BharatNotes The Literary Awards & Authors chapter covers the Nobel Prize in Literature alongside the Booker family. This chapter covers the other four Nobel Prize categories — Peace, Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine — plus the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (which, as the name below explains, isn't technically a "Nobel Prize" at all), and a handful of other major international awards RPSC has shown a documented appetite for testing.
Note before going further: The "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" — officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — was not one of the five prizes named in Alfred Nobel's 1895 will. It was established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to mark its 300th anniversary, first awarded in 1969, and is funded separately from the Nobel Foundation's original endowment — though it is administered by the same Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that awards Physics and Chemistry, announced in the same October window, and presented at the same 10 December Stockholm ceremony. If a question asks whether Economics is a "real" Nobel Prize in the strict sense of Nobel's will, the precise answer is no.
Nobel Peace Prize (2020–2026)
| Year | Laureate(s) | Country/Org | Citation | Announced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | World Food Programme | UN agency (Rome) | For its efforts to combat hunger and for acting as a driving force in preventing the use of hunger as a weapon of war | 9 Oct 2020 |
| 2021 | Maria Ressa & Dmitry Muratov | Philippines & Russia | For their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, a precondition for democracy and lasting peace | 8 Oct 2021 |
| 2022 | Ales Bialiatski; Memorial; Center for Civil Liberties | Belarus; Russia; Ukraine | For documenting war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power in their respective home countries | 7 Oct 2022 |
| 2023 | Narges Mohammadi | Iran | For her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for human rights and freedom for all | 6 Oct 2023 |
| 2024 | Nihon Hidankyo | Japan | For its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again | 11 Oct 2024 |
| 2025 | María Corina Machado | Venezuela | For her tireless work promoting democratic rights for Venezuelans and for a just, peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy | 10 Oct 2025 |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | — | — | Scheduled Friday, 9 October 2026, Oslo |
Notable firsts:
- 2021 — Maria Ressa is the first Filipino Nobel laureate of any kind; with Muratov, the first working journalists to win the Peace Prize since the 1930s.
- 2022 — the first time the prize was split across laureates from three countries in active/recent conflict simultaneously (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), announced roughly seven months after Russia's February 2022 invasion.
- 2023 — Narges Mohammadi was imprisoned in Iran's Evin prison at the time of the announcement — only the fifth person in the prize's history to receive it while incarcerated, and the second Iranian laureate after Shirin Ebadi (2003).
No 2020–2025 Peace laureate has an India connection.
Exam angle: RAS Prelims 2024 Q107 (about the Nobel Prize in Literature) used Nihon Hidankyo — actually that year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate — as a deliberately confusing distractor option. This confirms RPSC treats non-literature Nobel facts as fair game even inside a literature-themed question — expect the same organisation or citation to resurface as a direct Peace Prize question in a future paper.
Nobel Prize in Physics (2020–2026)
| Year | Laureate(s) | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Roger Penrose; Reinhard Genzel & Andrea Ghez | UK; Germany; USA | Penrose — black-hole formation as a robust prediction of general relativity. Genzel/Ghez — discovery of a supermassive compact object at our galaxy's centre |
| 2021 | Syukuro Manabe & Klaus Hasselmann; Giorgio Parisi | Japan/USA; Germany; Italy | Manabe/Hasselmann — physical modelling of Earth's climate and reliable prediction of global warming. Parisi — disorder and fluctuations in physical systems |
| 2022 | Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger | France; USA; Austria | Experiments with entangled photons, establishing violation of Bell inequalities, pioneering quantum information science |
| 2023 | Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, Anne L'Huillier | USA; Germany; Sweden | Experimental methods generating attosecond light pulses to study electron dynamics |
| 2024 | John J. Hopfield & Geoffrey Hinton | USA; Canada/UK | Foundational discoveries enabling machine learning with artificial neural networks |
| 2025 | John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, John M. Martinis | UK/USA; France/USA; USA | Discovery of macroscopic quantum-mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | — | Scheduled 6 October 2026 |
Notable: Andrea Ghez (2020) became only the fourth woman to win the Physics Nobel; Anne L'Huillier (2023) became the fifth. The 2024 award going to AI/neural-network foundations (rather than traditional physics) drew commentary in the physics community — worth remembering as an example of the Nobel committees increasingly recognising computational and AI-adjacent work. No 2020–2025 Physics laureate has an India connection.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2020–2026)
| Year | Laureate(s) | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Emmanuelle Charpentier & Jennifer A. Doudna | France; USA | Development of a method for genome editing (CRISPR-Cas9) |
| 2021 | Benjamin List & David W.C. MacMillan | Germany; UK/USA | Development of asymmetric organocatalysis |
| 2022 | Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, K. Barry Sharpless | USA; Denmark; USA | Development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry |
| 2023 | Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, Aleksey Yekimov | USA; USA; USA | Discovery and synthesis of quantum dots |
| 2024 | David Baker; Demis Hassabis & John Jumper | USA; UK; UK | Baker — computational protein design. Hassabis/Jumper — protein structure prediction (AlphaFold) |
| 2025 | Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, Omar M. Yaghi | Japan; Australia/UK; USA | Development of metal–organic frameworks |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | — | Scheduled 7 October 2026 |
Notable: Charpentier & Doudna (2020) were the first all-women team to win a science Nobel outright. K. Barry Sharpless (2022) won his second Chemistry Nobel (first was 2001) — only the fifth person in Nobel history to win twice in any category. The 2024 Chemistry award (AlphaFold) landed the day after the AI-themed 2024 Physics award — an unusual "AI double" in the same week. No 2020–2025 Chemistry laureate has an India connection.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2020–2026)
| Year | Laureate(s) | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, Charles M. Rice | USA; UK/Canada; USA | Discovery of the Hepatitis C virus |
| 2021 | David Julius & Ardem Patapoutian | USA; USA | Discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch |
| 2022 | Svante Pääbo | Sweden | Discoveries concerning genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution (Neanderthal genome; Denisovan discovery) |
| 2023 | Katalin Karikó & Drew Weissman | Hungary/USA; USA | Discoveries on nucleoside base modifications enabling effective mRNA COVID-19 vaccines |
| 2024 | Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun | USA; USA | Discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation |
| 2025 | Mary E. Brunkow, Frederick J. Ramsdell, Shimon Sakaguchi | USA; USA; Japan | Discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance (regulatory T-cells) |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | — | Scheduled 5 October 2026 |
Notable: The 2023 award for mRNA base-modification research is a rare case of a short lag between discovery and Nobel recognition — the underlying work directly enabled the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines rolled out from December 2020. No 2020–2025 Medicine laureate has an India connection.
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2020–2026)
| Year | Laureate(s) | Country | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Paul R. Milgrom & Robert B. Wilson | USA | Improvements to auction theory and new auction formats |
| 2021 | David Card; Joshua D. Angrist & Guido W. Imbens | Canada/USA; Israel/USA; Netherlands/USA | Card — empirical labour economics. Angrist/Imbens — methodological contributions to causal-relationship analysis |
| 2022 | Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, Philip H. Dybvig | USA | Research on banks and financial crises |
| 2023 | Claudia Goldin | USA | Advancing understanding of women's labour-market outcomes |
| 2024 | Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson | USA/Turkey-born; UK/USA; UK/USA | Studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity |
| 2025 | Joel Mokyr; Philippe Aghion & Peter Howitt | Netherlands/USA; France; Canada | Mokyr — prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. Aghion/Howitt — theory of growth through creative destruction |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | — | Scheduled 12 October 2026 |
Notable: Claudia Goldin (2023) became the third woman to win the Economics prize (after Elinor Ostrom 2009 and Esther Duflo 2019) and the first to win it unshared.
Common mistake: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the Economics prize in 2019 — just outside this 2020–2026 window. Don't attribute their win to a later year, and don't confuse it with the 2024 laureates (Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson), whose institutional-economics framework — most visibly through their book Why Nations Fail — discusses colonial-era India (East India Company revenue administration) as an illustrative case in their broader published work. That is a secondary, illustrative connection from the laureates' wider writing, not an India-based finding cited by the Nobel committee itself, and not personal Indian origin — don't overstate it into "an India-linked Nobel."
Other Major International Awards — India-Connected Recipients
Ramon Magsaysay Award ("Asia's Nobel Prize")
Common mistake: The award was not paused across 2021–2023. The only interruption in this window was 2020, when COVID-19 forced the cancellation of that year's presentation entirely — only the third such interruption in the award's history. The award resumed normally from 2021 onward.
| Year | India-connected recipient | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | No laureates — presentation cancelled due to COVID-19 | — |
| 2021 | None | 5 laureates from Philippines, USA, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia |
| 2022 | None | 4 laureates from Cambodia, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia |
| 2023 | Dr. R. Ravi Kannan (Assam) | Surgical oncologist; Director, Cachar Cancer Hospital & Research Centre; low-cost cancer care for North-East India; also a Padma Shri (2020) recipient |
| 2024 | None | 5 laureates from Bhutan, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand |
| 2025 | Educate Girls (Foundation to Educate Girls Globally) | Founded by Safeena Husain (2007); first-ever Indian organisation to win the Ramon Magsaysay Award; reported to have reached 30,000+ villages and helped 2 million+ girls return to school |
| 2026 | Not yet announced as of this check | Customarily announced 31 August |
Right Livelihood Award ("Alternative Nobel Prize," Sweden)
| Year | India-connected recipient | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) | Founded 2005 by lawyers Ritwick Dutta and Rahul Choudhary; cited "for their innovative legal work empowering communities to protect their resources in pursuit of environmental democracy in India" |
No other Indian/India-connected laureate was found across 2020–2025. 2026 laureates are not yet announced as of this check (customarily announced late September, ceremony in early December).
Templeton Prize, Fields Medal, Abel Prize, Turing Award — no India connection in this window
| Award | 2020–2026 India connection | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Templeton Prize (science & spirituality) | None found | Recent laureates: Francis Collins (2020), Jane Goodall (2021), Frank Wilczek (2022), Edna Adan Ismail (2023), Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2024), Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (2025), Simon Conway Morris (2026) |
| Fields Medal (mathematics, every 4 years) | None found | 2022 (Helsinki): Duminil-Copin, Huh, Maynard, Viazovska (2nd woman ever). 2026 (Philadelphia): Deng, Pardon, Tsimerman, Wang. Don't confuse with the two Indian-origin Fields Medalists outside this window — Manjul Bhargava (2014) and Akshay Venkatesh (2018, born New Delhi) |
| Abel Prize (mathematics, annual) | None found | 2020 Furstenberg/Margulis; 2021 Lovász/Wigderson; 2022 Sullivan; 2023 Caffarelli; 2024 Talagrand; 2025 Kashiwara; 2026 Faltings |
| A.M. Turing Award (computer science) | None found | 2020 Aho/Ullman; 2021 Dongarra; 2022 Metcalfe; 2023 Wigderson; 2024 Barto/Sutton; 2025 Bennett/Brassard. The only Indian-origin Turing Award winner in the award's entire history is Raj Reddy (1994) — well outside this window; don't imply a recent Indian winner exists |
UNESCO Prizes with a Genuine India Link
- Kalinga Prize for the Popularisation of Science — founded 1952 following a donation by Biju Patnaik (Kalinga Foundation Trust, India); the India connection is structural/historical, not about a recent Indian laureate. No Indian laureate has won in the 2020–2026 window (recent laureates: Karl Kruszelnicki 2019, Jean-Pierre Luminet 2021, Ana María Cetto 2023 — none Indian).
- UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize (use of ICT in education) — India won the 2021 edition, awarded to the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), a unit of NCERT under the Ministry of Education, Government of India.
Important for RAS
Prelims Focus
- Learn the Peace, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics laureates as five separate year-by-year series, the same way the literary-awards chapter recommends for Nobel Literature — RPSC has shown it will use a non-literature Nobel fact (Nihon Hidankyo) as a distractor even inside a literature question.
- The Economics "Nobel" is not one of Alfred Nobel's original five prizes — a precise, testable naming fact.
- Ravi Kannan (2023) and Educate Girls (2025, first Indian organisation ever) are the two India-connected Ramon Magsaysay facts worth memorising exactly; LIFE (2021) is the one India-connected Right Livelihood Award fact.
- Don't backdate Manjul Bhargava, Akshay Venkatesh, Raj Reddy or Abhijit Banerjee/Duflo/Kremer into this 2020–2026 window — all four are genuine Indian-connected international-award facts, just from outside this period, and RPSC likes testing exactly this kind of "correct fact, wrong year" substitution.
- The Ramon Magsaysay Award's 2020 cancellation (COVID-19) is a one-year gap, not a multi-year pause — a documented factual-correction point worth being precise about.
Interview Angles
- India's international-award presence in this window (Ravi Kannan, Educate Girls, LIFE, CIET/NCERT) clusters around social impact, education and environmental-legal work rather than the "hard sciences" Nobel categories — a panel could ask what this pattern suggests about where Indian institutions and individuals are currently earning global recognition, versus where they are not yet.
This topic sits under RPSC's Prelims-only "Current Affairs & Issues" block; there is no separate Mains "international awards" line, so no forced cross-paper box is needed here.
Practice — Quick Self-Check
1. Which organisation won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, for its efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons?
Answer: (b) Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations.
2. Why, strictly speaking, is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences not one of the "original" Nobel Prizes?
Answer: (b) It was established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank, funded separately from Nobel's original endowment.
3. Which Indian doctor won the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award for low-cost cancer care in Assam?
Answer: (b) Dr. R. Ravi Kannan, Director of the Cachar Cancer Hospital & Research Centre.
4. Which Indian organisation became the first-ever Indian organisation to win the Ramon Magsaysay Award, in 2025?
Answer: (b) Educate Girls (Foundation to Educate Girls Globally), founded by Safeena Husain. (LIFE, option d, won the Right Livelihood Award in 2021, a different award family — a deliberately close distractor.)
5. In which year was the Ramon Magsaysay Award's presentation cancelled entirely?
Answer: (a) 2020, due to COVID-19 — only a one-year gap, not a multi-year pause.
6. Which Indian institution won the 2021 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the use of ICT in education?
Answer: (b) The Central Institute of Educational Technology, a unit of NCERT.
Practice — Statement-Based (RPSC Style)
1. Consider the following statements. 1. K. Barry Sharpless won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 2001 and 2022. 2. He is the only person in Nobel Prize history to win a prize twice. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Answer: (a) 1 only. Statement 2 is false — Sharpless is only the fifth person in Nobel Prize history to win twice in any category, not the only one.
2. Consider the following statements about the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 1. It was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. 2. Their Nobel-cited research was specifically fieldwork conducted in India. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Answer: (a) 1 only. Statement 2 is false — colonial India appears only as an illustrative case in the laureates' broader published work (e.g. "Why Nations Fail"), not as the specific Nobel-cited research.
3. Consider the following statements. 1. The Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) won the Right Livelihood Award in 2021. 2. Educate Girls won the Right Livelihood Award in 2025. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Answer: (a) 1 only. Statement 2 is false — Educate Girls won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2025, a different award family; this is a deliberately close pairing of two genuine India-connected award facts.
Practice — "Which Is/Are NOT Correct" (Inverted Phrasing)
1. Which of the following statements about Indian-origin Fields Medal and Turing Award winners is NOT correct?
Answer: (d) is NOT correct — no Indian-origin mathematician won either the 2022 (Helsinki) or 2026 (Philadelphia) Fields Medal; the two genuine Indian-origin Fields Medalists (Bhargava, Venkatesh) are both from earlier editions.
2. Which of the following statements about the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 is NOT correct?
Answer: (c) is NOT correct — the Higgs boson discovery was recognised by the 2013 Physics Nobel (Englert and Higgs), a different year and topic entirely.
Key Terms
- Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — the Sveriges Riksbank Prize, established 1968; not one of Alfred Nobel's original five prizes.
- Ramon Magsaysay Award — "Asia's Nobel Prize," Philippines-based, honouring individuals/organisations for greatness of spirit in service to Asian peoples.
- Right Livelihood Award — Sweden-based "Alternative Nobel Prize," honouring practical solutions to global challenges.
- Templeton Prize — for work at the intersection of science and spirituality/religion.
- Fields Medal — mathematics' highest honour, awarded every 4 years at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
- Abel Prize — Norway's annual mathematics honour, often described as mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel.
- A.M. Turing Award — computer science's highest honour, from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
- Kalinga Prize — UNESCO's science-popularisation prize, with historical Indian origins (Biju Patnaik).
Sources & Verification
All facts in this chapter were checked as of 14 August 2026, drawing on WebSearch cross-checks of nobelprize.org press-release content (direct automated access to nobelprize.org itself was blocked during research — content was corroborated through secondary reporting including Reuters/AP-fed outlets, university press releases, and Wikipedia rather than a direct primary-page load), the official Right Livelihood Award laureate archive, the official Abel Prize winners page, the ACM Turing Award archive, and UNESCO's own prize pages. A genuine RAS PYQ connection is cited from BharatNotes' verified solved-PYQ bank (RAS Prelims 2024 Q107, where Nihon Hidankyo appeared as a distractor).
All five Nobel categories' 2026 laureates are unannounced as of this check and are correctly left blank rather than guessed — announcements run 5–12 October 2026. Several additional points are flagged rather than asserted with full confidence: (1) the exact wording of Ramon Magsaysay Foundation's 2020 cancellation (confirmed as "presentation cancelled," not explicitly worded as "zero laureates selected," though no 2020 laureate appears in any source checked); (2) the 2022 Fields Medal ceremony's relocation from St. Petersburg to Helsinki (following Russia's invasion of Ukraine) was corroborated only as general context, not through a dedicated verification pass; (3) the ACM's Turing Award year-labelling convention (the "year" of an award and its announcement date can diverge) should be treated as the ACM's own designation rather than a strict calendar-year rule. This chapter deliberately does not claim any Indian-origin recipient for the Fields Medal, Abel Prize or Turing Award within the 2020–2026 window, since none was found — readers should not backdate Manjul Bhargava (2014), Akshay Venkatesh (2018) or Raj Reddy (1994) into this period.
