Praj Industries and IISER Pune have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to scale up Mimamsa, a nation-wide annual inter-college science competition. As per the MOU, to begin with, Praj will lend technical as well as financial assistance to Mimamsa for three editions. Mimamsa 2020 will be the first of the revamped contest.
Over the past decade, Mimamsa has gained recognition as the country’s most acclaimed science competition that is based on the concepts of science and their interdependence. Mimamsa is a two-tiered event — Prelims and Mains — where teams across India compete under scientific and critical ways of thinking with zero emphasis on memorization. The quiz questions are designed to stimulate debate within the teams and encourage discussion with judges, rather than simply arriving at an answer.
Previous winners have been IISc Bengaluru, IIT Mumbai, BITS Hyderabad and Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Pune.
At the MoU signing, Prof. Jayant Udgaonkar, Director- IISER Pune, said, “I am happy that a progressive company like Praj has chosen to associate itself with and promote Mimamsa. Mimamsa is a tough unique competition and the support of Praj will only lead to a further improvement in its high quality.”
Pramod Chaudhari, Executive Chairman – Praj Industries, said that collaboration between industry and academia benefits institutes, quality of research and business in several ways. “We are pleased to collaborate with IISER in this novel project that fosters investigation, deliberation and critical thinking in the fundamental sciences among the future academics and industrial researchers. India’s vast talent in science and technology has the potential to spur innovation and drive socio-economic change in the country. We believe Mimasa is the ideal platform for budding undergraduate science enthusiasts to showcase their talent”, he said.
As an event with no registration fee and prize money of INR two lakhs, Mimamsa 2020 is expected to elicit participation from over 1,700 institutions across 22 cities. This will mean over 13,000 participants since inception. The preliminary round will be held on January 18, 2020 and the grand finale will take place at IISER’s Pune campus between March 21-22nd 2020.
Students can register at http://mimamsa.iiserpune.ac.in/
