Manthan Award South Asia 2008

Hon'ble Patrons & Advisors

Shri Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia
Hon'ble Minister of State, Department of Communications & Information Technology, India
 
Shri Scindia is currently Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in the Govt. of India. He is widely educated having studied at Doon School, Dehradun, Harvard University & Stanford University (USA). Mr. Scindia is the son of Late MP Shri Madhavrao J. Scindia. He represents Guna constituency in MP in the current Lok Sabha. He represents the youth brigade of the current political leadership.

Peter A. Bruck
Dr. jur., Ph.D., M.A.,
Mr. Bruck was born in Vienna in 1950. He studied Law, Social and Economic Sciences at the University of Vienna; Fulbright Scholar in Soziologie an der University of Iowa; Graduate Studies and Humanities Fellow in Communication an der McGill University; Professor of Journalism and Communication an der Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor at the Department of Communication Studies (1990-1995), Honorary Professor for Information Economics and New Technologies at the Department of Economic Sciences at the University of Salzburg.

Prof. Anil Gupta
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IMA)
B.Sc. (Agri), M.Sc. (Genetics, HAU), Ph.D. (Kurukshetra), Fellow (NAAS), Fellow, The World Academy of Art and Science, California, 2001, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Fellowship in Management.

Prof. Gupta is consultant to several national and international organizations. He established Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) and Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN), two NGOs, respectively to support the Honey Bee Network and to scale up and convert grassroots innovations into viable products. He has also helped set up the NIF (National Innovation Foundation) by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, to help India become an inventive and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala
IIT, Madras
Prof. Jhunjhunwala is a Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and Ph.D degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras.

Bibek Debroy
Mr. Debroy (born 25 January 1954) is an Indian economist, who is currently a Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge. Prof. Debroy has taught at Presidency College, Calcutta, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, International Management Institute (IMI) and National Council of Applied Economic Research. His past positions include the Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies at Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Consultant to the Department of Economic Affairs of Finance Ministry (Government of India), Secretary General of PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Director of the project LARGE (Legal Adjustments and Reforms for Globalising the Economy), set up by the Finance Ministry and UNDP for examining legal reforms in India. He is a member of the National Manufacturing Competitive Council.

Sanjeev Chopra, IAS
Mr. Chopra is at present Secretary with the Govt. of West Bengal. He was also a part of the Grand Jury for Manthan Award 2007. Formerly, he was Secretary IT  with the Govt. of Uttranchal. Where he did yeoman work in spreading IT literacy in the newly formed state. So much so that the state was adjudged the ‘e’ Emerging State by the Manthan Award Jury in 2006.

Dr. Ganesh Natrajan
Chairman, NASSCOM
Mr. Natrajan is currently Vice Chairman NASSCOM. Ganesh has been one of the most successful professionals in the Indian Information Technology Industry, having earlier been part of two major success stories in IT Training and Consulting, NIIT and APTECH. During his ten year stint as CEO of Aptech he grew the company’s revenues fifty times and listed it on the Indian and London Stock Exchanges.

FC Kohli
Widely credited as the father of Indian Software Industry, Fakir Chand Kohli has secured a place in the Indian IT annals of history. Kohli started off as an engineer with Tata Power Company and rose through the ranks to become the deputy general manager. It was then that he was offered the reigns of Tata's fledgling IT company, TCS, in 1969. Over the next two decades and more Kohli shaped the destiny of TCS. He was the first to talk about Tandem, first to import an IBM 3090, to maintain that mainframes are not dead, and to question the openness of open systems-even before most of the world addressed these concerns. He continues to work on projects that is helping spread computing in the country, and in recent years has been focusing on hardware and microelectronics.

Shankar Venkateswaran
Executive Director – American India Foundation
Mr. Venkateswaran joined AIF in June 2002 as the Executive Director – India, based in Delhi. Shankar brings 20 years of experience from the corporate and non-profit sectors. Prior to joining AIF, he was Chief Executive of Partners in Change, a pioneer non-profit organization in the field of corporate social responsibility. He also held various positions in UK-based Action Aid and was involved in appraising, building capacities and monitoring the work of its partner NGOs. Shankar is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

The Manthan Award
HONORARY BOARD MEMBER
Peter A. Bruck
Chairman
World Summit Award
Austria