Petrochemicals Research & Innovation Commendation(PRIC)

Overview

About PRIC

A national honour that carries no prize money is an unusual thing to chase, and this is one. The Petrochemicals Research & Innovation Commendation, shortened to PRIC almost everywhere it appears, is the Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals felicitating polymer and petrochemical work once a year, on the condition that the work has already left the notebook and reached a product, a process or a working prototype. It honours finished innovation rather than funding new work, and that distinction decides whether preparing a nomination is worth the effort.

PRIC is one of three arms of the New Scheme of Petrochemicals, sitting beside the Plastic Parks scheme and the Centres of Excellence scheme, according to the Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals year end review for 2024. The Department owns the scheme; the Central Institute of Petrochemicals Engineering & Technology (CIPET) organises the call and collects the nominations.

It is not a new award so much as a renamed and rewritten one. The Department has been giving petrochemicals innovation awards since 2010-11, ran the line for over eleven editions, and then decided to set up the commendation scheme in place of the National Petrochemicals Awards, as its own awards page records. Anyone searching older announcements will also find the same award line published as the National Awards for Technology Innovation.

PRIC's entry list runs well past the individual scientist. The scheme guidelines direct an applicant to apply under a category or sub-category using the format prescribed separately for an individual, a team, an industry, an academic institution, an R&D institution or an MSME, per the PRIC guidelines released in January 2023. A doctoral researcher, a naval materials laboratory and a polymer recycling start-up are all inside the intended pool.

The reasoning behind it is stated plainly. The guidelines put research and development investment in the Indian petrochemicals sector at around 0.3 percent of total sales, expenditure on research and development at under 1 percent of industry turnover, and a target of 2 to 3 percent to be reached in phases, tracing the objective back to the National Policy on Petrochemicals announced in April 2007. Recognition is the low-cost instrument the Department reaches for.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The scheme record publishes no opening or closing date, and CIPET's nominations page still carries the first commendation's call with its February 2024 last date. Treat the annual periodicity in the guidelines as the pattern and the two official websites named in the advertisement as the place a fresh window will appear.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The eligibility test turns on where the applicant is registered and how old the innovation is, not on any degree or job title. The guidelines open the scheme to Indian citizens, institutions, industries, organisations and start-ups registered in India, or entities created by the Central government, State governments or Union Territories.

Two conditions do most of the filtering. The innovation must not be older than three years at the time of submission, which quietly rules out established products that a firm has been selling for longer. And a team or group entry is capped at five applicants in any one application, so a twenty-author laboratory has to decide whose names go on the form.

A past win closes the door for a while. Awardees of previous editions of the National Petrochemicals Awards are treated as ineligible for the next three editions or years, so the cooling-off runs against the predecessor's roll of honour as well as the current one.

Nothing in the eligibility section asks for an academic qualification. Research students are handled by giving them their own lane instead: the nomination advertisement for the first commendation carries a sub-category for research in the field of polymer science and technology reserved for research students, inside the wider Research and Innovation in Polymers category.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

PRIC has no exclusion clause of its own; the disqualifiers sit inside the eligibility section of the guidelines, written as what will not be considered for an award. A mere theoretical hypothesis is out, an innovation still at the idea stage is out, and perpetual motion machines are named and excluded outright.

Registration is the other hard exclusion. An individual or a company operating from outside India, and not created by an Indian government authority, falls outside the scheme's stated opening even where the research subject is Indian.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

There is nothing to renew. The commendation is conferred annually as a one-time honour per edition, and the only recurrence rule that exists works in the opposite direction: a previous awardee waits out three editions before entering again, as the guidelines state.

What you get

Award & benefits

What the commendation carries is modest and deliberately non-monetary.

The cash figures attached to this scheme in search results belong to its predecessor, not to it. At the 11th National Petrochemicals Awards ceremony held on 27th September, 2022 at New Delhi, a sum of Rs. 3 Lakhs each for winners and 1 lakh each for runners-up was awarded, which the Department's awards page still records. The commendation guidelines that replaced that scheme commit a citation and a memento, and no prize money.

• The scheme provides a citation and a memento for each award category.
• Travel Allowance and Dearness Allowance will be provided to the awardees for attending the presentation function in person.
• The scheme provides national and international recognition to innovations, helping to improve the performance and quality of products leading to better market acceptance.
• Historically, under the previous edition named National Petrochemicals Awards, a sum of ₹3,00,000/- each for winners and ₹1,00,000/- each for runners-up was awarded.
• The commendations shall be conferred annually.

What to prepare

Documents required

A PRIC nomination is judged on a technical dossier that has to be assembled to a fixed format, not written free-form. Most of the write-ups go in as annexures capped at 250 words each in the sample application format, which forces a dense summary rather than a paper: the brief highlight, the detailed technical description with photographs, the principle involved, the novelty claim, the advantages over known alternatives, the users' report or field trials, the commercialisation status and the self-appraisal all sit inside that limit. The publication and patent status, the test report and the action plan for the next three years are asked for on separate sheets with no word cap.

Two attachments are the ones applications tend to fail on. The test report substantiating the claims has to come from a reputed Government institute or a Government-recognised National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories agency, so in-house data alone does not carry it. The certificate of undertaking needs two signatures and a seal, the applicant's and then the head of the organisation's beneath it, so it cannot be finished the night before.

The form also asks for things a research team may not have to hand. It wants the stage of development ticked from lab scale, pilot plan, working prototype, test marketing or full scale operation; the annual turnover of the industry or institution in rupees crore; and a disclosure of any business or collaboration with the Department's own autonomous bodies and public sector undertakings, which the form names as CIPET, IPFT, HIL, HOCL and HFL.

Step by step

How to apply

Applying is online, but not through any scholarship portal. For the first commendation, CIPET published the whole call on a single page: the advertisement, the guidelines, the sample application format and the certificate of undertaking as downloads, and an Online Application Form link that opens a Google form, on its PRIC nominations page. The advertisement itself directs applicants to watch chemicals.gov.in and cipet.gov.in for the call.

Because the submission is a single online form with signed and formatted attachments, the annexures and the countersigned undertaking are worth finishing before the form is opened rather than during it.

On tracking, the honest answer is that there is nothing to track. PRIC is not a Direct Benefit Transfer scheme, so there is no National Scholarship Portal login, no application number lookup and no payment status screen; the myScheme record for PRIC lists the application mode as online and carries no application URL of its own. The only published route for a query on a submitted nomination is CIPET's named contact for the scheme, given in the Contact section below.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection runs through two committees and ends with the Minister. A Screening Committee screens and evaluates the entries, headed by the Joint Secretary (Petrochemicals) with the implementing agency's Director General or Director as Member Secretary, and drawing members from national level academic institutions and research laboratories, national level industry associations, an expert committee and the Government of India.

Its evaluation report then goes to the Commendation Approval Committee, chaired by the Secretary (Chemicals & Petrochemicals) and made up of industry and academic experts working in petrochemicals and allied sectors. Shortlisted applicants may be asked to present their innovation or project in person before that committee, which is the point at which a well-written file has to survive questioning. The committee's recommendations go to the Minister (Chemicals & Fertilizers) for final approval.

The odds are worth knowing before the effort is spent. The predecessor scheme's 11th edition drew 351 nominations, from which five were selected as winners, six as runners-up and one for lifetime recognition.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The certificate of undertaking is where the binding conditions sit, and its wording is blunt. The applicant certifies having read and understood the terms and the eligibility criteria, and accepts in the same breath that meeting the eligibility criteria does not entitle anyone to the commendation. If any information supplied is found incorrect or false, the application may be summarily rejected without any reason being given.

Two smaller rules change how the form is filled. An applicant may submit a maximum of two applications in each of the two categories, so the entry limit is per category and not per person. And where the recognition is meant for a company rather than an employee, the sample format instructs that the company's name be entered as the primary applicant, which is the only place that choice is recorded.

Get help

Contact

Queries on the commendation go to CIPET's head office rather than to the Department. The nominations page names Dr. Vishal Verma, Manager (Technical) at the CIPET head office, reachable on +91-9730003953 and +91-7869955245 or by email at npawards@cipet.gov.in, per the CIPET PRIC page.

The organising address printed on the call is CIPET Head Office, T.V.K. Industrial Estate, Guindy, Chennai - 600 032, in the nomination advertisement. The scheme itself is administered by the Department of Chemicals & Petrochemicals, Ministry of Chemicals & Fertilizers, at Shastri Bhawan, New Delhi.

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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