Achievements of Indians in S&T
Achievements of Indians in S&T — recent Nobel/Bhatnagar/Ramanujan
12 min read · Updated 2026-05-25
What are India's top science awards?
India's top science awards are the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, given by CSIR since 1958 to researchers under 45 in seven fields, and the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, instituted in 2024 to replace over 300 awards with four tiers announced on National Science Day. C.V. Raman's 1930 Physics Nobel remains the only science Nobel won by an Indian citizen.
The story
In October 2009, a small auditorium in Stockholm watched Venkatraman Ramakrishnan — a Tamil Nadu-born biologist who had arrived in the United States with $30 in his pocket — walk to the podium to accept the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the ribosome, the tiny molecular machine that builds every protein in every living cell. His co-laureates, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath, had taken three decades to crystallise this 250,000-atom structure. Venky, as he is known, was the fourth person of Indian origin ever to win a Nobel in science, after C.V. Raman (Physics 1930), Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine 1968), and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics 1983).
But the awards story doesn't stop with the Nobels — it widens. In 2025, Shri Bhatnagar Prizes were awarded to nine scientists working in fields from quantum metrology to seismology to AI-driven genomics. The Infosys Prize, the TWAS-CSIR Award, the Vigyan Ratna and now-renamed Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar all celebrate Indian science talent. Behind the names sits a question every UPSC interview board asks: Does India produce world-class science, or do we just produce world-class scientists who then leave?
Why this matters for UPSC
Recent Indian achievements in S&T are a high-frequency Prelims topic — almost every year asks for a name-prize match (Bhatnagar winner ↔ field, Nobel of Indian origin ↔ year). Mains uses the same data to test brain-drain, R&D-spending, and innovation-policy arguments. Interview boards routinely probe "Name three Indian scientists who made the news this year" and "Why hasn't India produced a Nobel in 40 years?"