A total of 106 Padma awards have been announced — 6 Padma Vibhushan, 9 Padma Bhushan and 91 Padma Shri.
New Delhi: Nekram Sharma of Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh has been conferred with the prestigious Padma Shri award for his distinguished service in the field of agriculture.
Nekram Sharma is a lone recipient of the Padma Awards 2023 from Himachal Pradesh.
Nekram Sharma (59) is associated with organic farming and is credited for reviving the traditional crop system of ‘Nau-Anaj’.
Nau Anaj is a natural intercropping method in which nine food grains are grown on the same piece of land, without any chemical usage, cutting down water usage by 50 per cent and raising land fertility. Named “Nau Anaj ke Nayak”, Nekram is also producing local indigenous seeds, distributing to more than 10,000 farmers in six states at no cost.
A total of 106 Padma awards have been announced — six Padma Vibhushan, nine Padma Bhushan and 91 Padma Shri.
Former Uttar Pradesh CM Mulayam Singh Yadav, former Karnataka CM S M Krishna, Gujarat architect and educationist Balkrishna Doshi, tabla player Zakir Hussain, mathematician S R Srinivasa Vardhan, and ORS treatment pioneer Dilip Mahalanabis have been conferred the Padma Vibhushan this year.
Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation, industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla, linguistics scholar Kapil Kapoor, Kannada novelist and screenwriter S L Bhyrappa, playback singers Vani Jayaram and Suman Kalyanpur, physicist Deepak Dhar, and Telangana spiritual leaders Swami Chinna Jeeyar and Kamlesh D Patel were conferred with Padma Bhushan award.
Congratulating the recipients, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: “India cherishes their rich and varied contributions to the nation and their efforts to enhance our growth trajectory.”
