CHENNAI: Twentyone scientists were honoured with the Tamil Nadu Scientist Awards (TANSA) by the State Government on Wednesday for their outstanding contribution.
The awards for 2005 and 2006, each carrying Rs.10,000 and a citation, were distributed by Maharaj Kishan Bhan, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, at a function organised by the Tamil Nadu State Council for Science and Technology at the Central Leather Research Institute.
This is the first time that the awards have been conferred on women, and the first year that an award has been given to a scientist from a college.
Thangam Menon, University of Madras, Chennai, received the 2006 award in Medical Sciences for her work in microbiology. K. Meena, Shrimathi Indira Gandhi College, Tiruchi, won the 2006 award for her research in mathematical techniques for problem solving through artificial neural networks.
Dr. Bhan said a State would only champion science and technology if it believed it was critical to its progress.
“In today’s India, where the economy is driven by a low-cost economic model of manufacturing and services, many would say you can prosper without being a frontier science State,” he said.
“But a knowledge economy can only be founded on discovery and innovation, which is matched to our skills in services and manufacture.”
Building this knowledge economy involved pulling down the walls between the government, academia and industry, crafting an institutional structure capable of capitalising on opportunities and creating a national instrument to quantify and qualify innovation.
In the short term, he said, the best way to deliver the results of science is to find better ways of disseminating information, he said.
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