New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won 30th 'Ig Nobel prize 2020" for Medical Education along with seven other world leaders. According to improbable.com, the award is "for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
The co-winners are Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Gurbanguly Berdinmuhamedow of Turkmenistan.
Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical and parody award given out by the magazine 'Annals of Improbable Research' every year since 1991.
The award plays on the word 'ignoble', an antonym of noble and the name of Nobel. According to improbable.com, the award aims to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".
Modi is the second Indian Prime Minister to be awarded the Ig Nobel prize after Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In 1998, Vajpayee had won the award along with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for "aggressively peaceful explosion of atomic bombs."
This year, the governments of India and Pakistan were awarded Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door."