Hyd-based urban infra expert Karuna Gopal bags Skoch Challenger Award

Hyderabad: Founder President of Foundation for Futuristic Cities, a think tank that has influenced urban transformation in India for one-and-a-half decades, Karuna Gopal has been conferred the Skoch Challenger Award, a highly prestigious civilian honour instituted by the Skoch group in Delhi.

She has been selected for this prestigious award for outstanding work spanning more than two decades in the area of urban reforms and urban innovations, according to a press release issued here on Saturday.

Skoch Challenger Awards, instituted in 2003, salute people, projects and institutions that go the extra mile to make India a better nation. The awards are distinctive for its approach of selection of awardees, which is not based on nomination but on discovery, said the release.

Additionally, the College of Lifetime Achievers is regularly consulted for expert identification, inputs and qualification of a project, person or institution to be considered for the award, it added.

Karuna Gopal, who hails from a family of freedom fighters and IAS officers, has been invited by governments of the USA, Sweden, South Korea, UK, Philippines, Malaysia, UAE, Singapore, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Israel for inputs on Smart Governance. In 2018, Gopal was invited by the Prime Minister of UAE to address their flagship event – World Government.

Summit at Dubai. She contributed to the design of the '100 Smart Cities Mission' of India and has been invited to speak at the launch of the Mission by the Prime Minister.

Her innovation Sculpt Your City- 2009 shaped the mission guidelines and has been declared a National Best Practice, according to the release.