Indian Achievements

In this section, we would like to recognize recent achievements of Indians and folks of Indian origin. We hope this will make us all proud of our Indian heritage and culture and will instill inspiration to current/future generations to soar and achieve great things in life.

• Be Proud of India

• India Launches Edusat on September 20^th, 2004
                               India successfully launched a communication satellite, Edusat, abroad the third flight of its Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) on September 20, 2004. The $20 million Edusat spacecraft will link schools and colleges to remote classrooms to a nationwide space-based educational service to be in place by 2010. The 1950-kilogram Edusat was launched from the Satish Dawan Space Center at Sriharikota on the first operational flight of the GSLV. In previous two developmental flights in April 2001 and May 2003, the GSLV lofted payloads weighing 1550 Kg and 1825 Kg, respectively.  Edusat, designed to operate for seven years, will be stationed at in its geostationary orbital slot at 74 degrees east longitude over Indian Ocean (36,000 Km altitude, 0 Deg Inclination). In the final phase, the Edusat network is expected to cover all of India’s states with 30 uplinks and about 5000 remote terminals per uplink.
  
   

• Asian Indian Achievements in USA
   

  • There are now more than 1.7 million people of Indian origin in America. They reflect the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual society of India.

  • Indian Americans are represented in many fields including academics and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and financiers.

  • More than 87% of Indians in America have completed high school while at least 62% have some college education. As much as 58% of Indian Americans over the age of 25 hold a bachelor's degree or higher.

  • High levels of education have also enabled Indian Americans to become a productive segment of the U. S. population, with 72.3% participating in the work force.

  • Of these work force participants, 43.6% are employed in managerial and professional specialties.

  • Technical, sales, and administrative support occupations constitute another 33.2% of the work force.

  • The remaining 23.3% of the population works in other areas, such as operators, fabricators, laborers and precision production.

  • More than 5,000 Indian Americans today serve as faculty members in institutions of higher education in the U. S.

  • About 300,000 Indian Americans work in technology firms in California’s Silicon Valley. They account for more than 15% of high-tech startups in that region. The median income of Indian Americans in that region is estimated to be $125,000 (average $200,000) a year.

  • Two Indian Americans - Har Gobind Khorana of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and late Subramanyan Chandrashekhar of University of Chicago - have been awarded the Nobel Prize, in medicine and physics respectively.

  • Indeed, the NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in honor of the late Subramanyan Chandrashekhar. Known to the world as Chandra, he was widely regarded as one of the foremost astrophysicists of the twentieth century. The observatory was launched into space in July 1999.

  • Dr. Kalpana Chawla added a new chapter to the history of the Indian American community. In 1997, She became the first Indian or Indian American to fly in the US space shuttle. She was part of the Space Shuttle Columbia Flight STS-87.

  • The estimated annual buying power of Indian Americans in the United States is around $ 20 billion.

  • Based on the count of the 2000 Census, there are 1.7 million people in the US who identify themselves as Asian Indians or Indian Americans -- first- and second-generation immigrants or those whose ancestors migrated to the US from India.

  • According to University of California, Berkeley Study, about one-third of the engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while 7% of valley high-tech firms are led by Indian CEOs.

  • Some successes are well known, such as Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Sabeer Bhatia, who founded HotMail and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million. The number of Indian American New Economy millionaires is in the thousands. Massachusetts' Gururaj Deshpande, co-founder of a number of network-technology companies, is worth between $4 billion and $6 billion.

   

• Indian Nobel Laureates