National Innovation Foundation has selected Agricultural Correspondent of The Hindu M.J. Prabhu for its media award for popularising grass roots innovations through the Farmers’ Notebook column of the newspaper.
The Foundation, set up by the Department of Science and Technology, seeks to provide institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots innovations and help their transition to self-supporting activities.
The former Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, R.A. Mashelkar, is its Chairperson. Anil Gupta, Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and president, Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI), is its executive vice-chairperson.
Complimenting Mr. Prabhu, Chief Innovation Officer of the Foundation Vipin Kumar noted that the articles in the column on new technologies developed by the grass roots innovators had led to the commercialisation of several of them.