With the intention to promote scientific research for the development of India, Software giant Infosys Technologies has made announcement about the launching of ‘Infosys Science Foundation’ on Tuesday.

Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust, will encourage research in sciences and accolade exceptional inputs and achievements by Indian people.

The foundation has been funded with a corpus of Rs 21.5 crore contributed by the eight board members of the company.

Moreover, the foundation will give out a prize of Rs 50 lakh each to five young Indian researchers for their outstanding achievements under different scientific streams.

In order to supplement the prize money, Infosys will also grant Rs 2 crore on a yearly basis.

While lecturing at a media conference on Tuesday, Mr. N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor of Infosys, stated, “India needs bright minds across all areas of academics, government, business and society to strive for global excellence.”

“We need to encourage research in the country to address our developmental problems. This award will honour outstanding researchers who will make a difference to our future,” Mr. Murthy added.

A group of five members comprising far-famed international personalities in the respective areas will select the winners. The five streams for the award includes:

-    Physical Sciences, (Physics and Chemistry),
-    Mathematical Sciences (Mathematics and Statistics),
-    Engineering Sciences (All branches of engineering),
-    Life Sciences (Biology and Medicine),
-    Social Sciences and Economics (Economics, History, Sociology, Political Sciences and other Social Sciences).

Earlier, Infosys had set up a global annual award for computing excellence with a cash prize of $150,000.

The award, instituted through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), dwarfed the Turing Award, which was the highest recognition for computing in the world and referred to by some as the Nobel Prize for excellence in computing and technical research.

The award comes out of a corpus of $4 million given by Infosys to ACM.