Economist Raghuram Rajan and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research, are among the six winners of the Infosys Prize for 2011 announced on Wednesday. The annual Infosys prize, instituted in 2009 for five disciplines, carries India?s biggest prize money of R50 lakh and is given out by the Infosys Science Foundation which is funded by a corpus of R100 crore.
Rajan, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and currently honorary economic advisor to the Prime Minister, was awarded the social sciences prize for his work in analysing the contribution of financial development to economic growth as well as the potentially harmful effects of dysfunctional incentives that lead to excessive risk-taking, said the citation.
Mehta has been awarded the prize for social sciences for his contribution to political philosophy and social theory besides ?insightful analysis of India?s politics and public policy,?it said.
The prize for engineering and computer science went to Kalyanmoy Deb, director of the Kanpur Genetic Algorithms Laboratory for his work in the emerging field of Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimisation which has helped devise algorithms that are fast, accurate and scalable.
Imran Siddiqi, scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, won the Life Sciences Prize for breakthrough contributions to the basic understanding of clonal seed formation in plants. The fifth prize, for Mathematics, went to Kannan Soundararajan, director of the Mathematics Research Centre, Stanford University, for his work in analytic number theory.
The prize for Physical Sciences was awarded to Sriram Ramaswamy, professor, department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science for pioneering work on the mechanics and statistics of active matter.
?We want to create new heroes for India, new heroes for younger people to aspire and follow,? TV Mohandas Pai, president of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation told reporters, adding that the trustees will review the prize money depending on the returns from the corpus.
