Daijiworld Media Network - Mangaluru

Mangaluru, Jan 25: Renowned space scientist Udupi Ramachandra Rao, popularly known as U R Rao and Mangaluru-origin educationist Anant Agarwal, are among the nine eminent achievers from Karnataka named for this year's Padma Awards.

Former chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Prof U R Rao has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second highest civilian honour.

Anant Agarwal (literature and education), Bharathi Vishnuvardhan (art - cinema), Sukri Bommagowda (art - music), Prof G Venkatasubbiah (literature and education), Girish Bharadwaj (social work), Chamu Krishna Shastry (literature and education), Shekar Naik (sports - cricket) and Vikas Gowda (sports-discus throw) have been named for the Padma Shri Awards.

Anant Agarwal, a Mangalurean is the founder-president of eDX.com, an online platform that brings courses from the likes of MIT and Harvard free for all. He has been a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. In 2012, he was named by Forbes magazine among the 15 "classroom revolutionaries" who are using innovative technologies to reinvent education for students and teachers globally.

Son of Dr K L Agarwal and Vijaya, Anant Agarwal is married to Anuradha and the couple is blessed with two children Anisha and Akash. Agarwal did his early education in city's St Aloysius College right from std 1 to second PUC (1977). He then moved to IIT-Madras where he did his BTech, and followed it up with MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Standford University, USA. At MIT, he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also founded Tilera, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design.

He has been featured in Guiness Book of World Records too for the largest microphone array in the world. He was conferred the USA Presidential Award for Young Scientists in the year 1999 and the Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architechture in 2001.

Born in Admar to Lakshminarayana Acharya and Krishnaveni Amma, Prof U R Rao is currently the chairman of the governing council of Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium at Bengaluru, and chancellor of Indian Institute for Space Science and Technology (IIST) at Thiruvananthapuram. He had earlier received the Padma Bhushan in 1976.

In 2013, he became the first Indian to be inducted into the Satellite Hall of Fame, Washington by the Society of Satellite Professionals International. He is the also first Indian to be inducted into the International Astronautics Federation.

He has been honoured with Karnataka Rajyotsava Award in 1975 and 1983, Yuri Gagarin Medal of USSR in 1991, Sir M Visvesvaraya Memorial Award in 2002, Lifetime Achievement Award by ISRO in 2007, Distinguished Scientist Gold Medal of the Karnataka Science & Technology Academy in 2007, and many other national and international awards.

Girish Bharadwaj, known as the 'bridge man of India', hails from Sullia. He is recognized for building affordable and reliable footbridges in villages, and till date, he had built over nearly a hundred low-cost suspension bridges across rivers in the Western Ghats by using local and eco-friendly resources. This way, he has connected several villages in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.

As a young engineer, Bharadwaj, a graduate of PES College of Engineering, Mandya, started his journey in 1975 with a small workshop named 'Ayas Shilpa' in Sullia. In 1989, villagers from Arambur approached him with a request for a footbridge over the river Payasvini to connect them to the mainland. After putting in much thought and efforts, he built the 87-mt long Arambur footbridge, and since then, there has been no looking back. For his service over the years, he has won several awards including the CNN-IBN Senior Citizen Award.

Sanskrit proponent Chamu Krishna Shastry, the co-founder of Samskrita Bharati movement which aims to popularise Sanskrit across the world, was born in January 1956 at Kedila near Mangaluru. As a young man, he was influenced by the writings of V D Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda on Sanskrit, and went on to learn and master the language. In 1981, he along with his friends launched the 'Speak Sanskriti' movement, which gradually evolved into Samskrita Bharati. Today, the organization is active all over the country and 13 nations incluing the USA, Canada and the UAE. Shastry has authored 13 books in Sanskrit. His 'Saraswati Seva' project is aimed at translating books from other Indian and foreign languages in to Sanskrit. He was also a member of the central government-constituted Sanskrit committee that developed the 'Road Map for the Development of Sanskrit – Ten Year Perspective Plan' document in 2016.

Bharathi Vishnuvardhan, born in 1948 into a Marathi-speaking family in Karnataka, is a veteran multi-lingual actress in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu films. She was most seen as a leading actress in the Kannada film industry during the late 1960s to 1980s.

She married legendary Kannada actor the late Vishnuvardhan in 1975. Bharathi came to limelight with her perfomance in the supporting role in the 1966 film 'Nadodi' starrng M G Ramachandran. She forayed into Hindi cinema with 'Mehrbaan' in 1967. her first Kannada movie was 'Love in Bangalore' in 1966. Her other Kannada movies include 'Sandhya Raga', 'Bangaaradha Manushya', 'Doorada Betta', 'Gandondu Hennaru', 'Bangarada Jinke', 'Bhagya Jyothi' and so on. She also starred in Kannada serials like 'Janani' and 'Mukta-Mukta'.

Prof G Venkatasubbiah is a Kannada writer, grammarian, editor, lexicographer and critic who has compiled over eight dictionaries, authored four seminal works on dictionary science in Kannada, edited over sixty books and published several papers. Recipient of the Kannada Sahitya Akademi Award and the Pampa Award, Prof Venkatasubbiah's contribution to the world of Kannada Lexicography is vast. Prof Venkatasubbiah is best remembered for his work on Kannada dictionary on science titled 'Kannada Nighantu Shastra Parichaya'. His work 'Igo Kannada' serves as a reference for linguists and sociologists alike. He was born in August 1913 at Ganjam village, Srirangapatna in Mandya. Among the many awards he has received are Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, Rajyotsava Award, Karnataka Sahitya Academy Honorary Award, Pampa Award, Nadoja Award and so on.

75-year-old Sukri Bommagowda is known as the nightingale of the Halakki Vokkaliga tribes of Uttara Kannada. She hails from Ankola. A folk singer, Sukri has contributed immensely to preservation of folklore and environment in the tribal area she lives in. She has thousands of folk songs in her memory that were traditionally handed down by word of mouth in the tribal areas of Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. She is also an oral historian. She has led movements against alcohol consumption and deforestation. She was earlier awarded the 'Janapada Sri' by the Karnataka Janapada Academy.

Shekar Naik, a blind cricketer, was born in 1986 in Shivamogga. He led India to victory in the first T20 World Cup in 2012 and the ODI World Cup in 2014. He comes from a poor background and faced extreme hardship as he lost his parents at the age of 12. He was completely blind in both eyes at birth, but gained 60 percent vision after an operation on the right eye later in life. He started playing cricket after joining a school for the blind, and moved up the ladder of success step by step.

Mysore-born discus thrower Vikas Gowda holds the national record in discus throw, set in 2012, at 66.28 metres. The 2014 Incheon Asian Games silver medallist also had the pride of being only the second Indian man to win an athletics gold at the Commonwealth Games when his throw of 63.64m at the 2014 Glasgow Games got him a cherished yellow metal.