Gandhiji’s Great Granddaughter To Be Present At SDIAS’s Annual Event Awarding $100,000 In Scholarships

India-West Staff Reporter

SAN DIEGO, CA – The San Diego Indian American Society (SDIAS) will host the 40th Annual Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture and Awards Ceremony on July 29 at UC San Diego.

SDIAS, which has awarded $1.5 million in scholarships to 600 deserving local students over the years, will give out $100,000 in scholarships this year to 25 outstanding local high schoolers who graduated in June and 25 community college students.

The awards, which recognize their outstanding achievements and the significant challenges they have overcome, will be presented this year by Amrita Gandhi, the great-granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi.

The memorial lecture on Gandhi’s tenets of non-violence, truth, welfare, and peace will be delivered by Hon. Judge Jogi Dhillon with the California State Superior Court, Sacramento. The event will be chaired by Akash Palkhiwala, CFO at Qualcomm.

This year’s recent high school grad recipients come from diverse backgrounds and many San Diego County high schools and will use the scholarships to attend a broad mix of universities, including MIT, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, UCLA, UCSD, USC, and USD. Community college recipients include 10 students from the Grossmont Community College nursing program, eight from San Diego Miramar College, four from Southwestern College, and two from San Diego City College.

Over the last 40 years, SDIAS has led the initiative to build cultural bridges between the Indian American community and San Diego, bringing the Festival of Lights to Balboa Park every October, the Unity in Diversity cultural program held in Poway every spring, and the annual Mahatma Gandhi lecture and scholarship every summer.

SDIAS was founded in 1984 by San Diego State University Professor Emeritus M.C. Madhavan with wide support from the local Indian community, to promote Indian ethos, culture, and goodwill.