Awards & Honours - Current Affairs for May, 2017

The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee presented the Hindi Sevi Samman Awards for the year 2015 today (May 30, 2017) at a function held at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

These Awards were instituted by Central Hindi Institute, Agra in 1989.

The scholars received awards in 12 different categories for their contribution in the field of Hindi language and literature.

Hindi Scholars from Japan and the United States of America are among 26 individuals given awards by President Pranab Mukherjee for promoting Hindi language.

Fujii Takeshi (Japan) and Gabriela Nik Ilieva (US) were presented the George Grearson Award for promoting Hindi language.

Also, Pushpita Avasthi (the Netherlands) and Padmesh Gupta (London) were honoured under Padma Bhushan Moturi Satyanarayan award category.

The awardees in different categories include:

Minister of Defence, Finance & Corporate Affairs Shri Arun Jaitley gave away Raksha Mantri’s Awards for Excellence for the years 2014-15 and 2015-16 in recognition of exemplary performance amongst Ordnance Factories and the Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs).

For the year 2015-16 : -

INSTITUTIONAL AWARDS

Satyabrata Rout has been awarded Sangeet Natak Akademi Puraskar for the year 2016.

He is a professor from the Department of Theatre Arts, S N School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH).

He has been awarded for developing a unique method of teaching and practicing direction and design achieved from his experience working with eminent theatre practitioners and scholars.

Satyabrata Rout is considered as one of the pioneers of ‘visual theatre’ in India.

He has a rich experience of directing a number of plays, participating in national and international theatre festivals and conducting a numerous theatre workshops across the globe.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi Puraskar (Akademi Award) is an award given by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. The award is the highest Indian recognition given to practicing artists.

The award includes a purse of INR 50000, besides a Tamrapatra and Angavastram.

The awards are being presented in the categories of music, dance, theatre, other traditional arts and puppetry.

Sangeet Natak Akademi: Know More

• The Sangeet Natak Akademi was set up in 1953 for the promotion of performing arts.
• Setting up of Sangeet Natak Akademi is one of the main recommendations of the National conference on Dance, Drama, and Music, held in New Delhi in 1951.
• The Sangeet Natak Akademi is an Autonomous Body under the Ministry of Culture
• It acts at the national level body for the promotion and growth of Indian music, dance and drama
• It also oversees maintenance of standards of training in the performing arts and recognition of outstanding artists
• It is involved in the revival, preservation, documentation and dissemination of materials as well as instruments relating to various forms of music, dance and drama.

Avid bird watcher, Rohan Chakravarty has turned his love for wildlife and environment into his muse by drawing cartoons centred on conservation issues under the banner of Green Humour, a comic strip that is being distributed internationally.

Rohan Chakravarty, a wildlife and environment cartoonist from India, has won this year’s International President’s Award for his efforts to change attitudes towards nature.

The award is the top accolade given by WWF to recognise leadership in young conservationists who are under the age of 30 from around the world.

The award ceremony was held recently in Manado, Indonesia. Hailing from Nagpur (also known as the tiger capital of India), Chakravarty has been an enthusiastic bird watcher since childhood.

He was on his way to becoming a dentist when the sighting of a magnificent tigress at a waterhole at Nagzira Tiger Reserve threw his planned career off gear.

Today, this young cartoonist and illustrator has made his mark for sketching passionately and consistently on wildlife, climate change and other environmental issues and has many national and international magazines and newspapers lining up for his works.

With over 400 cartoons, Chakravarty probably has one of the largest online cartoon repositories - under the banner of Green Humour - that centres around environmental issues.

Reliance Jio has received TM Forum’s ‘Digital Service Innovator of the Year Award’ 2017.

TM Forum is the industry association driving digital business transformation of the communications industry.

Reliance Jio got this award by acquiring 90 million customers in four months.

Digital Service Innovator of the Year Award is given to the company or organisation which has made the most significant and innovative contribution to advancing the digital revolution in society.

In the category of Smart Business Provider, Verizon and Ericsson together won the Business Transformation of the Year Award.

Verizon: Know More

• Verizon Enterprise Solutions worked with Ericsson to provide a virtual services environment enabling the rapid launch of the new offerings targeted at enterprises across the globe.
• The solution from Ericsson provides end-to-end service orchestration, closed-loop service assurance and virtual network function (VNF) onboarding and testing and supports self-service for Verizon’s customers.
• It uses Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration, leveraging abstraction, model-driven configuration and automation techniques to contain underlying complexity.
• The Ericsson VNF Factory enables efficient onboarding and validation of NFV’s into Verizon’s ecosystem - all reducing time to market for new Verizon enterprise services.

Thespian Soumitra Chatterjee and India’s longest serving boss Y.C. Deveshwar were conferred the Banga Samman, West Bengal’s highest civilian award, by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on 20th May, 2017.

The Banga Samman awards were instituted in 2011, after Banerjee came to power. Celebrated artistes, singers, sportspersons, filmmakers, intellectuals have been honoured with these awards in the past.

Two categories of awards are presented as part of Banga Samman - Banga Bhushan and Banga Bibhushan.

Industrialist Deveshwar, pulmonologist Dhiman Ganguly, former Mizoram Governor Arun Prasad Mukherjee, veteran actor Chatterjee, and acclaimed poet Nirendranath Chakraborty were conferred the highest category of awards, the Banga Bibhushan.

Recipients of Banga Bhushan this year are Bangladeshi singer Rezwana Chowdhury Banya, folk singer Hidmat Fakir, Chapal Bhaduri, the last living female impersonator in folk theatre in India, baul exponent Lakshman Das Baul and Liver Foundation secretary and gastroenterologist Abhijit Chowdhury.

Prashant Ranganathan has emerged winner in the world’s largest pre-college science competition in the environment engineering category.

He won the award for his work on biodegradation of pesticides.

Prashant is among the 20 high schools students from various parts of the country who participated in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held in the US.

More than 1700 students across the world had participated in the event. Prashant Ranganathan is a student of Carmel Junior College in Jamshedpur.

His project titled ‘Biodegradation of Chlorpyrifos using native bacteria’ is aimed at helping farmers to biodegrade the harmful pesticides.

In all, Four Indian-Americans received top awards in various categories.

Indian American Pratik Naidu has won an award in the category of computational biology and bioinformatics.

Other Indian-American winners include Adam Nayak who has won in earth and environmental sciences, Karthik Yegnesh in Mathematics and Rahul Subramaniam in the microbiology category.

Renowned wildlife biologist, Dr Purnima Devi Burman, in May 2017 was nominated for the prestigious Whitley Awards.

Burman has been nominated for her relentless efforts and campaigns for the conservation of the Greater Adjutant Stork locally known as Haargila in Assam.

The wildlife biologist has been working with the Dadara, Pachariya and Hingimari villages of Kamrup district to save the Greater Adjutant Stork.

She is associated with Aaranyak, a Guwahati based NGO, which works for wildlife conservation.

Whitley Awards: Know More

• The Whitley Awards are given annually by the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN).
• Also known as Green Oscars, it is given to recognize and celebrate effective national and regional conservation leaders across the globe.
• The awards are worth £ 35000 and are now amongst the most high profile of conservation prizes.
• The awards particularly seek to recognize contributions to wildlife conservation made from outside the developed world.
• It also aims to bring to international attention the work of deserving individuals committed to precipitating long-lasting conservation benefits on the ground.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have secured first and second rankings for the second consecutive year in public affairs index (PAI) released by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), Bengaluru.

Gujarat has been ranked third followed by Karnataka and Maharashtra at the fourth and fifth position respectively in governance indicators.

The last four positions among the large states has been occupied by Bihar (18th), Jharkhand (17th), Odisha (16th) and Assam (15th).

Among the 12 small states which have been categorised as small as they have population less than two crore, Himachal Pradesh has been ranked first followed by Goa and Mizoram.

Delhi which occupied third position in 2016 index has slipped to ninth position in 2017.

The three last positions among small states have been occupied by Meghalaya (12th), Arunachal Pradesh (11th) and Jammu and Kashmir (10th).

The survey was carried out based on 10 themes, 26 focus subjects and 82 indicators.

In the category of essential infrastructure, Punjab has been adjudged as the best performer among all States followed by Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.

In the category of human development, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Punjab are the best performers while Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam are the worst performers.

In implementation of social protection policies, Kerala, Assam and Madhya Pradesh are the best performers while Telangana, Haryana and Punjab are the worst performers as they lagged behind other states in executing various State and Central government schemes.

In the category of women and children, Kerala has been adjudged as the best performer while Jharkhand, Haryana and Maharashtra are poor performers. In the category of fiscal management, Telangana has been adjudged as the best performer while Andhra Pradesh has been labelled as the poor performer.

For maintaining law and order, delivery of justice and environment categories, Tamil Nadu has been adjudged as the best performer but the state has been ranked last in the parameter of transparency and accountability in the administration.

In the category of economic freedom, Gujarat has secured top rank while Bihar has secured the last rank. PAC Public Affairs Centre (PAC), Bengaluru had come up with a Public Affairs Index (PAI) to rank governance inter-state by using data available in the public domain in key areas of governance.

PAC: Know More

• Public Affairs Centre (PAC) is a not for profit think tank.
• It was established in 1994 with a mandate to improve the quality of governance in India.
• The genesis of PAC is attributed to Dr. Samuel Paul in the early nineties.
• The objective of Public Affairs Index (PAI) is an attempt to bring together the states of the country which are culturally, economically and socially diverse, into a common data-driven framework in order to facilitate an interstate comparison.
• A well-framed methodology backed by statistical data from government sources, has been included in the study to provide insights into the subject of good governance.

Hollywood actor Emma Watson has received the first-ever Genderless Acting Award for the Best Actor category at the MTV Movie and TV Awards.

This is the first ever genderless award that doesn’t separate nominees based on their sex.

The 2017 edition of the MTV Movie & TV Awards were held on May 7, 2017, in Los Angeles, California. It was the 26th edition of the awards.

The MTV Movie & TV Awards is a film and television awards presented annually to winners decided online by the general public.

Emma Watson is a British actress, model, and activist. She is famous for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter film series.

India’s cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar plans to support charities and various initiatives to help the under-privileged people in the second innings of his life and he received the Fellowship Award at the 7th annual Asian Awards on may 8, 2017.

Sachin played for India for 24 years was a memorable journey and winning the world cup was icing on the cake.

Now in the second chapter of his life he plans to support charities and various initiatives to help the under-privileged people.

Providing solar lights to poor people in India was one of them, Tendulkar said. He called on the stage 8-year-old Hollywood star Sunny Pawar who had earlier won the Rising Star award for his role in the film ‘Lion’.

The ceremony, which celebrates excellence in the global Asian community, also paid tribute to Indian actor Om Puri.

The award for outstanding achievement in Cinema was posthumously conferred on Om Puri who died earlier this year at the age of 66.

India’s playback singer Adnan Sami won the Fellowship Award for ‘Outstanding achievement in Music.”

Other award recipients were Krishnan Guru-Murthy (Outstanding Achievement in Television), Ajay Banga (Business Leader of the Year), Masayoshi Son (Entrepreneur of the year).

Some others were Nisha Dutt (Social Entrepreneur of the year), Dr Jack Preger (Philanthropist of the year), Ding Punhui (Outstanding achievement in sport), Demis Hassabis (Outstanding achievement in Science and Technology) and Sir Harpal Kumar (Outstanding contribution to the community).

Sachin Tendulkar: Know More

• Born: 24 April 1973 Mumbai
• Test debut (cap 187): 15 November 1989 v Pakistan
• ODI debut (cap 74): 18 December 1989 v Pakistan
• Last ODI: 18 March 2012 v Pakistan

The 44^th Daytime Emmy Awards was announced on 30 April 2017 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, in Pasadena, Los Angeles.

General Hospital was declared the Outstanding Drama Series at the 44th Daytime Emmy Awards, while Jeopardy! grabbed the Outstanding Game Show award.

Complete list of winners

The Tamil Nadu government on 2 May 2017 conferred the 2017 Avvaiyar Award to Padma Venkataraman, a social worker.

She is also the daughter of former Indian President, the late R Venkataraman.

Padma was honoured with the award for her efforts in the field of women’s welfare and the rehabilitation of leprosy-affected people since the past 30 years by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami.

The prize carried a cheque of Rs 1 lakh, a gold medal weighing 8 gm and a certificate.

Padma Venkataraman who is the Chairperson of Women’s Indian Association (WIA) called the award a great honour and stated that it reflects the involvement of Tamil Nadu state’s government and CM in the advancement of women, children, the differently-abled and leprosy affected people. S

He further added that the award will only strengthen her resolve to serve the society as best as possible.

Avvaiyar Award: Know More

• The award was constituted by late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2012. It was named after the Tamil poetess Avvaiyar.
• It aims to honour women who have done excellent service in the areas of social reform, women’s development, culture, media, inter-faith harmony, and administration, among others.
• The award carries a cash prize of INR 1 lakh, 8 gram of gold and a certificate.
• In 2016, the award was conferred to M Sarada Menon, founder of Schizophrenia Care and research Foundation (SCARF) for the welfare of mentally challenged.
• Prior to that in 2015, the award was given to Shanthi Ranganathan, the founder of T. T. Ranganathan Clinical Research Foundation, for her service towards treatment and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol addicts.

The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in the last week of April 2017 announced the names of the recipient of the INSA Medal for Young Scientist 2017.

A total of 30 scientists have been chosen for the prestigious award.

The award, consisting of a bronze medal and cash award of INR 25000 will be given to the recipients during INSA’s anniversary meeting scheduled in December 2017.

The INSA Young Scientists Award is considered to be the highest recognition of promise, creativity and excellence in a young scientist.

The INSA award was instituted in 1974 by the Indian National Science Academy.

List of INSA award recipients

The US-India Business Council (USIBC) has selected Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu for the ‘Transformative Chief Minister Award.'

This is for his role in advancing the US-India partnership at the state level.

The award will be presented to him at the USIBC West Coast Summit in the Silicon Valley on May 8th.

The USIBC West Coast Summit will see the participation of Indian government officials.

Also part of this are 150 industry leaders from sectors such as information technology, banking, food processing, healthcare, clean energy, digital payments, and manufacturing.

The organisation aims to explore the impacts of manufacturing in India, digitisation, move towards adoption of a cashless society and the future of the US-India trade relations.

The companies such as Amazon, Paypal, Deloitte, Facebook, Mastercard, Dell, TransAsia, Varian Medical and Visa will attend the summit.

In addition, the Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT Aruna Sundararajan will also be honoured with the ‘Transformative Leadership Award’ for excellence in public service and for her role in advancing US-India cooperation and Digital India.

Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog was the last year’s recipient of this award.

USIBC: Know More

• USIBC was established in 1975 as a business advocacy organization for encouraging the private sectors in the US and India to enhance investments.
• It acts a direct link between business and government leaders to enhance the trade and investment ties between the two nations.
• USIBC works in partnership with major trade associations of India like The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) among others.
• President and CEO of MasterCard Ajay Banga is the current chairman of USIBC.

Two Indian-origin women veterans of the freedom struggle in South African were conferred the highest National Order awards by President Jacob Zuma on 28th April 2017.

Fatima Meer posthumously received the Order of Luthuli in Silver; while Shantie Naidoo joined 21 others to receive the same award at the Presidential Guest House in Pretoria.

Meer, a lifelong friend of the late Nelson Mandela together with her husband Ismail Meer, started her activist career as a high school student aged 17 in 1945.

Meer mobilised high school students and established the Students Passive Resistance Committee to canvass and raise funds for the Passive Resistance Campaign.

Excelling as a historian and sociologist, Meer was a prolific writer, including a biography of Mandela, as well as the script for the film Taj Mahal, made by Indian filmmaker Akbar Khan.

In 1969, she published a book, Portrait of Indian South Africans, donating the total proceeds thereof to the Gandhi Settlement towards the building of the Gandhi Museum and Clinic at the Phoenix Settlement started by Gandhi.

After the advent of democracy in 1994 under President Mandela, Meer served as a member of the parliament before passing on in 2010.

Naidoo is a descendant of Thambi Naidoo, one of Gandhi's most trusted lieutenants during his tenure in South Africa at the turn of the last century.

She suffered frequent imprisonment as a member of the Transvaal Indian Congress and the African National Congress.

African National Congress: Know More

• Abbreviation : ANC
• President: Jacob Zuma
• Chairman: Baleka Mbete
• Secretary-General: Gwede Mantashe
• Spokesperson: Zizi Kodwa
• Deputy President: Cyril Ramaphosa
• National Chairperson: Baleka Mbete
• Deputy Secretary General: Jessie Duarte
• Treasurer General: Zweli Mkhize
• Founder: John Dube, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Sol Plaatje
• Founded : 8 January 1912

Pawan Munjal-led Hero MotoCorp was conferred the ‘Indian MNC of the Year’ award by the All India Management Association (AIMA).

The award comes as the two-wheeler maker is set to enter the potentially lucrative markets of Brazil.

Brazil is Latin America’s largest two-wheeler market with annual sales in excess of two million units, and Mexico, which has a market size of more than half a million units per year.

Hero MotoCorp: Know More

• Headquarters: New Delhi
• Founder: Brijmohan Lall Munjal
• Parent organization: Hero Cycles

Yusra Mardini, a Syrian woman who helped save a boat carrying fellow refugees, has been appointed by the UN agency for refugees as its new Goodwill Ambassador.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Mardini’s actions saved the lives of 20 refugees who were fleeing the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Mardini, 19, was also one of the 10 athletes who made up the historic Olympic Refugee Team and participated at the Rio Olympic Games last year.

Yusra Mardini: Know More

• Yusra Mardini is a Syrian swimmer currently living in Berlin, Germany.
• She was a member of the Refugee Olympic Athletes Team, that competed under the Olympic flag at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
• Born: 5 March 1998, Syria
• Height: 1.57 m
• Nationality: Syrian