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+<!-- pubdate: 20190912 -->
+
+# Santhosh Thottingal is awarded the President's Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman for 2019
+
+Santhosh Thottingal, a software freedom activist, has been awarded the
+Maharshi Badrayan Vyas Samman by the Hon. President of India for his
+substantial contribution in the field of Malayalam language. FSF India
+congratulates Santhosh for this recognition and his several years of
+dedicated effort to create free software solutions for Indic
+Computing.
+
+The award, introduced in 2016, is given to the substantial
+contributions to languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Arabi, Pali and
+Classical Oriya, Classical Kannada, Classical Telugu, and Classical
+Malayalam. This is given to young scholars in the age group of 30 to
+45 years, that includes a certificate of honor, a memento and a
+one-time cash prize of Rs.1 lakh.
+
+Santhosh has been one of the most active contributors of Swathanthra
+Malayalam Computing and a principal engineer in Wikipedia's language
+computing department. He has developed and released several algorithms
+and tools that serve computing needs in many Indian languages
+including Malayalam. He heads the maintenance of around dozen popular
+Malayalam fonts. Santhosh (along Kavya) designed two fonts, Chilanka
+and Manjari.  He has contributed tools that serve a broad range of
+language computing needs - input tools, layout tools, fonts, font
+rendering, text to speech, translation, localization are just some of
+them. He has also contributed and presented papers at several
+international conferences.
+
+Dr. Rajeev R. R from the e-governance and training department of
+ICFOSS has also been selected for this award along with Santhosh.
+
+We hope this award inspires Santhosh and Rajeev, budding contributors
+to push boundaries of Malayalam language computing.
+
+---
+
+Orginially published at [blog.smc.org.in][smc].
+
+[smc]: https://blog.smc.org.in/santhosh-thottingal-wins-the-presidents-maharshi-badrayan-vyas-samman-for-2019/