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daa-awardees-2021IIT-Kharagpur names Distinguished Alumnus Awards (DAA) for 2021

Information taken from IIT-Kharagpur Director V.K. Tewari's Facebook Page (December 4, 2021)

IIT Kharagpur is ecstatic to announce the awardees for its Distinguished Alumnus Award 2021 comprising of Prof. Suresh Chandra Mishra, the Chairman of Naval Research Board at DRDO & visiting faculty at IMU, Visakhapatnam. Apart from teaching Naval Architecture, he has been involved in designing ships, boats & other water based infrastructure & also formed the think tank FROST for safety & sustainability of inland water transportation. Commander VK Jaitly is another awardee who is a motivational speaker, consultant & mentor for the corporate world, universities, & colleges across the country. An Advisor at Subir Chowdhury School of Quality and Reliability & at TSG of IIT Kharagpur, he developed the First Multi-Media of India at INS Valsura in 1991 & has been a pioneer in the field of State Wide Area Networks & Network Centric Warfare in Indian Defence Forces. The other two awardees are Dr. Mohan Rao & Krishan Mohan Khanna. A Food Process Engineering & Chief Science Officer, Rainos Consulting USA & Retd. Sr. Director PepsiCo Global R&D, Dr. Rao throughout his 46 years R&D career has active involvement in projects, advisory boards, and technical mentoring & is an internationally recognized authority in the area of food rheology. Mr. Khanna, the Chairman and Founder of i-Watch think tank & foundation has worked with Niti Aayog, the Ministry of Agriculture and many Farmer Producer Organization (FPO’s). He was a mentor & advisor to many Rural Development projects & increased the income of farmers by 3 to 9 times in 2019-21. Another awardee who is a renowned Alumni of IIT KGP is Dr. Mukund Padmanabhan. President and Founder of Guru Krupa Foundation & a Researcher at Renaissance Technologies, he was a topflight researcher at University of California, Los Angeles & at IBM Research with prolific publication in speech recognition and signal processing & chose to give back to his alma maters and communities through philanthropy.

Mukund has given large support to many initiatives at IIT-Kharagpur through the IITKGP Foundation USA. He has been pivotal in helping with the set-up of the Academy of Classical and Folks Arts (ACFA) at IIT-Kharagpur. Here is a link to an article we shared about his support:

Mukund Padmanabhan ('87) gives Huge Support to KGP's Academy of Classical and Folks Arts (ACFA)

In addition to helping with the set-up and programming of the ACFA, he provided a generous contribution to fund seven research fellowships within the ACFA.

Generous Contribution by Mukund Padmanabhan ('87) to fund seven research fellowships

He also helped support student interships for five incoming students to KGP and five outgoing students from KGP.

KGP to get a big donation from Mukund Padmanabhan ('87) of USA to support student internships

Congratulations to Mukund and all 2021 recipients on this special award!