Shital Somani and Vaibhav Tidke from Mumbai have won the grand prize of $60,000 at the Dell Social Innovation Challenge (DSIC 2013) for their Solar Conduction Dryer project.

The team of two's project was shortlisted from over 2600 project concepts that addressed issues impacting over 110 countries. Five finalists convened in Austin to compete for the cash prize.

Somani and Tidke's project aims at addressing the 30 percent food spoilage rate for poor rural Indian farmers via cost-effective dehydrators powered by solar conduction. The innovation will allow farmers to preserve more of their crops and sell dehydrated fruits and vegetables as another income source.

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Delhi resident Ritesh Agarwal, 19, and California resident Diwank Singh Tomer, 19, are among 20 young entrepreneurs chosen for the Under 20 Thiel Fellows, to pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship and begin to build the innovative companies of tomorrow, according to an announcement from the San Francisco based Thiel Foundation.

Ritesh is one of the youngest entrepreneurs from India. He runs OYO Inns, a chain of affordable tech-enabled inns and Oravel, a rising popular alternative to hotels in India. As a Tjiel Fellow he will use technology to bring affordable and standardised accommodations to emerging economies across the world starting in India.

Tomer stepped out of his college in India to work on an online platform for learning to code. He is an exceptional hacker and engineer who won the Mozilla WebFWD fellowship for his efforts to improve learning online. He has since moved to the Bay Area to further his efforts and currently works on a collaborative learning platform.

Over two years, each Fellow receives $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation's network of tech entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, thought leaders, futurists and innovators. Peter Thiel is the co-founder of the Felloship that has launched over thirty companies over two years and raised over $34 million in outside funding. Jonathan Cain is president of the Thiel Foundation.

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The biggest scientific collaboration known as ITER, the international nuclear fusion project, that is based on the tokamak concept of magnetic confinement in which the plasma is contained in a doughnut shape vacuum vessel, is underway, for which India is developing the heaviest and largest part of the Tokomak, the super machine.

India is to be one of the significant creators of the Tokamak. The main feature of the ITER in Cadarache south France, is a man-made level 42 hectare platform, the Tokomak building will be slightly taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Building began in 2010 in France where 34 nations are collaborating to realise the ITER project's First Plasma in November 2020.

The strength of ITER-India is now 83 permanent and 10 contracted staff, as well as some 20 engineers hired from various engineering service companies.

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Innovator Sumit Dagar announced that his company has created the world's first Braille smartphone. It is based on an innovative 'touch screen' that is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into touchable patterns.

Dagar's company is being incubated at the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, on the IIM Ahmedabad campus. He is a post graduate from the National Institute of Design and is collaborating with IIT Delhi on making the prototype that is currently being tested at the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

The Braille smartphone uses Shape Memory Alloy technology, based on the concept that metals remember their original shapes. The screen has a grid of pins that move up and down as required. The grid has a Braille display where pins come up to represent a character or letter to form patterns in Braille.

All other elements are like any other smartphone.

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Of the twenty-one titles in the race for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2013, five contemporary English fiction titles are from India. They are:

The Other Side of Light by Misi Saran
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil
Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto
The Wildlings by Nilanjana Roy
God on Every Wind by Farhad Sorabjee

The contest inspires writers and story tellers to make an impact on society with their literature, and engage readers with change. It builds on communities of emerging voices. The Indian books nominated are debut novels that explore the life of South Asia.

Five regional winners and the overall winner will be announced on May 14 at the Hay Festival in London. The winner will receive a cash purse of 10,000 GBP and regional winners 2500 GBP. They will be judged by a panel of members of the internationl literary community represented by Godfrey Smith, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Manu Joseph, Linda Leith, Esther Phillips and Martin Shaw.

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