IIT Delhi Alumni Award for
Outstanding Contribution to
National Development 2012-2013
Dear Alumni,
We are pleased to inform that the IIT Delhi
Alumni Association has decided to confer upon
the IIT Delhi Alumni Award for Outstanding
Contribution to National Development 2012-13
as follows:
Mr. Ajay Kumar, 75, BT, EL
Mr. Shashank Tripathi, 86,BT,ME
A brief profile of the awardees is enclosed for
your information. IIT Delhi Alumni Association
shall be conferring these awards at the Annual
General Body Meeting on 27 th April 2013 at
Seminar Hall, IIT Delhi.
Regards,
Pravin Purang
Secretary
IIT Delhi Alumni Association
-------------------------------------------------
Mr. Ajay Kumar received his B.Tech. and
M.Tech. degrees in Electrical Engineering from
IIT, Delhi in 1975 and 1977 respectively. He
has been a full time ‘development
professional’, working with NGO’s,
governments, companies, professionals,
academics and academia for the last 35 years.
His focus has been on rural development /
technology, renewable energy, e-governance,
agriculture / livelihood of small and marginal
farmers, strengthening NGOs and motivating
young professionals to work in the
development sector.
For his contemporaries and youngsters, he is a
role model who has taken the unconventional
route, the ‘road less travelled’. Even here he
has mostly worked as a free-lancer, preferring
the un-structured path rather than the
“alternate” structures that most development
professionals opt for. He is admired by many
in the NGO sector, by bureaucrats, IIT-ians,
professionals, especially young professionals,
friends and, last but not least, the beneficiaries
in villages and other places where he has
worked.
As a development professional he has taken a
multi-dimensional approach, and has worked
on/ with a large number of aspects of
“development”, from personal growth to team
working to social organization, models of
development, NGOs, volunteering, motivation
of young professionals, thought process of
Gandhi and other development thinkers,
manpower mobilization, fund raising,
networking with individuals and institutions,
policy formulation in government, and more.
The foundation for this multi-dimensional
approach evolved through interaction within a
group of friends and associates, namely Mr.
Anand Kumar, Dr. NN Mehrotra, Dr. Vibha
Gupta, Mr. Vinoo Kaley and Ajay. This group
took up several unconventional and innovative
initiatives in the decade of 1980’s which
helped Ajay to understand development from a
multi-dimensional perspective. The group itself
had the good fortune to learn from national
level policy planners, as well as thinkers and
practitioners of rural development.
Ajay had his first major brush with rural
development activities while heading the NSS
unit at IIT Delhi. His interaction with top
scientists and policy planners at that stage was
crucial in building in him the confidence to go
ahead and make the development sector a
career choice. The Centre for Rural
Development and Appropriate Technology
(RDAT) at IIT New Delhi was a product of such
interactions. Later on he worked for four years
in villages in and around Wardha, in
Maharashtra, in an institution setup by
Gandhiji to work on Science & Technology
issues. Here he had extensive exposure to
Gandhiji thoughts, Gandhian institutions, and
followers of Gandhi. He then shifted to
Gujarat, where he spent almost two decades. In
early 2000 he shifted to Madhya Pradesh. He
currently lives & works in Bhopal. His wife, Dr
Upma Diwan is a full time social worker who
has lived and worked with Aadivaasis for more
than 30 years in Madhya Pradesh.
He spent most of the decade of the eighties in
motivating young professionals to choose to
work in the development sector, and also
helped setup an institution, along with a few
other pioneers from industry, government and
the NGO sector in Gujarat, on the theme of
‘Science & Technology Missionaries’.
He was a member of the team that
conceptualised and implemented the first
‘Rural Technology’ project initiated by the
Department of Science and Technology
(Government of India) in 1979 at Wardha, and
was head of the team that setup the first solar
energy village in India (Gujarat) in 1984.
He was also active in relief and rehabilitation
work after the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984,
drought relief in Gujarat in 1987-88 and in
relief and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the
Gujarat earthquake in 2001, in the company of
his friend and colleague, Anand Kumar.
Between 1999 and 2003 , as a small deviation
from his main focus, he spent 4 years working
in the software industry in Delhi, Bangalore,
the USA and in Singapore as a specialist in
software engineering tools and processes
(Rational Rose & Rational Unified Process).
Since 1995 Ajay has been actively involved in a
large number of e-governance projects that
are specially relevant to the poor, to
agriculture and to livelihood issues. These
include the computerisation of the Gujarat
High Court & the Gujarat District Courts,
AGRISNET, a project about ICT based services
to farmers through the Department of
Agriculture (MP), an e-PDS project linking
Ration Cards to the UID/ Adhaar card under
the Department of Food & Civil Supplies (MP),
an NREGA project of Maharashtra Government,
etc. He has also been a member of the
committee on e-governance setup by the Prime
Minister.
Over the last decade or so Ajay Kumar has
been working with farmers’ organizations and
the Madhya Pradesh Department of Agriculture
& Mandi Boards. He also worked as an advisor
to a corporate house on CSR activities in the
field of agriculture and rural development for
several years. He was also a member of a
committee setup by the Planning Commission
on “ICT and Agriculture” for the 12 th Five Year
Plan.
As he was not a regular earner Ajay Kumar was
initially supported, financially, by his mother,
and later by his wife. Equally important has
been the contributions, from time to time, of
friends from IIT, IIM, the software industry,
NRIs and other friends from business and
industry. Many of these friends in Delhi,
Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh
opened up their houses for him – for days,
months and even years. This experience has
sustained and increased his optimism about
the possibility of good in society.
One of his major interest areas is –
strengthening the civil society sector and NGOs
by networking, creating new networks, getting
professional inputs into the sector, devising
mechanisms to enroll quality manpower into
the sector and involving the civil society in
policy formulation in partnership with
government. He is concerned about the
marginalization of smaller NGOs and is keen to
increase their contribution and participation in
the development process
He has been and continues to advise many
NGOs in Gujarat, Maharashtra, MP and Delhi
besides interacting with policy planners on
issues of development. He makes himself
available for e-governance projects in MP and
around.
He loves to keep in touch with the ground
reality by living in villages and interacting with
different types of beneficiaries specially the
poor in the rural, tribal and remote areas. His
wife has enriched this experience by her close
link with people in remote tribal areas.
Many elders have guided him in this journey
and he wishes to acknowledge their
compassion and contribution.
---------------------------------------------------
Mr. Shashank Tripathi received his Bachelor
of Technology Degree in Mechanical
Engineering from IIT, Delhi in 1986. Mr.
Tripathi is currently the Partner and Head of
Strategy - PwC India and is leading the Strategy
Consulting practice of PwC India.
He is the Chairman of Yagriti Seva Sansthan, an
NGO that is working for the development of
the villages in Eastern UP, and also supports
young entrepreneurs.This NGO has been
relentlessly working towards rural upliftment,
and supporting young entrepreneurs who want
to contribute towards building a better society
Some of his major accomplishments include:
Author of - India: A journey through a healing
civilization. This book captured the 1997 Yatra,
which was published in August 2007 on the
60th Anniversary of India's independence by
Harper Collins India.
He is also Founder and Creator of Jagriti Yatra,
which has now become a phenomena in the
country to promote youth enterprise for the
development of middle India. This initiative
has done 6 journeys till now across the
country, taking 400-450 carefully selected and
motivated youth across the country in a
dedicated train for 8000-9000 km, to meet
role models like Elango, Anna Hazare, Arvind
Eye Care etc, learn from it, and provides a
solid basis for these youngsters to start their
own social enterprise. This initiative is widely
covered by media and supported by companies
like Tata, Google, Dell, Etc. Mr. Tripathi is very
passionate about national development and has
been working hard to give the necessary
exposure and platforms to young
entrepreneurs to learn from role models and
start their social ventures
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