Scientific Social Responsibility

CSIR-Jigyasa programme and Virtual Lab

President, CSIR and Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, in the CSIR Society Meeting held on 6th April 2016 had suggested CSIR to create a vibrant student- scientist interaction. Further, during CSIR Foundation day celebration on 26th September 2016, Hon’ble Prime Minister had envisioned Scientists handholding school children, laboratories to become Centre of attraction for children and maximum opportunity to students to perform research at CSIR laboratories.

Following in line with the Vision articulated by Hon’ble Prime Minister, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) signed an MoU on Student – Scientist Connect programme ‘Jigyasa’ on 6th July, 2017. CSIR’s “Jigyasa: Student – Scientist Connect programme” has been initiated in a project mode under CSIR’s National Laboratories scheme and nearly 4,00,000 students and teachers have benefitted, directly since its inception in 2017. “JIGYASA” is aimed to inculcate the culture of inquisitiveness and scientific temper among the students. Subsequently an MOU was signed between CSIR and Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti.

Hon’ble Prime Minister of India and President, CSIR, in the CSIR Society Meeting held on 14th February, 2020, among many directions to CSIR, had appreciated the student outreach Jigyasa program and stressed on the importance of developing virtual labs so that science can further be taken to all segments of the students residing in each and every corner of the country. CSIR’s Jigyasa has taken up this challenge and proposed to set up a Virtual Laboratory (Online and offline) to instill scientific temper so that science can reach to all segments of the students in each and every corner of the country. Virtual Lab Platform developed by CSIR in collaboration with IITB, under Jigyasa programme, was launched by the Hon’ble Minister of S&T, Dr Jitendra Singh on 22nd November 2021.

With the launch of Virtual Lab, CSIR had proposed organizing Bootcamps and virtual National Level Scientific Creativity competitions as part of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav celebration. This competition is to provide an opportunity to school children to exhibit their creative skills and also develop their scientific knowledge and win attractive prizes!!

The CSIR Jigyasa Vigyan Mahotsav 2022 programme was launched on 3rd January 2022 by DG, CSIR. Since then, 15 bootcamps were organised that had an outreach of more than 20,000 students. Followed by the bootcamp, 2430 students were able to submit their creatives during the period 7 – 16 February 2022. Creative content-wise committees were constituted to shortlist the creatives. Finally, top 150 submissions were shortlisted to be reviewed by an Expert Committee, constituted to finalise the top winners. The Expert Committee scrutinized the top contents and identified: 3 grand prizes of Rs. 1 lakh each; 6 first prize of Rs. 50,000 each; 36 students won second prize of Rs. 20,000 each; and 30 students won third prize of Rs. 10,000 each. Prize awards to the top 75 contents created in comics, science fiction, infographics, videos, app development and animation were provided.

More details about the Jigyasa programme and Virtual Lab can be found at https://jigyasa-csir.in