Andhra-Born Honored With U.S. Presidential Award

Houston-based Andhra-born Indian American Krishna Vavilala was presented the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award (PLA), the nation’s highest honor for his contributions to his community and US at large.

PLA is an annual event led by Americorps held to honor citizens who exhibit outstanding character, work ethic, and dedication to their communities. Incidentally, AmeriCorps is a US govt agency that engages more than 5 million Americans in service through a variety of volunteer work programs in many sectors.

Eighty-six-year-old Vavila received the award in a glittering red-carpet ceremony and was praised for his achievements by calling him a ‘change maker and global humanitarian.’ A retired electrical engineer, Vavilala is the founder, and chairman of the Foundation for Indian Studies (FIS), a non-profit organization whose signature project, ‘the Indo-American Oral History Project,’ won the 2019 Mary Fay Barnes Award for Excellence.

In 2006, Vavilala established the Indian Studies program at the University of Houston and initiated the India Studies program at Texas Southern University earlier this year.

He is known to have participated in several Martin Luther King Jr parades dressed as Mahatma Gandhi, a trend he started in 2006. A staunch believer in peace and racial harmony, Vavilala-founded FIS is committed to carrying forward Gandhiji and Dr. King’s legacies of non-violence and peaceful co-existence.