List of 11 Indian Nobel Prize Winners

Nobel Prize winners are often seen as the most prominent and influential people in their fields. It gives them a chance to be recognized by the world for their remarkable achievements.

The list of Indian Nobel Prize winners contains an inspiring mix of innovators, scientists, laureates, and humanitarian activists who have made a substantial difference in the world.

List of Indian Nobel Prize Winners

1. Ronald Ross

Ronald Ross was a British physician, born in British India who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria.

Ross made many important contributions to the fight against malaria, but his most important discovery was that the malaria parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes.

This discovery led to the development of effective mosquito control measures, which have saved millions of lives. [Reference]

2. Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim. His poems include “Mandalay”, “Gunga Din”, and “The White Man’s Burden”.

He is also remembered for his children’s stories, such as “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and “How the Camel Got His Hump”. Because of his work, he won Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. [Reference]

3. Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali writer, poet, and philosopher who is considered one of the most important authors in modern Indian literature.

He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he is still the only Asian author to have done so.

His work includes novels, short stories, essays, plays, and songs. His poetry is particularly well-known, and his best-known work is probably his collection of poems, Gitanjali.

Tagore was born in Calcutta, India, in 1861, into a wealthy family. His father was a leader in the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement in Bengal.

Tagore was educated at home by private tutors, and he also spent time at his family’s estates in the countryside. He began writing poetry at an early age, and he published his first collection of poems, Sandhya Sangit, in 1879. [Reference]

4. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist who made groundbreaking discoveries in the field of light scattering. He was born in Tamil Nadu, India in 1888 and studied physics at the Presidency College in Madras. In 1917, he was appointed as the Palit Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta.

Raman’s most famous discovery was the Raman effect, which showed that when light is scattered by a material, some of the light is scattered in a direction that is shifted in wavelength. This discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

Raman also made significant contributions to the fields of acoustics and optics. He was the first to show that the intensity of light scattered by a material is dependent on the wavelength of the light.

He also showed that the wavelength of light scattered by a material can be used to identify the molecules present in the material.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is the first Indian to win Nobel Prize in non-medical science. [Reference]

5. Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-American biochemist and one of the Nobel prize winners in India.

He shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg for research that showed how the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cells, controls the cell’s synthesis of proteins.

Khorana was born in Raipur village, in the Punjab region of undivided India (now in Pakistan), on January 9, 1922. His father was a village schoolteacher. Gobind Khorana graduated from D.A.V. College, Lahore, in 1943, and then went on to the University of Liverpool, England, where he received a Ph.D. in 1948.

After a brief period at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Khorana joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1952, where he remained until he retired in 2007. [Reference]

6. Teresa Bojaxhiu, M.C.

Teresa Bojaxhiu, famously known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian nun and missionary. She was born in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. Her parents, Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu, were of Albanian descent.

In 1928, she joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, India.

She took her first religious vows as a nun on May 24, 1931, and her final vows on May 14, 1937. She chose the name Teresa in honor of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta. In 1946, she experienced what she called “the call within the call” when she felt a strong urge to help the poor and the sick.

She started a new order, the Missionaries of Charity, to do just that. [Reference]

7. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who made groundbreaking contributions to the field of astrophysics. He is best known for his work on the theory of stellar evolution, which led to the discovery of the Chandrasekhar limit.

Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, India in 1910. He showed an early interest in science and mathematics and went on to study physics at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He continued his studies at the University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1933.

After finishing his studies, Chandrasekhar worked at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, where he made the important discovery that white dwarf stars are supported by degeneracy pressure.

This discovery led to the development of the Chandrasekhar limit, which is the maximum mass a white dwarf star can have before it collapses.

Chandrasekhar’s work on stellar evolution had a major impact on our understanding of how the Universe works. [Reference]

8. Amartya Kumar Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the UK, the US, and India. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indices of poverty. He is the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on welfare economics.

In his early work, Sen developed the capability approach, which argues that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary importance, rather than economic growth or income. In later work, he has been concerned with issues of social choices, such as fairness and justice.

Sen has been a critic of the way poverty is commonly measured and has argued that the best way to measure poverty is by looking at the number of people who are unable

9. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-American structural biologist of Indian origin. He is the current President of the Royal Society, having held the position since 2015.

He is also a distinguished chemist and a molecular biologist and is one of the four scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the structure and function of the ribosome.

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1952. He received his B.Sc. in physics from St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirappalli, in 1970, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Madras in 1975.

He carried out postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, from 1976 to 1979, before moving to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1980, where he has worked ever since. [Reference]

10. Kailash Satyarthi

Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian children’s rights activist and an advocate of education. He has been working to end child labor and human trafficking for over two decades. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of children.

Satyarthi was born in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, on January 11, 1954. His father was a police officer and his mother was a homemaker. He was the youngest of four children. Satyarthi was educated at the local schools in Vidisha and Bhopal. He graduated from college with a degree in electrical engineering.

In 1980, Satyarthi gave up his successful career as an engineer and devoted himself to working for the cause of children’s rights.

He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), or “Save the Childhood Movement,” which works to end child labor and trafficking. BBA has rescued more than 80,000 children from bonded labor.

11. Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Banerjee is an Indian-American economist and the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Banerjee is a recipient of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

Banerjee was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, into a Bengali family. His father, Dipak Banerjee, was a professor of economics at the Presidency College, Kolkata.

His mother, Snehalata Banerjee, was a housewife. He has two sisters, both of whom are doctors. Banerjee attended South Point School, Kolkata, and later went on to study at the University of Calcutta.

He completed his B.A. in economics in 1981 at the University of Calcutta and his M.A. in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi in 1988.