3 Indian students win Gates Cambridge scholarship

Three Indian students are among 50 from around the world chosen for this year’s prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 and awarded annually to the “world’s most brilliant” scholars. They are Siddhartha Kar, Suhasini Sen and Anand Shrivastava. They will begin their courses at Cambridge University in October. The university said that the competition this year was “intense” and the 50 successful candidates from 23 countries were chosen on the strength of their “potential to improve the lives of others in a multitude of important ways.”

“We are delighted to have awarded Gates Cambridge Scholarships to 50 outstanding individuals from over 20 countries in the International selection round. The scholars come from diverse backgrounds and will pursue a wide range of subjects at Cambridge. Most importantly, they fit the mission of the Scholarship: they convinced us at interview that they have real potential to improve the lives of others in a multitude of important ways,” said Professor Robert Lethbridge, Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Mr. Kar, who has an MBBS degree from the B. J. Medical College, Pune, will study for a PhD in public health and primary care with focus on the genetic epidemiology of cancer. “My research will involve the application of exciting emerging technologies. My experiences so far have left me profoundly conscious of global disparities in cancer care. I aspire to use my education in cutting edge public health genomics to eventually organise large-scale studies in India to further elucidate genetic risk factors for cancer,” he says in his profile.

Ms. Sen, a graduate of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, and a practicing lawyer from Delhi, will study for LLM. Her area of interest, she says, is the balance that needs to be struck between compulsions of national security and curtailment of civil liberties. “At what stage or in what context does it become morally and legally permissible to dilute principles of presumption of innocence and personal liberty? I believe that it is essential for a legal practitioner to have some answers to these questions, and it is to this end that I am pursuing an LLM,” she says.

Mr. Shrivastava, a product of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, will do an MPhil in economics. “I am particularly interested in the assessment of the costs and benefits of forest land, the variation in these costs and benefits across the population and the political economics of the conversion of forest land for industrial use,” he says.

Source: The Hindu, April 12, 2012

>Gates Foundation sanctions Rs. 4.6 million to Punjab Agri University

> Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has sanctioned Rs. 46 lakh (Rs. 4.6 million) to Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) to undertake research on poverty in the state. With an objective of tracking changes in rural poverty in the household and village economies of Punjab, the project will initially run for three years (2011-14) and is likely to be extended for another five years, an official release said.

Mr. Manjit Singh Kang, Vice Chancellor, PAU said the project is need of the hour as the state is reeling under economic squeeze, indebtedness and farmer suicides, and poverty ratio in small and marginal farmers and agriculture labourer household have risen in recent years. He said the main purpose of the project is to develop data base at farmer household level on consumption and production parameters, and track changes in poverty and other economic variables over time.

Aiming at strengthening capacity building in the university for further policy analysis in the agriculture sector, the project will be implemented in all the three zones representing sub-mountainous areas, Central Punjab and Southern Punjab. The district level data for agriculture sector will also be collected to arrive at a clearer profile on the spatial attributes and correlates of poverty.

R. S. Sidhu, Principal Investigator (Project)-cum-Dean, College of Basic Sciences and Humanities, PAU, said this project concurrently runs in India and Bangladesh and is being implemented by National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NCAP), New Delhi and ICRISAT, Hyderabad.

At first, the project was intended to be taken up in Semi-Arid Tropics and Humid Tropics India and Punjab was not intended in its coverage, he said. During the launch of this project in India in 2009, a meeting with Gates Foundation at Delhi was held where they (Kang and Sidhu) pitched for the inclusion of Punjab in the ambit of this study because of its relevance and importance.

Source: Press Trust of India, April 26, 2011

>Four Indian students win Gates Scholarship at Cambridge

>Four Indian students are among 60 from 29 countries who have been awarded the prestigious Gates Scholarship for postgraduate studies at the Cambridge University. Describing them as the “world’s most brilliant students,” the university said they were selected from among the several thousands who applied for the scholarship set up in 2000. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it enables academically gifted postgraduates with a strong interest in social leadership and responsibility to study at Cambridge.

Professor Robert Lethbridge, Provost (CEO) of the Gates Cambridge Trust, said: “This is an outstanding group of young men and women with a wide range of backgrounds, interests and career trajectories; what binds them together is a desire to ‘give back’ by using their education and leadership to tackle global problems and improve the lives of others. We are sure they will make significant contributions in the future.”

Sukrit Silas from Delhi will study for a Ph.D. in Pathology as would Bangalore-born Divya Venkatesh. Raghu Mahajan from Chandigarh will do Part 3 of the Mathematical Tripos and hopes to go on to do a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics while Anand Shrivastava, a product of IIT Madras, will study for an M.Phil. in Economics.

Source: The Hindu, April 12, 2011