BCT Media Awards - 2007

These awards were finalized on 11th October, 2007 by a Jury of eminent media personalities chaired by Shri B. G. Verghese and including Ms. Aparna Vaish, Shri K. S. Sachidananda Murthy, Shri Om Thanvi and Shri Arvind Ojha.

Over more than 15 years of committed work at grassroots by members of Honey Bee Network has been recognized by the Government of India culminating in the establishment of National Innovation Foundation (NIF), an autonomous society with a corpus fund from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The Union Finance Minister in his budget speech of 1999 had announced the establishment of NIF. The raison-detre of NIF is to unleash the true potential of innovators and traditional knowledge experts at grassroots who are economically poor but knowledge rich, who could neither have the privilege of formal education nor could mobilize any support required in augmenting their knowledge from organized sector. NIF helps such grassroots innovators by recognizing, respecting and rewarding their creativity. NIF scouts their innovations, helps in nurturing them and finally scaling them up in the form of commercial enterprises.

GIANs are the regional implementation arm of NIF that work in collaboration with state governments of the region. GIAN works as the technology incubator to bring innovations and investments together in order to create viable enterprises. GIANs also help in dissemination of innovations and traditional knowledge for social benefit. We have GIAN-West in Ahmedabad, GIAN-NE in Guwahati, GIAN-North in Jaipur and GIAN-Cells in some other parts of the country.

GIAN-North has been established jointly by NIF and the Government of Rajasthan (GoR) in the year 2002. GIAN-North caters to seven north Indian states i.e. Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir and NCT of Delhi and UT of Chandigarh

To encourage the participation of media in identifying these grassroot innovations, GIAN-North in association with Bhoruka Charitable Trust, Jaipur instituted these Media Awards for best reporting on grassroot innovations from north India from print and electronic media and two such awards have already been concluded in the previous years.