President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday presented the visitor's award for the best university to Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University while noting the research activities in the Central universities should align with the developmental challenges of the country.

He also urged all the universities to continue the good work and use their "best minds" to convert new knowledge into innovative products to directly benefit the common population.
"Innovative minds should create tools and implements that alleviate the drudgery of farmers, workers, artisans and weavers. The number one barometer for successful outcome of research and innovation should be its beneficial applicability to a wider section of the population.
"The areas for research activity should align with the developmental challenges of our nation. The best minds in our universities should apply themselves to work out solutions in areas like sanitation, urban transportation, sewage disposal, clean river systems, healthcare and drought-resistant farming," Mukherjee said.
On JNU, he said it has "been adjudged the best university for its unrelenting pursuit of academic excellence. It has shown outstanding performance in all key parameters like quality of students and faculty, training of faculty, citations, publications, research projects, foreign collaborations, seminars and innovation exhibitions".

The President also presented the visitor's award for innovation to Deepak Pant, department of Environmental Science, Himachal Pradesh University for developing a reactor for direct conversion of waste plastic to LPG in small scale.
The visitor's award for research was jointly received by Shyam Sunder, department of Medicine, Banaras Hindu University for his work in the area of diagnosis and treatment of Indian Kala-azar and Niranjan Karak, department of Chemical Sciences, Tezpur University for development of renewable resource based bio-degradable hyper-branched polymer nano-composites.
The President further said that the honours recognise the single-minded devotion and painstaking work in the pursuit of excellence of the winners.