2024 Goldman Environmental Prize

♦ Alok Shukla was awarded the prestigious 2024 Goldman Environmental Prize. He is a renowned environmental activist and convenor of Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan. This prize is also known as the “Green Nobel Prize”. 
♦ The Goldman Environmental Prize is an annual award honours grassroots environmental champions worldwide for their outstanding contributions to environmental protection.
♦ Alok gets this award for his work to protect Hasdeo Arand, one of the largest contiguous stretches of very dense forest in central India spanning 170,000 hectares, with 23 coal blocks.  

2024 Goldman Environmental Prize winners list:

2024 Cambridge Dedicated Teacher Awards

♦ Gina Justus was named the regional winner for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the prestigious 2024 Cambridge Dedicated Teacher Awards.

♦ She is an English High School teacher at the Sharjah Girls Branch in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Justus, originally from Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) has been working in the UAE since 2005 and was recognised for her                 outstanding mentorship and dedication to charity. 

♦ The 2024 competition saw a record-breaking number of nominations, with over 14,840 submissions from 141 countries. 

♦ The Cambridge Dedicated Teacher Awards is a global competition that honors exceptional primary and secondary school teachers. 

Ratan Tata

♦ Ratan Tata was honoured with the prestigious KISS Humanitarian Award 2021 on 22 April 2024.

♦ This recognition stands as a testament to his unwavering dedication to social development and outstanding corporate leadership.

♦ The award was announced in 2021, but Tata was unable to receive the award then because of the Covid pandemic.

♦ This award was established in 2008 by Achyuta Samanta, the KISS Humanitarian Award holds the highest esteem of KIIT and KISS, aiming to acknowledge individuals and organizations that epitomize humanitarian work on a global scale.

Kaushik Rajashekara

♦ An Indian-origin professor Kaushik Rajashekara elected as an International Fellow of the Engineering Academy of Japan. Currently, he is the Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering. This honour recognizes his outstanding contributions to the field of power conversion and the electrification of transportation.
♦ In 2022, Mr Rajashekara received the most coveted prize in the field of international energy - the Global Energy Prize - bestowed by the Global Energy Association. Only three people in the world were selected in 2022 for the honour out of a record 119 nominations from 43 countries.

Lata Deenanath Mangeshkar Award 2024

♦ Amitabh Bachchan will be honoured with the Lata Deenanath Mangeshkar Award 2024 for his career and contribution to the film industry.

♦ Previous recipients of this esteemed award include Prime Minister Narendra Modi and popular singer Asha Bhosale.

♦ This award was established by the Deenanath Mangeshkar Smriti Pratishthan in memory of the late Bharat Ratna awardee and legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar on February 6, 2022.

♦ The Pratishthan decided to honour several others with the Master Deenanath Mangeshkar award: music director AR Rahman and veteran Marathi actor Ashok Saraf for music; Padmini Kolhapure for films; singer Roopkumar Rathod for Indian music; actor        Atul Parchure for Marathi theatre; and retired teacher and author Manjiri Phadke for literature. Additionally, actor, producer, and director Randeep Hooda received a special award for his contributions to cinema.

John L. Jack Swigert Jr. Award

♦ India's Chandrayaan-3 mission team was awarded the prestigious 2024 John L. 'Jack' Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration. The award was accepted by India's Consul General in Houston, D C Manjunath, on behalf of the ISRO at the inaugural event of the annual Space Symposium in Colorado.

♦ With the successful Chandrayaan-3 mission in August, 2023, India became the first country to land on the South pole of the moon.

♦ John L ‘Jack’ Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration is an honour bestowed by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in recognition of outstanding contributions to space exploration. It is named after John L. ‘Jack’ Swigert Jr., an American astronaut who flew on the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.