Awards & Honours GK Questions with Answers – Page 10

The Academy in Chennai confers the Sangeetha Kalanidhi on the musician who presides over its annual December music season, and the title is treated as the highest distinction a Carnatic musician can receive.

The award is named after Tansen, the celebrated musician of Akbar's court who is associated with Gwalior, and it is presented at the Tansen Samaroh, the annual music festival held at Gwalior in that state.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi, the national academy for music, dance and drama set up by a government resolution in 1952 and inaugurated in January 1953, gives its annual awards widely but reserves the Fellowship as its highest distinction, limited to a small fixed number of living artists at any one…

The Recording Academy held its first Grammy ceremony on 4 May 1959 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, and it honoured the recordings released during 1958.

Planet Drum, a percussion project led by Mickey Hart with Zakir Hussain among its players, won in 1992 the very first Grammy ever given in that newly created category.

Rahman took one Grammy for the compilation soundtrack album of the film and a second, shared with the lyricists Gulzar and Tanvi Shah, for the song Jai Ho; through that second award Tanvi Shah became the first Indian woman to win a Grammy.

This category honours the composition itself, that is the words and the music, so the trophy goes to the songwriter or composer rather than to the person who sang or produced the track.

Its formal name is the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and its voting members are musicians, producers, recording engineers and other professionals of the American recording industry.

The sitar maestro won the Grammy in 1968 for Best Chamber Music Performance for the album West Meets East, which he recorded with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, making him the first Indian to receive the award.

Samantara pursued a twelve year legal battle that ended with the recognition of the community's rights and the blocking of a proposed open pit bauxite mine, and the Goldman Prize followed in 2017.

The correct answer is B, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which instituted the award in 1987 for outstanding contribution to the protection of the environment by an individual or an organisation.

The Amrita Devi Bishnoi Wildlife Protection Award was instituted in 1994 and is named after Amrita Devi, who in 1730 at Khejarli in Rajasthan died, along with hundreds of other Bishnois, resisting the felling of khejri trees ordered by the ruler of Jodhpur, and the community has protected trees and…

The airport is also notable as the first in India built through a public limited company with participation by the state government, non-resident Indians and the public.

The ecologist Madhav Gadgil, who founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences at Bengaluru and chaired the expert panel that reported on the ecology of the Western Ghats, was honoured in 2024 for a career of research and advocacy rather than for a single project.

Barman built a network of village women known as the Hargila Army to protect the tall trees in which the birds nest and to change the local view of a bird once treated as a bad omen; UNEP honoured her in the Entrepreneurial Vision category in 2022.

Afroz Shah, a lawyer, began clearing plastic and other waste from the beach with a neighbour in 2015, and the weekly effort grew into a volunteer movement that removed thousands of tonnes of rubbish; UNEP honoured him in 2016 in the Inspiration and Action category and described it as among…

Alok Shukla, of the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan and the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, organised the forest dwelling villages in a campaign that led the state to cancel twenty-one proposed coal blocks, and the prize followed in 2024.

The correct answer is B, Medha Patkar, who led the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the Sardar Sarovar dam and the displacement it caused, and who received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1992, becoming the first Indian to win it.

The prize was established in 1989 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman at San Francisco and first awarded in 1990, and it deliberately honours ordinary people rather than officials or researchers.

UNEP was set up in 1972 following the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and placing its headquarters at Nairobi made it the first major organ of the United Nations with its head office in a developing country, and still the only large one based in Africa.