Railway Current Affairs

Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Agnes, William Shakespeare's partner, in Hamnet. Her win made her the first Irish woman ever to take the Best Actress Oscar.

Michael B. Jordan won the Best Actor Oscar for his dual performance as Smoke and Stack in Sinners, Ryan Coogler's supernatural thriller set in the Jim Crow-era South. It was his first Oscar nomination and first win.

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won the Best Picture Oscar at the 98th Academy Awards on 15 March 2026. The film won six awards in total that night — the most of any film at the ceremony.

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.

Harmanpreet Kaur, who captained the Indian women's cricket team to a T20 World Cup title, was awarded the Padma Shri in 2026. She is among the sports awardees in the 2026 Padma Shri list.

The Padma Vibhushan is the second-highest civilian honour in India, ranking after the Bharat Ratna (the highest). Padma Bhushan is the third and Padma Shri is the fourth-highest civilian honour.

Rohit Sharma, the World Cup-winning captain of the Indian men's cricket team, received the Padma Shri in 2026. He is among the 113 Padma Shri awardees. The Padma Shri is the fourth-highest civilian honour in India.

Alka Yagnik was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 2026 for her distinguished contribution to Indian playback singing. She is among the 13 Padma Bhushan awardees of 2026. The Padma Bhushan is the third-highest civilian honour in India.

Late Bollywood legend Dharmendra Singh Deol was conferred the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 2026 for his exceptional contribution to Indian cinema spanning over six decades. He is among the 5 Padma Vibhushan awardees of 2026.

The Government of India announced 131 Padma Awards for 2026, comprising 5 Padma Vibhushan, 13 Padma Bhushan, and 113 Padma Shri. The list includes 16 posthumous and 19 women awardees.

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.

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.