Awards – Medium Level – GK Questions

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Khel Ratna was instituted in 1991–92 as the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award. On 6 August 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced it would be renamed to the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, honouring the hockey legend born on 29 August 1905 — the date observed as National Sports Day.

Murlikant Petkar lost the use of his right arm in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. He then trained as a para-swimmer and won India's first-ever Paralympic gold medal at the 1972 Heidelberg Games in the 50m freestyle swimming event. At the 2025 ceremony (age 80), he received the Lifetime Arjuna Award and the room gave him a standing ovation. He was personally received by President Murmu.

V.K. Murthy — Varahalu Venkateshwara Murthy — received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2008 at the 56th National Film Awards. He was the first cinematographer to receive the award in its forty-year history. He is best known for his collaboration with director Guru Dutt, particularly the visual style of Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962).

Four sibling pairs have received the award: B.N. Reddy (1974) and B. Nagi Reddy (1986); Raj Kapoor (1987) and Shashi Kapoor (2014); Lata Mangeshkar (1989) and Asha Bhosle (2000); B.R. Chopra (1998) and Yash Chopra (2001). The Lata-Asha pair is the most frequently asked in exams because both are widely known to the general public.

Prithviraj Kapoor received the award posthumously in 1971 — the award was presented to his son Raj Kapoor at the 19th National Film Awards. Raj Kapoor himself then won the award sixteen years later in 1987. Vinod Khanna died in April 2017 and the award for that year was given to him posthumously. These are the only two posthumous awards in the prize's entire history.

The 58th Jnanpith Award for 2023 was given jointly to Gulzar (the poet-lyricist-filmmaker, for Urdu literature) and Jagadguru Rambhadracharya (Sanskrit scholar, devotional poet, and founder of Tulsi Peeth at Chitrakoot, for Sanskrit literature). Gulzar had previously received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2013. This was the sixth joint award in the prize's history.

Amitav Ghosh received the 54th Jnanpith Award in 2018. English was added to the list of eligible languages in 2013, and Ghosh became the first — and, as of 2025, the only — writer in English to win the award. His novels engage with colonialism, migration, and environmental history across the Indian Ocean world.

18. Vairamuthu was named the recipient of the 60th Jnanpith Award for 2025, announced by Bharatiya Jnanpith in March 2026. He is the third Tamil writer to receive the award after Akilan (1975) and Jayakanthan (2002), and the first to be honoured primarily for poetry rather than prose. The selection committee was chaired by Pratibha Ray, who herself won the Jnanpith in 2011.

The Gandhi Peace Prize jury is chaired by the Prime Minister of India. The other members are the Chief Justice of India, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (or the leader of the largest opposition party), the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and two eminent persons appointed for a three-year term. This is a common exam question because it is unusual for a PM to chair an awards jury — it reflects the prize's status as a high-level national honour with diplomatic significance.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was withheld from 2006 to 2012 inclusive — a period of seven consecutive years. The jury, which has the explicit authority to withhold the award if no nominee meets the required standard, exercised this authority for this entire stretch. The prize resumed in 2013 when it was given to Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Note: the 2004 prize was NOT withheld — it was given to Coretta Scott King of the USA. Some older sources incorrectly list 2004 as withheld.