AWARDS OCTOBER 2015

AWARDS OCTOBER 2015

• Raif Badawi: Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for ‘insulting’ Islam, was awarded the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov human rights prize on 29th October. The 31-year-old blogger, who was arrested in 2012, is an outspoken advocate of free speech whose vicious public flogging in January, when he was subjected to a first round of 50 lashes, triggered an international backlash.
  
  Announcing the award, parliament head Martin Schulz called on Saudi King Salman to immediately release Badawi, denouncing his sentence as “brutal torture” and demanding that Riyadh live up to Europe’s standards on the crucial question of human rights.
  
  Badawi, who co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network Internet discussion group, was detained in 2012 on cyber crime charges. Like most Saudis, Badawi is a Sunni Muslim but his network had announced a “day of liberalism” and called for an end to the influence of religion on public life in the kingdom. He was arrested and the website shut down on grounds it criticised Saudi Arabia's notorious religious police. He was initially charged in 2013, and last year a Saudi court sentenced him to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in jail.
  
• Angus Deaton:Scottish economist Angus Deaton has won the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences. He got the award for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in Stockholm today. Deaton, who was born in Edinburgh in 1945, now works at Princeton University in the United States.
  
  The economics award is not a Nobel Prize in the same sense as the others, which were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in 1895. Sweden's central bank added the economics prize in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel.
  
  The announcement concludes this year's presentations of Nobel winners. The awards will be handed out on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896, at lavish ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo.
  
• Arun Jaitley: Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has been chosen as 'Finance Minister of the Year, Asia' by London-based publication Emerging Markets. In an article the magazine said that Mr Jaitley too deserves 'some recognition' for India's relative economic success over the last 18 months.
  
  Emerging Markets had chosen Pranab Mukherjee as 'Finance Minister of the Year, Asia' in 2010. The article said the government must continue the privatisation programme, which is under strain, and "must convince the investment community that the sale agenda is intact and that the money can be raised. Emerging Markets is part of Euromoney Institutional Investor plc, one of the largest providers of financial information worldwide.
  
• Marlon James: Jamaican author Marlon James has won the Man Booker Prize for his novel inspired by the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the 1970s. Michael Wood, chair of the Judges, described A Brief History of Seven Killings as the most exciting book on the shortlist. The 680-page epic was full of surprises as well as being very violent and full of swearing.
  
  The Man Booker prize, which was launched in 1969, aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom.
  
  To maintain the consistent excellence of the Man Booker Prize, judges are chosen from a wide range of disciplines, including critics, writers and academics, but also poets, politicians and actors, all with a passion for quality fiction.
  
  The Man Booker International Prize was established in 2005, biannually rewarding an author for a body of work originally written in any language as long as it was widely available in English. From 2016, the prize will become a translation prize, awarded annually for a single work of fiction, translated into English and published in the UK.
  
• Satyarthi: Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi has been selected for the prestigious Harvard Humanitarian of the Year Award. The award is given by the University annually to an individual whose works and deeds have served to improve the quality of lives and inspired people to greater heights
  
• Sourabh Bansal: Power2SME, in collaboration with TiE Delhi-NCR, announced the winners of the second edition of the Spirit of Manufacturing Awards on 16th October.
  
  The Young Entrepreneur of the Year award was won by Sourabh Bansal, founder and Managing Director of Magicrete. Ayush Sinhal, Director, Crystal Power, got the award for IT Adoption and Innovation, while the International Business Leader award went to Sandip Patil, founder of E-Spin Nanotech.
  
  The Social Impact award was won by Sumita Ghose, founder and MD of Rangsutra, and the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year went to Pragati Sawhney, founder, Chockriti. The Special Jury Award went to Mausami Ambastha, Founder-Director of Thread Sol.
  
  The jury members were Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman, IIT-Patna and co-founder of HCL, Sunil Bhalla, co-founder and Director of Lava Mobiles, Priyank Narayan, Director of Entrepreneurship at Ashoka University, and Sudha Sarin, VP-Marketing & Communication at Power2SME.
  
• Nobel Prizes: Three scientists from Japan, China and Ireland whose discoveries led to the development of potent new drugs against parasitic diseases such as malaria and elephantiasis won the Nobel Prize for Medicine on 5th October.
  
  Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura won half of the prize for discovering avermectin, a derivative of which has been used to treat hundreds of millions of people with river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis. China's Youyou Tu was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has slashed malaria deaths and has become the mainstay of fighting the mosquito-borne disease.
  
  The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said these two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually.
  
  The laureates will receive their prizes at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel.
  
• Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald: Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two researchers had made key contributions to experiments showing that neutrinos change identities.
  
  The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the academy said in its statement in Stockholm. Kajita is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and Professor at the University of Tokyo. McDonald is a Professor Emeritus at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
  
  The winners will split the 8 million Swedish Kronor (about USD 960,000) prize money. Each winner also gets a diploma and a gold medal at the prize ceremony on December 10.
  
• Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for discoveries in DNA repair. Their work uncovered the mechanisms used by cells to repair damaged DNA - a fundamental process in living cells. According to Nobel Committee the recipients had explained the processes at the molecular level that guard the integrity of our genomes. The prize money of eight million Swedish kronor will be shared among the winners.
  
• Svetlana Alexievich: Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. The prize committee called her writing a monument to courage and suffering. The 67-year-old author is the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in its history.
  
  Her best known works in English translation included Voices From Chernobyl, an oral history of the nuclear catastrophe; and Zinky Boys, a collection of first-hand accounts from the Soviet-Afghan war. Alexievich is a political writer who is critical of her home country's government. The author was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother.
  
• Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet wins Nobel Peace Prize for 2015: Tunisia's "National Dialogue Quartet" on 9th October won the Nobel Peace Prize for building democracy after the 2011 revolution which unleashed the Arab Spring. The Nobel Peace Prize jury cited the group on Friday for "its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.
  
• John Williams: Five-time Oscar winner John Williams will be the recipient of the 44th AFI Life Achievement Award at its gala tribute to be held in Los Angeles next year.
  
• Shashi Kapoor honoured with Lifetime Achievement award
  Veteran Bollywood star Shashi Kapoor was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award at a star-studded closing ceremony of the 6th Jagran Film Festival on 4th October.
  
• Jacob Tsimerman: The 2015 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto, Canada. The prize will be awarded during the International Conference on Number Theory at SASTRA University in Tamil Nadu’s Kumbakonam (Ramanujan’s hometown) where the prize has been given annually. The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize was established in 2005 and is awarded annually for outstanding contributions by young mathematicians to areas influenced by the mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
  
• Ratan Tata: Leading Indian industrialist Ratan Tata has been felicitated by the city of Coventry with its highest award in recognition of his contributions to the West Midlands region of central England.
  
  The Tata Group Chairman Emeritus took oath as an Honorary Freeman of the City of Coventry, an award only 13 people have been conferred with since 1914. Tata was honoured alongside Indian-origin professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, founder of the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), at the University of Warwick in Coventry, at a special ceremony at Coventry Cathedral.
  
  Earlier this year, Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) had reaffirmed its long term commitment to Coventry and the West Midlands with a confirmation of a further 600-million-pound investment to support product creation and advanced vehicle manufacturing.
  
  The group is also among key contributors to a new 150-million-pound National Automotive Innovation Centre under construction on the University of Warwick campus.
  
• RC Bhargava: Maruti Suzuki Chairman RC Bhargava has been honoured with the lifetime achievement award at the Forbes India Leadership Awards, 2015. The award recognises his invaluable contribution to the Indian business community and exemplary leadership demonstrated over the years
  
  An IAS topper of 1956 batch, Bhargava was one of the founding members of Maruti in 1982. He led the company as Managing Director from 1990 to 1997. Bhargava, who has been Chairman of the country’s largest car maker since 2007, also serves on the board of several leading corporates.