities, Directors of IISERs and Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru on December 17, 2019) at Rashtrapati Bhavan. During the inaugural session of the Conference, the President presented the 5th Visitor’s Awards.
About Visitor’s Award
The President had announced institution of these awards at the Vice Chancellors’ Conference in 2014 with the aim of promoting healthy competition amongst Central Universities and motivating them to adopt best practices from across the world.
The Visitor’s Award – for Research in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences was presented to Prof. Sibnath Deb from the Department of Applied Psychology, Pondicherry University; for Research in Physical Sciences was presented to Prof. Sanjay Puri from the School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University; for Research in Biological Sciences was jointly presented to Prof. Asad Ullah Khan from the Inter-disciplinary Biotechnology Unit, Aligarh Muslim University and to Dr Partima from the Special Centre for Nano-science, Jawaharlal Nehru University. The Visitor’s Award for Technology Development was conferred on Dr Shaon Ray Chaudhuri from the Department of Microbiology, Tripura University.
Later, addressing the concluding session of the Conference, the President said that universities and higher educational institutions should play a leading role in addressing the specific challenges faced by our nation and our society. Many of these challenges require creative and innovative solutions. It is their paramount duty to ensure that their campuses emerge as spaces that nurture free expression and ideas, where experimentation is encouraged and failure is not ridiculed but seen as learning. In addition, universities should become the laboratories for exposing students to the problems that need to be addressed in the cause of nation-building.
