Proud moment awaits India at Tech awards

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 14 October 2010, 10:42 IST
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California: India will be yet again honored for its rich talent when an Indian company that converts rice husks to electricity will represent the nation at the 10th annual Tech Awards, a black-tie gala to be held Nov. 6 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. The Indian technology is one among the 15 inspiring projects from around the world to be honored by The Tech Museum of Innovation which will honor an elite group of inventors and activists who are making world-changing projects at the grass roots. Out of these 15, five will take the top prizes at the Tech Awards, presented by Applied Materials, a signature program of The Tech Museum. Husk Power Systems of Patna, a small company based in Bihar, designs, operates and installs 35- to 100-kilowatt mini-power plants that convert rice husks into electricity. This fabrication helps more than 50,000 rural Indians to receive power in a financially sustainable, scalable, environmentally friendly, and profitable manner. The founders are thrilled that their work has earned international recognition. "It feels great to know that people half way across the world are aware of and appreciate the hard work the HPS team is doing," said Ratnesh Yadav, the company's co-founder and COO. There are other notable Indian strides along with several other projects at work in South Asia which have been named this year's Tech Award Laureates. This includes International Development Enterprises India who manufactures and distributes a variety of foot-operated, water-lifting devices that can irrigate small plots of land in regions that have high water tables and enables more than 800,000 farmers to shift from rain-dependent cultivation to year-round cultivation of high crops. This year's Tech Awards attracted 1,011 nominations which had projects representing the work done in 54 countries, up from 44 last year. Last year had South Asians and South Asian Americans who were either Tech Award Laureates or top winners including Salman Khan, founder of the influential online Khan Academy; PATH, a company founded by an Indian American that makes a novel, iron-rich Ultra Rice which packs micro-nutrients into each tiny grain; and Akshaya Patra, a huge school lunch program that serves 1.2 million Indian children a day.