No Engineer Good for Infy Prize This Year

New Delhi: India churns out around seven lakh engineers every year. And yet how many of them are actually good enough to win some of the prestigious domestic and global awards? The issue has come to the forefront with Infosys Technologies reportedly having failed to find a worthy candidate for its Infosys Engineering Science Prize 2009.

The company has decided not to give the prize in that category to anyone this year. Infosys' Chief Operating Officer (COO), SD Shibulal, told that there were 34 nominees for the engineering and computer science prize but even after relaxing the age limit to 55 years, the jury could not find anyone who met all the criteria of the Infosys Prize. So, the jury took the unanimous decision to not award the prize for the engineering sciences discipline this year.

Infosys Science Foundation is a not-for-profit trust set up by Infosys Technologies. The company has named three scientists and two academic experts as winners of Infosys Prize 2009 for outstanding contributions to scientific research.

The winner in physical sciences is Thanu Padmanabhan of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophyics, Pune, in recognition of his contribution to a deeper understanding of Einstein's theory of gravity in the context of thermodynamics. For mathematical sciences, Ashoke Sen of Harish Chandra Research Institute at Allahabad was given the prize in recognition for his contributions to mathematical physics. For life sciences, K VijayRaghavan of National Centre of Biological Sciences in Bangalore got the award.

The winner in the social sciences and economics category is Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his contributions to the economic theory of development. Upinder Singh of the University of Delhi won an award for her contributions as an outstanding historian of ancient and early medieval India.

Wipro to hire 5000

Hyderabad: Considering a fresh recruitment strategy of taking in graduates from non-engineering institutes, Wipro plans to hire around 5,000 people in the next couple of months.

"Our strategy is to recruit non-engineering graduates, in addition to engineering and make them fit into the slot. We are still working out the details," said Wipro Technologies Joint CEO Girish Paranjpe. Refusing to divulge more details for next year's recruitments and outlook, Paranjpe said that it would be a mix of 60 percent freshers and 40 percent experienced.

Last year the company made offers to as many as 8,500 persons through recruitment drives in colleges and institutions. "We expect clients to make no further cuts in their budgets. We expect 2010 to be a better year than 2009," Paranjpe said on the sidelines of dedicating renovated Manikonda Lake at Hyderabad facility to the community.

He said that the new hiring strategies will be worked out in a month or two. Attrition rate in the company currently stands at ten percent. On becoming energy efficient, he said that the company is determined to reduce the carbon emission per employee by 45 percent from the present 3.96 tonnes to 2.5 tonnes in the next five years. "Our power consumption went down by 12 percent last year and we are planning to set up a micro windmill at our Hyderabad facility soon," said Paranjpe.