Awards – MCQ – GK Questions

Sabyasachi Mukherjee of TIFR Mumbai was recognised twice in 2025 for his work in complex dynamics and connections between Mandelbrot sets and Kleinian groups. The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar 2025 was announced on 26 October 2025 by the Ministry of Science and Technology (PIB PRID:2182615). The Infosys Prize 2025 was announced on 12 November 2025. Both recognitions cover the same body of mathematical research, from two entirely different institutions.

Nikhil Agarwal is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-director of Blueprint Labs. He received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Economics for developing empirical methods to study and improve allocation mechanisms — practical systems like school admission lotteries, medical residency matching, and kidney exchange programmes that need to match people to places or resources without using prices.

The conventional Haber-Bosch process produces ammonia (used in fertilisers feeding ~50% of the world) by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure, using natural gas as both fuel and hydrogen source. Manthiram at Caltech developed electrochemical pathways — including lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction and oxygen-atom transfer catalysis — that use renewable electricity instead, at room temperature and pressure, reducing the process's carbon footprint.

Andrew Ollett of the University of Chicago is the world's leading scholar of Prakrit languages — the ancient South Asian spoken languages distinct from Sanskrit, including Pali, Ardhamagadhi, and Maharashtri. His work covers Prakrit grammar, the cultural history of why authors chose Prakrit over Sanskrit, and the circulation of Prakrit texts across the subcontinent. He is the first Prakrit language scholar to win the Infosys Prize Humanities category.

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.

In 2024 the Infosys Science Foundation announced a new direction: restricting the Infosys Prize to researchers under the age of forty, shifting the award from a mid/senior career recognition to an early-career recognition. They also introduced a new condition for winners based outside India: they are required to spend thirty days at an Indian institution of their choice and give a public lecture there within the award year.

The Vigyan Team award under RVP 2025 was given to the CSIR Aroma Mission team for their work in Agricultural Science. The mission introduced aromatic crops (lavender, rose, lemongrass, patchouli) to farmers across northern and northeastern India, demonstrating a pathway to the essential oils market that improved incomes without drastically changing traditional farming practices.

Vedika Khemani of Stanford University received the Infosys Prize 2024 in Physical Sciences for her contributions to non-equilibrium quantum matter, most notably the discovery of time-crystals. A time-crystal is a phase of matter that breaks time-translation symmetry — it oscillates periodically without consuming energy. Khemani's theoretical work provided the framework that enabled experimental groups to verify the phenomenon in the lab.

The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar was instituted in 2023 and first awarded in 2024. It effectively replaced the standalone Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, which had been given annually by CSIR since 1958. The SSB Prize was last awarded in 2022. The RVP retained the SSB name in its third category — Vigyan Yuva–Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar — for young scientists under 45.

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.

No cricketer featured in the 2025 National Sports Awards nominations for any category. The most recent cricketer to receive the Arjuna Award was pacer Mohammed Shami in 2023. India's women's team won the T20 World Cup and reached the ICC Women's World Cup final in the 2025 cycle, but no women's or men's cricketer was included in the panel's recommendations.

Gayatri Gopichand was nominated for the Arjuna Award as a player in the women's doubles badminton category, forming the top-ranked women's doubles pair in India alongside Treesa Jolly. Her father Pullela Gopichand is India's national badminton coach and former All England Open champion (2001).

Divya Deshmukh, a chess grandmaster born in 2005, won the FIDE Women's World Cup in 2025 — making her the first Indian to win that title. She was twenty years old at the time. She was nominated alongside Vidit Gujrathi, giving chess two nominees in the 2025 Arjuna list.

Six hockey players received the Khel Ratna before Hardik Singh's 2025 nomination: Dhanraj Pillay (1999-2000), Sardar Singh (2017), Rani Rampal (2020), P.R. Sreejesh and Manpreet Singh (both 2021, the year India won its first Olympic hockey medal since 1980), and Harmanpreet Singh (2024, Paris bronze). If Hardik Singh is confirmed, hockey will have produced 7 Khel Ratna recipients.

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.

The Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Trophy, which recognises the best-performing university in inter-university sports competitions, was shared jointly by Chandigarh University, Lovely Professional University, and Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU), Amritsar. The MAKA Trophy was instituted in 1956–57, making it the oldest award in the National Sports Awards system.

Thirty-two Arjuna Awards were given at the 17 January 2025 ceremony. Seventeen of these went to para-athletes — an unprecedented proportion — driven by India's historic 29-medal haul (7 gold, 9 silver, 13 bronze) at the Paris 2024 Paralympics, which was India's best-ever performance at the Paralympic Games.