UPSC GK Questions 2026

A recipient of the Bharat Ratna is given a Sanad, which is a certificate signed by the President, together with the medallion, and the award is conferred at Rashtrapati Bhavan, usually a few weeks after the names are announced on the eve of Republic Day.

He became eligible because the scope of the award had been widened in December 2011 from art, literature, science and public service to any field of human endeavour, and he is also the youngest person to receive the Bharat Ratna.

The Bharat Ratna medallion is made in toned bronze in the shape of a peepal leaf, with a platinum sun and the words Bharat Ratna in Devanagari on the front, and the State Emblem of India with the motto Satyameva Jayate on the back.

The rules provide that not more than 120 Padma awards may be conferred in a year, and awards made posthumously and those given to foreigners and non-resident Indians are counted outside that ceiling.

The Padma Awards Committee is constituted afresh by the Prime Minister each year and is headed by the Cabinet Secretary, with the Home Secretary, the Secretary to the President and a number of eminent persons as members.

Because of it, the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards may not be used as a prefix or suffix to a recipient's name, and the awards were challenged on this ground before the Supreme Court upheld them in the Balaji Raghavan case.

Known as the Frontier Gandhi, he led the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the North-West Frontier Province and remained a citizen of Pakistan after partition, which makes him the first recipient who was not an Indian national.

She was Prime Minister at the time, and the award followed the events of that year.

Until then the honour had been given only to living persons.

All three were honoured in 1954, the first year of the award. Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, Radhakrishnan was a philosopher who later became President, and Raman was the physicist who discovered the effect that carries his name.

The order of precedence of the civilian honours runs Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the Padma Vibhushan is given for exceptional and distinguished service.

Both honours were instituted on 2 January 1954 by President Dr. Rajendra Prasad, and the first Bharat Ratna was conferred in the same year on C. Rajagopalachari, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman.

The words, meaning truth alone triumphs, were adopted as the national motto and are inscribed below the state emblem of India in Devanagari script.

A horse was set free to wander for a year, guarded by the king's soldiers; every territory it crossed unchallenged was counted as accepting his overlordship, and the animal was then sacrificed with great ceremony.

Iron appears only in the later Vedic period, and the axes and ploughshares made from it allowed the forests of the Ganga-Yamuna doab to be cleared, which is why this single word carries so much historical weight.

The correct answer is C, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who argued in his book The Arctic Home in the Vedas that the Vedic hymns preserve memories of long days and long nights, which he took as evidence of an Arctic origin.

The whole of the ninth mandala consists of hymns to Soma, at once a plant, the drink pressed from it and the god of that drink, which shows how central the soma offering was to Vedic sacrifice.

The early Vedic people were mainly pastoral and grew little, and the one grain their hymns name repeatedly is barley, used both as food and in offerings.

The phrase is quoted so often in examinations because it fixes both the names of the assemblies and the text they are described in.

The Rigveda praises it as the naditama, the best or holiest of rivers, and treats it as a goddess as well as a stream.