Awards – MCQ – GK Questions

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.

Kiran Bedi received the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service for the reforms she introduced at Tihar Jail in New Delhi during her tenure as Inspector General of Prisons. Tihar housed over 8,000 prisoners and was known for violence and corruption. Bedi introduced literacy classes, yoga and meditation sessions, vocational training, and addiction rehabilitation programmes — transforming a punitive institution into one that attempted rehabilitation. She was also the first woman officer of the Indian Police Service.

From 1958 to 2008, the Ramon Magsaysay Award was given in six specific categories: Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism/Literature/Creative Communication Arts, Peace and International Understanding, and Emergent Leadership. From 2009 onwards, five of these fixed categories were discontinued and the award began to be given without prescribed categories — judges simply look for the best exemplars of the award's spirit. Emergent Leadership, which was added only in 2000 via a Ford Foundation grant and is limited to individuals or organisations aged 40 or under, was retained as a distinct track.

Ramon Magsaysay died on 17 March 1957 in a plane crash. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed the award in April 1957 and the Foundation was formally established in May 1957 with a founding board of seven Filipinos. The first awards were then given on 31 August 1958 — Magsaysay's birth anniversary — after a full selection cycle had been completed. This is why the award is described as "established 1957, first given 1958."

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.

Midnight's Children won the regular Booker Prize in 1981. In 1993, on the prize's 25th anniversary, a special panel selected it as the Booker of Bookers — the best novel to have won in the first quarter century. In 2008, on the 40th anniversary, a public vote chose it again as the Best of the Booker. It is the only novel to have won both retrospective prizes. A third special award — the Golden Booker (50th anniversary, 2018) — went to The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

The Booker Prize was originally open only to writers from the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, and Zimbabwe. From 2014 onwards, the prize opened to any work written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, regardless of the author's nationality. This brought in American and other non-Commonwealth authors for the first time and sparked significant debate about whether it would dominate the prize.

The four double Booker winners are J.M. Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012), and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). Ian McEwan has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize six times — among the most nominations ever — but has only won once, for Amsterdam in 1998. He is a very common wrong answer in this type of question.

Arundhati Roy, born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, won the 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things — her debut novel set in a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. She was the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize. The novel has sold millions of copies worldwide and remains one of the most widely taught South Asian novels in English.

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.

P.V. Narasimha Rao served as India's ninth Prime Minister (1991–1996). He took office when India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to barely two weeks of import cover. His government, working with Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, initiated the landmark 1991 liberalisation — abolishing industrial licensing, reducing import tariffs, allowing FDI, and devaluing the rupee. He steered these reforms through a minority government without losing the floor of the House. Beyond economics, he was a scholar who read and wrote in several languages.

Article 18(1) prohibits the State from conferring any title except military or academic distinctions. A common misconception is that the Bharat Ratna therefore violates the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in the Balaji Raghavan case (1996), held that Bharat Ratna and Padma Awards are not titles within the meaning of Article 18(1) and do not violate the Constitution.

In 2024, five individuals received the Bharat Ratna: Karpoori Thakur, L.K. Advani, P.V. Narasimha Rao, M.S. Swaminathan, and Chaudhary Charan Singh. Four of the five were posthumous; only L.K. Advani was living. This broke the record set in 1999, when four were given: Jayaprakash Narayan, Amartya Sen, Gopinath Bordoloi, and Ravi Shankar.

Sachin Tendulkar received the Bharat Ratna in 2014, the year he retired from international cricket. He was 40 years old at the time, making him the youngest person to have received the award. He is also the first and only sportsperson in the award's history — no other cricketer, athlete, or player of any sport has received it before or since.

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.

Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's second Prime Minister, died in Tashkent on 11 January 1966 after signing the Tashkent Declaration ending the 1965 India-Pakistan War. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna the same year, making him the first posthumous recipient. The rules originally did not allow posthumous awards; an amendment in 1966 made this possible.