Page 156 - Annual Report 2019-20

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Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research (AWSAR)
The project Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research (AWSAR) is focussed on motivating young research scholars (Ph.D. and Post Doc Fellows) with interest in communicating science to a wider audience. This is an annual competition announced by DST in 2018. Under this initiative, PhDs and post-doctoral scholars in science and technology streams are encouraged to write a popular science article during the tenancy of their scholarship/fellowship. This initiative fosters, strengthens, and creates scientific temper through popular science writing and creating a culture of science communication/ popularisation among the research scholars. The scholars also get an insight into popular science writing, its methodology, dos and don’ts, etc., in several orientation workshops organised across the country. AWSAR was launched in September 2018 by giving wide publicity through print and electronic media and conducting workshops in different parts of the country. A dedicated website on AWSAR (https://awsar-dst.in/) was developed to submit the stories. The website also highlighted the initiatives, guidelines for story submission, eligibility, award categories, sample research stories, workshop details, etc.
One-day sensitisation workshop on “Popular Science Writing” was organised (2019-2020) in six different locations (New Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Guwahati, Gandhinagar, and Lucknow), in collaboration with DST and NCSTC with about 876 participants and 33 experts from the field of S&T, and science communication.
VIGYAN PRASAR ANNUAL REPORT 2019-2020
Figure 1: Location of workshops and the number of participants
A total of 4,993 researchers registered on the AWSAR portal in 2019-2020 for the opportunity under both categories (Ph.D. and Post Doc Fellow). There were 258 researchers under the PDF category, and 4,735 researchers were from Ph.D. category. A total of 1,948