Nobel Prize: How many Indians have won top honours? Here's the full list

NEW DELHI: The 2025 Nobel announcements have begun, with prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry already declared.

Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries on immune tolerance, while John Clarke , Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis won the Physics Prize for their work on quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation. The Nobel in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for the development of metal–organic frameworks.

As the world waits for the Literature, Peace, and Economics awards by 13 October, here’s a look back at the Indians who have won the Nobel Prize so far:

• 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.

Since 1901, the Nobel prizes have been awarded to men, women and organisations for work that has led to great advances for humankind, in line with the wishes of inventor Alfred Nobel.

Each Nobel laureate receives 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million), funded by the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor who founded the awards. The prizes are formally presented on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.