| 1st Indian to be awarded the Nobel prize in any field (literature) | Rabindranath Tagore |
| 1st Indian to be featured as the Person of the Year by Time magazine | Mahatma Gandhi (1930) |
| 1st Indian to be awarded the UNESCO's Kalinga Prize | Jagjit Singh (1963) |
| 1st Indian to receive the Booker prize (British citizen) | Salman Rushdie |
| 1st Indian woman (and also first Indian citizen) to receive the Booker prize | Arundhati Roy |
| 1st Indian to receive the Pulitzer prize (Reporting category) | Gobind Behari Lal |
| 1st Indian recipient of International Cricket Council's Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy | Rahul Dravid |
| 1st Indian scientist to be awarded the Nobel prize | CV Raman |
| 1st Indian to be awarded the Nishan-e-Pakistan | Morarjee Desai |
| 1st Indian to be awarded Magsaysay Award | Vinoba Bhave |
| 1st Indian to be awarded the Bangladesh Swadhinata Sammanona | Smt. Indira Gandhi |
| 1st Indian and Indian Organisation to be awarded the Right Livelihood Award | Ela Bhatt of SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) (1984) |
| 1st recipient of World Food Prize instituted By Norman Borlaug (Father of Green Revolution) | MS Swaminathan (Father of Green Revolution in India ) (1987) |
| 1st Asian recipient of Hoover Medal (America's prestigious award for outstanding extra-career services by engineers to humanity) | APJ Abdul Kalam (2008) |
| 1st Indian recipient of DSC Prize for South Asian Literature | Jeet Thayil (2013) |
| 1st Indian recipient of Priztker Prize (referred to as Nobel Prize of Architechture) | Balkrishna Doshi(2018) |
