17 scientists win Swarnajayanti Fellowships; Six from IITs among awardees

IITs, IISc, IISER and TIFR scientists dominate the list while there are none from any of the central university or state universities in the list.  

As many as seventeen scientists from scientific institutions across India have been awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowships for their innovative research ideas and the potential of creating an impact on Research and Development (R&D) in different disciplines.

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) dominate the list with six scientists belonging to the IITs alone. There are two each from IIT Bombay, Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune.

Scientists selected for the award will be allowed to pursue unfettered research with freedom and flexibility in terms of expenditure as approved in the research plan. The scientists with a proven track record and selected through a rigorous three-layered screening process will pursue basic research in frontier areas of science and technology.

Swanajayanti Fellowship scheme

The Swanajayanti Fellowship scheme was instituted by the Government of India to commemorate India’s fiftieth year of Independence. Under the scheme, the awardees are facilitated by the Department of Science & Technology, with support for all the requirements for performing the research including a fellowship of Rs 25,000/- per month for five years. In addition, DST supports the awardees by giving them a research grant of 5 lakh Rupees for 5 years. The fellowship is provided in addition to the salary they draw from their parent Institution.

In addition to fellowship, grants for equipment, computational facilities, consumables, contingencies, national and international travel and other special requirements, are covered based on merit.

Dr Rishi Raj, Associate Professor (Mechanical Engineering) and Associate Dean (Resources) at IIT Patna is among the winners. Prof Atul Dixit, Associate Professor of Mathematics at IIT Gandhinagar, has also won the prestigious Swarnajayanti Fellowship in the category of Mathematical Sciences for the year 2020-21. It is for the first time that the Swarnajayanti Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences category has been awarded to a researcher from Gujarat.

The fellowship is awarded for a period of five years. In addition, the projects of the fellowship recipients are considered for funding by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB).

Prof Dixit has been awarded this fellowship for his research project titled – ‘Generalized Herglotz functions, zeta functions arising from modular relations, asymptotics of generalized Lambert series, and mock theta functions’; which broadly lies at the interface of Analytic Number Theory and Special Functions.

Sharing his thoughts on getting one of the prestigious fellowships in the country, Prof Atul Dixit said: “I feel really happy and am humbled to receive this fellowship. It is heartening to see your research work getting appreciation. I am hopeful that some of the work that I have done in Special Functions, especially the theories of generalised modified Bessel and Hurwitz zeta functions, will eventually find applications not only in various areas of mathematics but also in engineering and sciences. Any award or fellowship of this kind comes with a huge responsibility. I will strive hard to live up to the expectations put forth by the Swarnajayanti interviewing panels, the mathematical community, and various well-wishers. Receiving this fellowship has already boosted my confidence. It will constantly remind me to perform better than before. It will help not only me but also my students and postdocs to pursue unfettered research and collaborate with various mathematicians from around the world.

The other awardees include Dr Siddhesh S. Kamat, IISER Pune; Dr Sridharan Devarajan, IISc Bengaluru; Dr Niti Kumar, CSIR-Central Drug Research Institute Lucknow; Dr Nitin Gupta, IIT Kanpur; Dr Modhu Sudan Maji, IIT Kharagpur; Dr Sakya Singha Sen, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory Pune; Dr Chandramouli Subramaniam IIT Bombay; Dr Mousomi Bhakta, IISER Pune; Dr Ujjwal Koley, TIFR; Dr Arvind Singh, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad; Dr Subhro Bhattacharjee, TIFR Bengaluru; Dr Pabitra Kumar Nayak, TIFR Hyderabad; Dr Shamik Banerjee, Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar; Dr Mayank Shrivastava, IISc, Bengaluru and Dr Amartya Mukhopadhyay, IIT Bombay.

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