Hari Om Ashram Prerit Doctor Vikram Sarabhai Research Award(HOAPDVSRA)

Overview

About HOAPDVSRA

This award is filed under education in the central scheme directory, yet no candidate can enter it. The Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad decides it from nominations written by other people, and the person being nominated is a working scientist under 45, not a student. The prize is Rs 50,000 and a medal, awarded in alternate years across four research disciplines. What decides most nominations is not the eligibility list at all: it is the date the age is counted from, and the short list of people PRL lets sign a nomination.

Treat this as a research prize rather than a scholarship. It carries no stipend, no course requirement and no institutional enrolment condition, and it recognises work already published rather than study still to be done.

The money behind it is an endowment: the awards were established from funds provided by Pujya Shri Mota of Hari Om Ashram, Nadiad, and the Physical Research Laboratory, a unit of the Department of Space, runs the nomination and selection cycle. The scheme record lists the Ministry of Science and Technology as the provider, so a searcher who goes looking for the ministry's own application window will not find one. Everything operational sits with PRL.

The four fields are narrow and they matter more than the age rule for most people who read this page. Space sciences covers astronomy, astrophysics and planetary and atmospheric sciences. Space applications covers meteorology, hydrology and remote sensing with their ground truths. The third is electronics, informatics, telematics and automation. The fourth is systems analysis or management, which PRL extends to non-linear and non-equilibrium systems in the natural and social sciences. A biologist or an economist is not automatically outside that fourth field: the awardees table shows a 2005 award for a new paradigm for the release and conservation of energy in biological systems, argued through systems biology and the systems analysis of non-equilibrium problems.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The award is biennial and its cycles are named for odd-numbered years, while the paperwork for a cycle often runs into the following calendar year. The scheme record carries no open or close date, so the operative dates are the ones PRL publishes with each call.

Before preparing a nomination, check the PRL page for a current call. The notice on it is written for the 2017 awards and the published awardee table also ends at 2017, so the cycle a nominator can act on today is not something this or any other secondary page can confirm.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The age bar is a fixed calendar date, not a rolling one. For the 2017 cycle PRL required the nominee to be below 45 as on 1 January 2017, meaning born on or after 2.1.1972. Someone who turned 45 the month after that reckoning date was therefore still inside the bar, while someone born a single day before it was outside it, no matter when the nomination itself was filed.

Two things the guidelines do not impose are worth stating plainly, because searchers arrive here expecting them from other central schemes. There is no income ceiling, and there is no category quota. Nothing in the published notice conditions the award on family income, on caste category or on the nominee holding a post at any particular class of institution.

What does condition it is authorship of the nomination. PRL accepts nominations only from heads of academic and research institutions, Vice-Chancellors, Fellows of the Indian Academies of Science and Engineering, and past recipients of the award. A scientist who meets every other line of the eligibility list and cannot get one of those signatures has no route in.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme record publishes no exclusion list. Three things do that work in practice: the calendar age cut-off, the four-discipline boundary, and the fact that nobody may put their own name forward. A past unsuccessful nomination is explicitly not an exclusion, and PRL invited re-nomination of candidates from the 2015 and 2013 cycles through a fresh nomination meeting the current criteria.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing renews. This is a single cash prize with a medal, not a fellowship with a tenure, so there is no continuation form, no annual verification and no attendance or marks condition. The only thing that repeats is the cycle itself, which runs in alternate years, and a nominee who was not selected can be put forward again.

What you get

Award & benefits

Each award carries a cash prize of Rs 50,000 and a medal, with one award intended in each of the four disciplines in a cycle. The published awardee record does not read as a clean four per cycle: some entries are recorded as None, and several older cycles list more than four names, so the count in any given year is decided by the nominations that come in rather than fixed in advance.

Where the winners actually sit is the clearest signal of what the selectors reward. Across the published cycles the names come from the IITs and IISc, TIFR and its Pune centres, IUCAA, RRI and the Department of Space laboratories themselves, including the Space Applications Centre, NRSC and PRL, which is the population a nomination is competing against.

• Cash Prize: An amount of ₹50,000/- and a medal.

What to prepare

Documents required

The list of papers is not the hard part. The format is, and it is the part the notice spells out in the most detail.

PRL asked for the nomination in the prescribed proforma in two copies, accompanied by a CD carrying every enclosure and the proforma itself in MS-Word format, with the reprints supplied as e-files only. Two further limits are easy to miss on a first reading of the list: the account of the nominee's significant contributions is capped at two pages, and the ten best publications must be filed as a separate listing, which PRL calls essential, rather than left inside the full publication list. The proforma is downloaded from the PRL website under National Awards and Hari Om Awards.

Step by step

How to apply

There is no applicant-side form, so the practical question is how a nominator files. PRL's notice allowed the nomination to be made online or on the downloaded proforma, with the completed form and its enclosures emailed to the laboratory's Hari Om awards address, and it named the postal destination as the Director, Physical Research Laboratory, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad-380009.

Tracking works differently from every scholarship that runs on a portal. This award is not a National Scholarship Portal scheme, so there is no registration number, no application status screen and no payment or DBT tracker to check. The central scheme record for the award lists the application mode as online while publishing no application link at all, which is why a search for a login page returns nothing usable. The only public status signal is PRL's own awardees table, which is where a decided cycle appears; between the deadline and that update, the nominating institution is the one place that will hear anything.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is a reading of the work, not a test or an interview, and no scoring rubric is published. PRL states the deciding rule in one line: although the overall work of the candidates is taken into account, work done in India is given prime consideration. A strong record built largely abroad is therefore worth less here than the same record built in an Indian laboratory, which is the single most useful thing a nominator can know before writing the two-page contribution summary.

The timeline is slow. For the 2017 awards PRL expected the selections to be completed by the second quarter of 2018, roughly a year after nominations closed.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Beyond the prescribed format, the India-first selection rule and the re-nomination provision, the notice sets no further published conditions. The notice says nothing about splitting one award between two scientists, nothing about withholding an award in a discipline where no nomination convinces the selectors, and nothing about how or when the medal and the cash are handed over. Where the awardee record shows an entry as None, the reason for it is not published alongside.

Get help

Contact

Nominations and queries go to the Physical Research Laboratory, not to the Ministry of Science and Technology and not to any scheme helpdesk. The notice addresses the nomination to the Director of the laboratory at its Navrangpura campus in Ahmedabad, and gives a dedicated Hari Om awards mailbox for the e-mailed copy. One practical point: PRL administers several separate awards from the same corner of its site, this one alongside the Hari Om Ashram Prerit Senior Scientist Award, the Buti Foundation Award and the PRL Award, so a nomination that does not name the award it is for can land against the wrong one.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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References

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