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.