Awards & honours
Awards & honours — Padma · Bharat Ratna · Nobel · Booker · Magsaysay · Jnanpith
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What is the Bharat Ratna?
The Bharat Ratna is India's highest civilian award, ahead of the Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri; the Supreme Court held in Balaji Raghavan v. Union of India (1995) that these are not titles barred by Article 18. Five Bharat Ratnas were conferred in 2024: Karpoori Thakur, L.K. Advani, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Charan Singh and M.S. Swaminathan.
The story
25 January 2024, 8 PM, Rashtrapati Bhavan press release. The Ministry of Home Affairs announces five Bharat Ratnas in a single year — the highest in the award's history since 1999. Karpoori Thakur (posthumous, Bihar's two-time CM and OBC icon), L.K. Advani, P.V. Narasimha Rao (posthumous, former PM), Chaudhary Charan Singh (posthumous, former PM), and Dr M.S. Swaminathan (posthumous, father of India's Green Revolution). The political grammar of the announcements — three posthumous PMs in one year — re-writes how India's highest civilian honour will be read in 2024.
Three months later, on 10 December 2024 in Stockholm, the Nobel Peace Prize is presented to Nihon Hidankyo — the Japanese organisation of atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Literature Nobel goes to Han Kang of South Korea, the first Korean Nobel laureate in literature. The Chemistry prize honours AI in protein design — split between David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (the AlphaFold team at Google DeepMind).
Awards are the shorthand of recognition — but for UPSC they are the facts the examiner asks. Categories, recipients, purposes, instituting bodies — every year, every cycle, asked.
Why this matters for UPSC
Awards & honours fetch 1-2 direct Prelims questions every cycle, plus interview probes on every Bharat Ratna and Nobel. Mains seldom asks awards directly but uses them as examples ("name the M.S. Swaminathan contribution to food security"). The high-yield items: Bharat Ratna, Padma awards, Nobel prizes, Magsaysay, Jnanpith, Booker, Oscar, Pulitzer, Abel.