Awards – Easy Level – GK Questions

Sushant Sachdeva of the University of Toronto received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Engineering and Computer Science for his advances in mathematical optimisation, particularly developing near-linear-time algorithms for flow networks and linear programs. His results have been described as producing "absurdly fast" algorithms because they approach what theorists consider the theoretical limit of speed for these problems.

Anjana Badrinarayanan at NCBS Bengaluru received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Life Sciences for her work on DNA damage repair, particularly for discovering novel mitochondrial DNA damage response pathways. She is the only winner in the 2025 Infosys Prize cohort who is based in India.

Neena Gupta is a mathematician at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. In 2014, she proved a striking negative answer to the Zariski Cancellation Problem in positive characteristic — a problem in algebraic geometry that had remained open since 1949. The Infosys Prize 2024 (presented at a ceremony on 11 January 2025 in Bengaluru) formally recognised this work alongside her broader contributions to commutative algebra.

The Vigyan Ratna is the highest category of the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, recognising a lifetime of achievement in science and technology. In 2025, it was awarded posthumously to Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar — the astrophysicist, cosmologist, founder of IUCAA Pune, and science communicator who worked on the Steady State theory with Fred Hoyle. He died in 2025. This was only the second posthumous Vigyan Ratna in the award's history.

Aarti Pal is the national and Asian champion in yogasana — competitive yoga. Yogasana was formally recognised as a competitive sport by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in 2020, but no yogasana athlete had been recommended for the Arjuna Award in the five years since. Pal's 2025 nomination was the first. Yogasana will feature as a demonstration sport at the 2026 Asian Games.

Hardik Singh was the only athlete nominated for the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna at the National Sports Awards 2025. The nominations were finalised on 24 December 2025. A two-time Olympic bronze medallist (Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024), he had also won the FIH Player of the Year award in 2023 and received the Arjuna Award in 2021.

Manu Bhaker won bronze in the Women's 10m Air Pistol individual event and a second bronze in the 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team event alongside Sarabjot Singh at Paris 2024. No Indian athlete had previously won two medals in a single Olympics since India began participating as an independent nation in 1948.

The Khel Ratna for 2024 was presented on 17 January 2025 at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Manu Bhaker won two bronze medals at Paris 2024 Olympics (first Indian to win 2 medals in single Olympics as independent nation). D. Gukesh became the youngest World Chess Champion at 18 in December 2024. Harmanpreet Singh captained the hockey team to a Paris 2024 bronze. Praveen Kumar won the Paralympic High Jump gold (T64) in Paris 2024.

Mohanlal was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2023, presented at the 71st National Film Awards ceremony on 23 September 2025. At 65 years of age at the time of presentation, he is the youngest person to have received the award. He is the second recipient primarily associated with Malayalam cinema, after Adoor Gopalakrishnan (2004).

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award was instituted in 1969 to mark the birth centenary of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (born 30 April 1870). The first award was given to Devika Rani at the 17th National Film Awards. She was a pioneering actress and producer known as the first lady of Indian cinema who helped build Bombay Talkies in the 1930s.

Ashapoorna Devi became the first woman to win the Jnanpith Award in 1976 — eleven years after the prize was first given. She was honoured for her Bengali novel Prothom Protishruti (The First Promise, 1965), the opening volume of a trilogy tracing three generations of women in Bengal. Eight women in total have won the award through 2025.

7. Sankara Kurup, a Malayalam poet, received the inaugural Jnanpith Award in 1965 for his poetry collection Odakkuzhal (The Bamboo Flute), published in 1950. The citation ceremony was held on 19 November 1966. Kurup was the first of sixty recipients across sixty editions of the award from 1965 to 2025.

Gita Press, Gorakhpur — founded in 1923 — received the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021. The award was announced on 18 June 2023 when the jury, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, met and unanimously decided to recognise Gita Press for its century-long contribution to making religious literature accessible at subsidised prices without relying on advertising. Gita Press has published over 41.7 crore books in 14 languages, including more than 16.21 crore copies of the Bhagavad Gita.

Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Tanzania's first President, was the inaugural recipient of the International Gandhi Peace Prize in 1995. The prize was launched on 2 October 1995, the 125th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Nyerere was recognised for his pan-African leadership, his voluntary relinquishment of power in 1985 after more than two decades as President, and his model of frugal, people-centred governance.

Educate Girls, an NGO focused on enrolling out-of-school girls in rural India, won the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay Award. This made it the first Indian organisation to receive the prize. India has had approximately 60+ individual winners since 1958, but this was the first time an organisation from India received the honour. The NGO was founded in 2007 by Safeena Husain.

Hayao Miyazaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the director of celebrated animated films including My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. He was one of five 2024 Ramon Magsaysay Award recipients, recognised for his use of animation to explore the human condition across four decades of filmmaking.

Vinoba Bhave received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1958 — the very first year the prize was given — for Community Leadership. He was recognised for his work leading the Bhoodan movement, in which he walked across India asking landowners to voluntarily donate a portion of their land to the landless. He was one of five inaugural recipients, alongside winners from Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka.

Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station over one day of their nine-month mission. Judge chair Edmund de Waal described it as a book about a wounded world. Samantha Harvey was the first woman to win the Booker since 2019. The trophy was presented to her by 2023 winner Paul Lynch at a ceremony in London on 12 November 2024.

David Szalay won the Booker Prize 2025 for his novel Flesh, announced on 10 November 2025 at Old Billingsgate, London. He became the first Hungarian-British author in the prize's history to win. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction and follows a man named István across decades — from a Hungarian housing estate to London's elite. Szalay had previously been shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — known as the Frontier Gandhi — was a Pashtun leader from Pakistan who received the award in 1987. Nelson Mandela of South Africa received it in 1990. Mother Teresa, though born in present-day North Macedonia, held Indian citizenship from 1950 and is therefore NOT counted as a non-citizen recipient.