Awards & Honours

The Bharat Ratna is India's highest civilian honour. It was instituted in 1954 and is given for exceptional service or performance of the highest order in any field of human endeavour. It is conferred by the President on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, and it carries no cash prize. The exam asks very predictable things: who got it first, who got it in a given year, who got it posthumously, and who was the first woman, sportsperson or foreigner. Learn the 1954 trio and the 'firsts' and most questions fall.

The Padma Awards are the next three civilian honours after the Bharat Ratna, in descending order: Padma Vibhushan (exceptional and distinguished service), Padma Bhushan (distinguished service of a high order) and Padma Shri (distinguished service). They began in 1954, are announced every year on the eve of Republic Day and are presented by the President in a ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan, usually in March or April. The Ministry of Home Affairs runs the process. The common exam trap is the order: Vibhushan is the highest of the three, Shri the lowest. A second trap is the year: the question says 'Padma Shri 2025' and you must recall a name tied to that list, so we learn a handful of striking names rather than hundreds.

India has six gallantry awards for the armed forces, split by one clean idea: wartime or peacetime. The three wartime awards are the Param Vir Chakra, Maha Vir Chakra and Vir Chakra; the three peacetime awards are the Ashoka Chakra, Kirti Chakra and Shaurya Chakra. They are paired in order of rank: Param Vir with Ashoka, Maha Vir with Kirti, Vir with Shaurya. All started in 1950 (Ashoka Chakra series) and the peacetime trio got its present names in 1967. This topic also covers honours that foreign countries give to Indian leaders, a favourite of recent SSC papers; there the trick is to attach each order to its country.

Literary, film and arts honours form a compact group of questions. For literature, the three big names are the Jnanpith Award (the highest literary award in India; given for a writer's overall contribution in any Indian language of the Eighth Schedule, and English), the Sahitya Akademi Award (for a single outstanding book, in 24 languages) and the Saraswati Samman. For cinema, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award is the highest lifetime honour and the National Film Awards (Golden Lotus and Silver Lotus) are the yearly prizes. Remember 'first' winners and a few recent names; those are what the exam picks.

The Nobel Prize is the world's best-known award, created under the will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896) and first presented in 1901. There are five original prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. A sixth, the Economic Sciences prize, was added by Sweden's central bank in memory of Nobel and first given in 1969. The exam does not ask for a full list of laureates; it asks which Indian won what and when, and a few famous literary laureates and their books. So learn the Indian table by heart, and tie each famous author to one book.

Beyond the Nobel, the exam loves a handful of international prizes and Indian winners: the Magsaysay Award (Asia's 'Nobel'), the Booker Prize and International Booker Prize (fiction), the Pulitzer Prize (US journalism and letters), the Abel Prize (mathematics), the Oscars and the beauty pageants (Miss World and Miss Universe). The learning method is a three-box habit: prize → who started or runs it → the Indian name and year. Do not try to memorise every winner; tie each Indian to one prize, one work and one year.