Women rank-holders steal the show at VIT

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Woman power was in full flow at the 27th annual convocation of the VIT University at Vellore on Saturday.

A majority of the 134 rank-holders in the various engineering and sciences disciplines turned out to be of the fairer sex. To be precise, 78 of the medal winners were women, which drew liberal compliments from the huge audience.

Noted parliamentarian Era Sezhiyan was one of them. Seated in the front row — he is a visiting professor at VIT and teaches ‘personal morality and public ethics’ to senior students — Sezhiyan could not miss noticing that a good many were women in the long queue of rank-winners receiving their medals from the chief guest Prof M.S. Swaminathan.

“This is a great trend”, remarked Sezhiyan, his face lighting up. “When a woman is empowered with education, it benefits an entire generation, strengthens the whole society”.

The very first medal recipient was a woman — Priya Ajayaghosh scoring the first rank in M.Tech (biomedical engineering). The third ranker in her stream too was a woman, Bhawanjali Saxena. After that, there were six women in a row, winning the top honours in M.Tech (biotechnology) and M.Sc (applied microbiology). And several beaming pretty faces followed them.

“We are here to lead, to deliver, to conquer. I am proud to be one among this generation of the new Indian woman’, said Ms Priya Ajayaghosh, speaking to DC after receiving her gold medal.

“Gone are the days when the woman was confined to the kitchen and to bringing up babies. We now get encouragement and support from the family and society. And we do not waste opportunities by getting distracted. Women are focused and we invest all our mental and physical energies in achieving our goal”.

Said VIT vice-president G.V. Sampath, “We have noticed, with a sense of pride and happiness, that the graph of high-performers among the women students here has been climbing every year”.