Chandralekha Singh (KGP 1988) & Jeremy Levy Student Excellence Awards in the honour of Prof. Mandakini Majumdar and Prof. G P Sastry
 
Recipients for 2018-19: Shubham Jena and Prajwal Singhania
 
IIT KGP is instituting several new student awards and scholarships from the upcoming semester beginning July 2018. The Chandralekha Singh (KGP 1988) and Jeremy Levy Student Excellence Awards in the honour of Prof. Mandakini Majumdar and Prof. G P Sastry will be conferred on Foundation Day to Shubham Jena and Prajwal Singhania.
 
For alumna Prof. Chandralekha Singh [1988/MSc/PH/SN] and her husband Prof. Jeremy Levy from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, the motivation was commemorating the names of former faculty members at IIT Kharagpur. Late Prof. Mandakini Majumdar (nee. Deshpande) and Prof G P Sastry profoundly impacted the lives and careers of their students. While the former, was a pioneering woman engineering expert to serve as a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, the latter who taught at the Department of Physics, was a very popular teacher and wrote several text books. For Prof. Singh and Prof. Levy, who themselves are academicians at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, these are legacies of teacher-student rapport of a close-knit campus like IIT Kharagpur.
 
The annual award will be given to top two undergraduate students at IIT Kharagpur admitted through JEE (Advanced) and studying in 2nd or 3rd or 4th and 5th year in any Department, School or Center, without any backlog. The amount of the award will be Rs. 50,000/- per student per academic year.
 
The award is instituted to recognize and support excellence in academics for those who come from families of limited means. A key criterion of this award is the flexibility in deciding the means background which has been extended to not exceeding Rs. 10 Lakh per year. The amount may be slightly adjusted every year based on Cost of Living Index.
 
“We have observed that the upper cut off for economic background of students for existing scholarships and awards are at such a threshold, that students falling in marginally higher category do not qualify for those benefits. While considering the cost of living, they too need some sort of financial support” opined Prof. Subrata Chattopadhyay, Dean, Alumni Affairs.
 
This donation was facilitated by the IIT KGP Foundation USA. The Foundation earlier this year, facilitated donations for funded foreign internships and a hi-tech ambulance for the students.
 
“We are working extensively with our alumni in USA, UK, Canada, Australia to offer a varied range of support for the students. The alumni are already supporting students’ travel for international competitions or host them while they are visiting those countries” said Prof. Chattopadhyay.