23 Year Old Indian Girl Bags Cambridge's Prestigious Award
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 15 November 2011, 00:17 IST   |    25 Comments
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Bangalore: The whole of India must be proud of hearing the news of Kolkata girl Mahima Khanna, who won the Cambridge's most prestigious Stevesion Award. The 23 year old has topped the 2010-2011 MPhil class of economics at the Cambridge University and will receive this most acclaimed award for her success. Mahima Khanna's MPhil papers were related to trade liberalization and informality, based on evidence from the manufacturing sector in India. She told that the size of the informal sector in India is growing and the government should patronize it. She is interested in India's fiscal deficits and interest rates. Mahima, the young economist, is currently employed as a trade analyst in Mumbai and she aspires for a career in World Bank. With this award she becomes the third Indian and the first Indian woman to bag the award after the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen who won it in the year 1956 and Sir Partho Dasgupta had won it in 1967, for his contribution to nutrition and developmental economics. Mahima is very excited to share the award with the god [Amartya Sen] in the economics field. Mahima the daughter of doctor parents is an ace golfer who has played amateur golf at the RCGC and Tolly Club. Economics is an unusual choice for her. She did her schooling in Loreto House and La Martiniere for girls and she cleared the medical joint entrance examination. But she eventually took admission in St Xavier's College, reports Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey from TOI. When she graduated in 2009, Mahima had topped in economics in Calcutta University. She went to Cambridge for her post graduate degree on a Commonwealth scholarship and she also excelled there too by ranking second and she stayed back for her MPhil. Mahima attributes her success of winning the award to her grandfather Swarn Kumra, an engineer who studied in London University.