Dr Anirban Pathak, who took his early education from the Malda Zilla School in English Bazaar, and is currently a professor of physics at the Jaypee International Institute of Information Technology (Deemed University) in Noida, has been announced as the recipient of the prestigious Shri Om Prakash Bhasin Award-2017, popularly known as the Indian Nobel, for his contribution to the field of electronics and telecommunications.

Malda people, including his family, friends, teachers and old pals, received the news with an abundance of joy and pride. The PhD holder from Shantinekatan has become the first to get such high honour from a small town like English Bazaar.

Mr Pathak is also counted among the youngest scientists of the nation to receive such a grand award. The award has earlier gone to the likes of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Sam Pitroda, Prof MGK Menon, Prof MS Swaminathan, and many more.

Talking over the telephone from Noida during a hectic schedule there with his students on his research work, Dr Pathak said, “Our research is based on quantum information processing and quantum communication. The latter was initiated by us in India. Previously, there was conditional security in the classical cryptography, but with our efforts there is unconditional security by designing several new protocols for unconditionally securing quantum communication, which was held unachievable previously.”

“Most of the work was done here in the JIIT, but now the community has spread rapidly, including researchers from the HRI Allahabad, IIT Jodhpur, PPISR Bangalore, ISI Kolkata with their valuable contribution to India’s Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuST),” he added.

A junior researcher of the JIIT, Kishore Thapliyal, said that the topic has now become so important that in this year’s union budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley, specifically mentioned it and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the HRD ministry launched a programme on QuST recently.

According to Dr Pathak, the research work will open up new vistas as far as the security of big databases are concerned as in AADHAR, defense, online transactions, e-auctions, e-voting, which will hereof rely on unconditionally secure quantum communication.

“Another feature will be that the quantum computers can perform several tasks much faster than the classical computers, thereby endangering the classical cryptographic schemes. Again, putting aside the technical aspects, it is going to improve our understanding about the nature as the field is closely related to foundational aspects of quantum mechanics,” he said.

Rana Khan, former teacher of the Malda Zilla School and Dr Pathak, said, “He was a very meritorious student in class X when I came to the school, and his participation in the field of expansion of scientific knowledge caught my attention. His zeal for accumulating knowledge and capacity for tasks surprised me a lot. Now we have a familiar relationship and he is welcome to my house any time. I can only say that this is the beginning, and you have miles to go, keep it up.”

Dr Pathak, who has his ancestral home at Abhirampur, acknowledged the award as his “immense good luck.” “The recognition has enhanced my responsibility,” he said.