The chairs will be named after Rabindranath Tagore, C V Raman, Hargobind Khorana, Mother Teresa, C Chandrasekhar, Amartya Sen and V Ramakrishnan.
"The work done through these chairs in our universities will become a perpetual source of inspiration for the younger generation of scholars," HRD Minister M M Pallam Raju said at the diamond jubilee celebration of UGC here.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, present on the occasion, hailed UGC's proposal to institute awards in the name of Jawaharlal Nehru for individual excellence in the areas of science, humanities and social sciences, technology, fine arts and culture.