Indian winners of the Nobel Prize

Awardees

Categories & Year

Purpose

Rabindranath Tagore

(Literature, 1913)

Awarded for Gitanjali, a collection of poems that brought Indian spirituality and lyricism to world literature.

With this, Tagore became the first Asian Nobel laureate.

CV Raman

(Physics, 1930)

Honoured for discovering the Raman Effect, explaining how light changes wavelength when it passes through a transparent material.

Har Gobind Khorana

(Physiology or Medicine, 1968)

Shared the prize for decoding how genetic information in DNA controls protein synthesis.

He also built the world’s first synthetic gene.

Mother Teresa

(Peace, 1979)

Recognised for her humanitarian work through the Missionaries of Charity, caring for the poor and sick in Kolkata.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

(Physics, 1983)

Awarded for his theory on the structure and evolution of stars, including the “Chandrasekhar limit.”

Amartya Sen

(Economic Sciences, 1998)

Honoured for his contributions to welfare economics and his “capability approach” to measuring poverty and development.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

(Chemistry, 2009)

Shared the prize for mapping the atomic structure of the ribosome, a discovery crucial to medical science.

Kailash Satyarthi

(Peace, 2014)

Recognised for his decades-long fight against child labour and advocacy for children’s education.

Abhijit Banerjee

(Economic Sciences, 2019)

Shared the prize for pioneering the use of field experiments to study and reduce global poverty.