New Delhi: Sixty-year-old Kailash Satyarthi on Friday became the fifth Indian citizen to win the Nobel Prize joining the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, C.V. Raman, Mother Teresa and Amartya Sen in the elite club.
The child rights crusader, shared the Nobel Peace prize for 2014 with Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”.
Satyarthi is the first India-born activist to win the Peace Nobel. He runs the Bachpan Bachao Andolan NGO that works for child rights, specially bonded labour.
Tagore was the first Indian to win the coveted prize for Literature in 1913 “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
Raman won the prize for Physics in 1930 “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him.”
Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin and Indian citizenship who founded ‘The Missionaries of Charity’ was awarded the Peace Nobel in 1979 in recognition of her “work in bringing help to suffering humanity”.
The Nobel for Economic Sciences in 1998 was won by Kolkata-born economist Sen “for his contributions to welfare economics.”
Other than this, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of which Rajendra K Pachauri is the chairman, won the Peace Nobel in 2007.
Some other laureates with Indian connections include Ronald Ross, who won the Noble Prize for medicine in 1902.
The medical practitioner was born in India but was a British citizen. (PTI)
