Assistant Provident Fund Commissioner (APFC) 2016 recruitment test, advertisement 170. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, B-CRHE-O-PAPA); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part B. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

Amongst the following, who is the latest recipient of the 'Bharat Ratna' award ?

(a)Sachin Tendulkar
(b)Atal Bihari Vajpayee
(c)Amartya Sen
(d)A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Answer

Why

Correct — B, (b) Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The stem asks who is the latest recipient of the Bharat Ratna and prints no date, so it is to be answered as of the paper’s own moment, and at that moment the most recent conferments were those of 2015 — Atal Bihari Vajpayee and, posthumously, Madan Mohan Malaviya, the award to both having been announced in December 2014. Only one of the two appears in the option list, and that is the keyed answer.

The other three names are all genuine recipients, and each is earlier.

Sachin Tendulkar was honoured in 2014, together with the scientist C.N.R. Rao. He is the youngest recipient of the award, at forty, and the only one from sport — which he could be only because the statutes were revised in December 2011 to make eligible ‘any field of human endeavour’, sportspersons having been outside the original rules.

Amartya Sen received it in 1999, a year after the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences of 1998.

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam received it in 1997, before his presidency.

So the sequence within the option set is 1997, 1999, 2014, 2015, and the question is asking for the last of them. A time-relative item of this kind is always answered at the date of the examination; treating it as a question about the present day would be a mistake, and in this instance would also be unhelpful, since the award has been conferred again since.

Why the others are wrong

(a)Sachin Tendulkar — Sachin Tendulkar received the Bharat Ratna in 2014, in the same announcement as the chemist C.N.R. Rao, and he is the nearest wrong answer here because his award was the one immediately before the pair of 2015. Two facts about it are examinable in their own right. He is the youngest recipient of the award, at the age of forty, and the only recipient from the world of sport. That was possible only because the statutes were revised in December 2011 to open the award to ‘any field of human endeavour’; under the original rules sportspersons were not eligible at all. A candidate who remembers the excitement around that award, which was widely reported, may take it for the most recent without asking what followed it.
(c)Amartya Sen — Amartya Sen received the Bharat Ratna in 1999, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 1998 — a sequence the award has followed more than once, Mother Teresa’s having been announced a year after her Nobel Peace Prize. His is therefore an award of the late 1990s and nearly two decades earlier than the one the question is asking about. The option is on the list because Sen is among the best known of all Indian recipients and because his work on famine, entitlement and welfare economics is itself a subject these papers ask about, so his name is likely to be present in a candidate’s mind without a date attached to it.
(d)A.P.J. Abdul Kalam — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam received the Bharat Ratna in 1997, some years before he became President of India in 2002. The date is worth fixing precisely because the honour is so often associated in memory with the presidency, which came later, and because his death in 2015 put his name back into the news in the very year of the awards this question is really about. That coincidence is probably why the option is here. It is a good example of the way a time-relative question can be got wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the award: a name that was prominent in the year of the examination is not thereby the answer to a question about who received the honour most recently.

Concept

The Bharat Ratna is India’s highest civilian honour. It was instituted by a press communique from the office of the secretary to the President on 2 January 1954, alongside the Padma Vibhushan, which was then a three-tier award and was reclassified in 1955 into the Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri.

The award carries no monetary grant. The recipient is given a sanad, a certificate signed by the President, and a medallion in the shape of a peepal leaf rimmed in platinum. Recommendations are made by the Prime Minister to the President, and there is no formal nomination by the public.

The first conferments, all in 1954, went to three people together — C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C.V. Raman — so there is no single ‘first recipient’, a point examiners occasionally exploit. Posthumous awards were not provided for originally; the statutes were amended in January 1966 to permit them, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was the first person so honoured. Conferment was suspended twice, from July 1977 to January 1980 and again from 1992 to December 1995, the second time while public interest litigation questioned the constitutional validity of such awards.

The rules were widened in December 2011 to cover any field of human endeavour, which brought sport within the award’s reach. Two non-Indians have received it, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Nelson Mandela, and one naturalised citizen, Mother Teresa.

This item belongs to the current-affairs strand of the paper and is of a type that ages: the answer depends on when the question was asked. The stem gives no date and asks for the ‘latest’ recipient, so the intended answer is the position at the time of the sitting.

For a candidate at the time, the item tested whether general awareness was up to date, and the option list is arranged along a timeline to punish approximation — the four names span 1997, 1999, 2014 and 2015, with the two most recent close enough together that only exact recall separates them.

For a reader studying the paper later, the item is worth treating differently. The study value lies not in the name but in the framework around it: when the award was instituted, what it consists of, who recommends it, how the rules have changed, and the small set of facts about first, youngest, oldest and posthumous recipients that questions on this subject actually turn on. Those do not age, and they answer the variants that will be set in future.

The stem prints ‘Bharat Ratna’ in single quotation marks and ‘A.P.J.’ with full stops, both as the booklet has them.

Key facts

At the time of this paper the most recent Bharat Ratna conferments were those of 2015, on Atal Bihari Vajpayee and, posthumously, Madan Mohan Malaviya, announced in December 2014.
Sachin Tendulkar received the award in 2014 along with C.N.R. Rao; he is its youngest recipient, at forty, and the only one from sport.
The statutes were revised in December 2011 to make the award available for ‘any field of human endeavour’, sportspersons having been ineligible under the original rules.
Amartya Sen received it in 1999, a year after the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; A.P.J. Abdul Kalam received it in 1997.
The award was instituted on 2 January 1954 and carries no monetary grant — the recipient receives a sanad signed by the President and a peepal-leaf medallion rimmed in platinum.
The first conferments in 1954 went to three people together — C. Rajagopalachari, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C.V. Raman — and posthumous awards became possible only after the statutes were amended in January 1966.

Study next

The Indian honours system: Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the procedure for each.Landmark recipients and the facts examiners use: first, youngest, oldest, posthumous, non-Indian and naturalised recipients.The suspensions of the civilian honours in 1977-80 and 1992-95 and the litigation about their constitutional validity.National awards in other fields — gallantry awards, sporting awards, literary and film honours — and the ministries that administer them.Handling time-relative questions: recording the date of an examination alongside every ‘latest’, ‘current’ or ‘first’ answer.

Common traps

Answering with a present-day fact rather than with the position at the time of the paper.
Taking the most widely publicised award in memory to be the most recent one.
Associating an award with a later achievement — Kalam’s honour came five years before his presidency.
Assuming a single ‘first recipient’ of the award; the first conferments in 1954 went to three people together.

Awards and honours appear on EPFO papers as short recall items, often phrased with ‘latest’, ‘first’ or ‘youngest’, and the option list is built from other genuine recipients so that nothing can be eliminated as false. The safest preparation has two parts: the institutional facts about the honour, which do not change, and a short list of recent recipients with their years, which does. Where a stem uses a word like ‘latest’ without a date, it is asking about the moment of the examination, and a candidate reading an old paper should treat the item as a prompt to learn the framework rather than the single name.

Related PYQs

EPFO_APFC_2016_Q14

What is the number of States and Union Territories in India ?

(a) 29 and 6
(b) 28 and 7
(c) 29 and 7
(d) 28 and 6

Answer(c) 29 and 7

The paper’s other time-relative item, where the count of States and Union Territories must likewise be given as of the year of the sitting.

EPFO_APFC_2016_Q26

Which of the following is one of the Millennium Development Goals fixed by the UNO ?

(a) Halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS
(b) Develop a new variety of foodgrains which can ensure bumper crops
(c) To ensure that population does not increase in the least developed countries
(d) Develop procedures towards adequate and timely forewarning on hurricanes and tsunamis

Answer(a) Halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS

A current-affairs item of the same kind, answered by recalling an exact list rather than by reasoning from general knowledge.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The Bharat Ratna was instituted in which year, and what does it carry by way of monetary grant ?
- (a)1950; a grant fixed by the President
- (b)1954; no monetary grant
- (c)1954; a grant equal to that of the Padma Vibhushan
- (d)1966; no monetary grant
Answer(b) 1954; no monetary grant — the award was instituted on 2 January 1954, and the recipient is given a sanad and a peepal-leaf medallion rather than money. The year in option (d) is that of the amendment permitting posthumous awards, and the honours system carries no monetary grants of the kind the other options describe.
practice — not a real PYQ
Sachin Tendulkar could be considered for the Bharat Ratna because
- (a)the statutes were revised in December 2011 to cover any field of human endeavour
- (b)the award has always been open to sportspersons
- (c)Parliament passed a special resolution in his favour
- (d)the award was extended to sport by a constitutional amendment
Answer(a) the statutes were revised in December 2011 to cover any field of human endeavour — under the original rules sportspersons were not eligible. Option (b) states the opposite of the position before 2011, and options (c) and (d) describe procedures that were not used; the honour rests on statutes and on the Prime Minister’s recommendation to the President.

Why