The first scientist from Andhra Pradesh to win a Nobel Prize will receive a Rs 100-crore award from the state government, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu announced on Wednesday. Naidu was addressing students at a Children’s Science Congress, organised on the sidelines of the Indian Science Congress, in Tirupati.
“From now on, you should develop the curiosity to achieve it and work very hard towards that end,” The Telegraph reported. The amount Naidu announced is around 14 times the value of the Nobel Prize award in 2016. No Indian Nobel laureate has come from Andhra Pradesh yet.
“India has not been able to produce many Nobel Prize-winning scientists despite having abundant talent,” he said. “There is a lot of potential among the youngsters here, and I am sure, if they are encouraged, Nobel laureates would emerge from them,” Hindustan Times reported.
However, scientists who heard about the offer said the chief minister was mistaken to assume they were driven by money. “Money is not what motivates people to do science,” Suvrat Raju, a physicist at Bengaluru’s International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, told the English daily. He added that the money could be put to better use, such as improving people’s attitude towards science in India or for the betterment of the country’s scientific infrastructure.
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