Current Affairs for IAS Prelims 2011 AWARDS October 2010 Www.upscportal
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AWARDS Social activist Aruna Roy gets Lal Bahadur Shastri award • President Pratibha Patil presented the prestigious Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award forExcellence in Public Administration, Academia and Management to Aruna Roy, social and political activist, at the Rashtrapati Bhavan . • The award carries a prize of Rs. 5 lakh, a plaque and a citation stating that the award was conferred on Ms. Roy for her “arduous journey and dedication towards the issue of the common man.” • It noted that the most significant of Ms. Roy's efforts had been the campaigns fortrans parency and the people' s right to infor matio n, which began in the early 1990s, and, more recently , the right to work campaign. • “These [two] broad-based collective campaigns helped ensure the passage of the Right to Information law and the National Rural Employ ment Guarantee Act [now the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act] by Parliament in 2005.” • Instituted by the Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management with a view to upholding the vision of the late Prime Minister, each year the award honours an Indian, residing either in the country or abroad, who is an exceptionally outstanding and distinguished business leader, management practitioner, public administrator, education or institution bui lde r , for his or her sus tai ned indivi dual contri buti ons and achi evements of high professional order and excellence. Nobel for “test-tube baby” creator • Robert Edwards, the British scientist whose pioneering research with his late colle ague Patrick Steptoe led to the birth of the world's first “test-tube baby'' in 1978, has won this year's Nobel Prize for medicine. • The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize worth ten million Swedish Kronor, described his work as “a milestone of modern medicine.” • “His work has made possible the treatment of infertility , a medical co ndition that affects a large proportion of humanity including more than 10% of couples worldwide,” it said in a statement. Physics Nobel for groundbreaking work on wonder material • A day after winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine, two scientists in Britain struck it “rich” again at Stockholm when Russian-born Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov ofManchester University were named joint winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics for their “groundbreaking” work on experiments with graphene, a new form of carbon with immense possibilities. • At 36, Professor Novoselov, a British-Russian citizen, has been the youngest physicist since 1973 to win a Nobel, a committee official said. • Highl ighti ng the signific ance of their work, the Prize committee said graphe ne could be put to a number of practical uses. Downloaded from: http://www.upsc portal.com www.upscportal.com
