How Padma Awards Are Decided: The 30 Member Committee Behind India’s 131 Honours in 2026

The Padma awards are India’s civilian honours in three grades, and a committee the Prime Minister names each year decides who gets one.

Published: 11 September 2026

The Padma Awards Committee that recommended the 2026 list carried 30 names. Peoples Feed counted every row in the list the Ministry of Home Affairs publishes. Four of the 30 sit on it by post.

Those four are the Cabinet Secretary, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Secretary to the President. The other 26 appear as names alone.

That committee’s work ended in 131 Padma awards, announced from New Delhi on January 25, 2026. The Prime Minister constitutes the committee. The President confers the award.

Three grades, nine disciplines and a cap of 120 a year

The Padma awards come in three grades, and a single Ministry of Home Affairs scheme document governs all three. The scheme dates the honours to 1954.

Padma Vibhushan is for “exceptional and distinguished service”. Padma Bhushan is for “distinguished service of a high order”. Padma Shri is for “distinguished service”.

The grades are not handed out in equal numbers. Of the 131 awards announced for 2026, 113 were Padma Shri and only 5 were Padma Vibhushan.

The scheme names nine disciplines. They are Art, Literature and Education, Sports, Medicine, Social Work, Science and Engineering, Public Affairs, Civil Service, and Trade and Industry.

Merit on its own is not the test. The scheme asks for “an element of public service” and sets the bar as “excellence plus”, not “merely excellence in a particular field”.

A ceiling applies. No more than 120 awards may be given in a year, leaving out posthumous awards and awards to foreigners. A higher Padma award needs a gap of at least five years.

Posthumous awards are the exception. The scheme allows one only where the death fell within the year before that Republic Day. Sixteen of the 2026 awards were posthumous.

Who can nominate, and when the window actually closes

Any Indian citizen can nominate anyone for a Padma award, including themselves, and the filing is done online on the Rashtriya Puraskar Portal at awards.gov.in.

The Ministry of Home Affairs runs two sites here. Nominations are filed at awards.gov.in. The award lists, the committee lists and the process notes sit at padmaawards.gov.in.

The nomination form is short. It asks for the nominee’s education, the “magnitude, scale, longevity” of the contribution, earlier awards, and a summary of “not more than 250 words”.

One group is cut out at the start. Government servants, including those in public sector units, are not eligible unless they are doctors or scientists. Everyone else qualifies “without distinction of race, occupation, position or sex”.

Now the part most published guides get wrong. The scheme document sets the nomination window as “1st May and 15th September”. The government has not used those dates for two years running.

A Press Information Bureau release dated April 11, 2025 covered the 2026 cycle. It said nominations opened on March 15 and closed on July 31 that year. A release dated April 27, 2026 gave the same two dates for the 2027 awards.

So the 2027 window shut on July 31, 2026. The scheme and the portal’s own answers page both still print September 15.

The portal is busy. On 11 September 2026 its front page showed 4,21,650 registrations and 4,14,462 nominations across every award it carries, not for the Padma awards alone.

Checklist before you file a Padma nomination

• Check whether the person is a serving government servant. If so, only a doctor or a scientist can be considered.
• Check that five years have passed since any earlier Padma award, if you are proposing a higher grade.
• Write the public service part, not only the excellence part. The scheme asks for “excellence plus”.
• Work to March 15 and July 31, the dates used for two cycles, and not to the September 15 in the scheme. The 2027 window closed on July 31, 2026.
• Keep the citation to 250 words and attach the links and documents that prove the numbers.
• File at awards.gov.in. Self-nomination is allowed and the Ministry says so in writing.

Who sits on the Padma Awards Committee

The Padma Awards Committee is constituted by the Prime Minister every year, and its published membership has grown in each of the last two cycles.

Peoples Feed counted the three lists the Ministry of Home Affairs has put online. The committee ran to 17 members in 2024, 21 in 2025 and 30 in 2026.

The four seats held by office never changed. The rest turned over almost completely. Non official members went from 13 to 17 to 26.

By our count, 20 of the 26 non official members in 2026 were not on the 2025 list. One name appears on all three lists, and it is Professor Tariq Mansoor.

The 2026 members include Anju Bobby George, Devi Shetty, Prasoon Joshi and P R Sreejesh. They also include G Satheesh Reddy, R Hari Kumar, Bhartruhari Mahtab, Sudha Raghunathan and Waman Kendre.

What the list does not carry is as telling. Peoples Feed read every row and found no designation printed beside any of the 26. No row is marked Chairman, Chairperson, Convenor or Member Secretary, and no list carries a date.

What the Prime Minister and the President actually do

The Prime Minister appoints the Padma Awards Committee and then approves what it recommends, and the President approves the same list and confers the awards.

“The recommendations made by the Awards Committee are submitted to the Prime Minister and the President for their approval,” the scheme says. Neither approval is called a formality. Neither is called a veto.

Every nomination reaches the committee. The Ministry of Home Affairs answered unstarred question 276 in the Lok Sabha on February 4, 2025. It said all nominations and recommendations, “including self nominations”, are placed before the committee.

Announcement and conferment are two separate acts, and the gap is wide. The scheme puts the announcement on January 26 and the ceremony in March or April.

Neither held in 2026. The Ministry announced the list on January 25. The President presented the awards at two Civil Investiture Ceremonies at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the first on May 25, 2026 and the second on June 23, 2026.

Sixty six recipients were listed for the second ceremony alone. Five months separated the announcement from that afternoon.

What a Padma award does not entitle you to

A Padma award brings a certificate and a medal, and nothing that can be spent, claimed or worn in front of a name.

The scheme is exact about the object. “The decoration comprises a Sanad (Certificate) issued under the hand and seal of the President and a Medallion.”

It is equally exact about the money. The scheme says: “No cash allowance or any facility/benefit in terms of concession etc. in rail/air travel is attached to these awards.”

It is not a title either. The scheme says the award “does not amount to a title and cannot be used as a suffix or prefix to the awardee’s name on letterheads, invitation cards, posters, books etc.”

That wording tracks a judgment. Balaji Raghavan and S P Anand against the Union of India was decided on December 15, 1995. The Supreme Court held that the National Awards are not “titles” under Article 18(1) of the Constitution.

The Court attached a condition. The awards “should not be used as suffixes or prefixes”. In the Court’s words, “if this is done, the defaulter should forfeit the National Award conferred”.

Rank does not come with it. The Table of Precedence issued by the President’s Secretariat on July 26, 1979 seats “holders of Bharat Ratna decoration” at Article 7A. Padma awardees appear nowhere in that document.

The honour can also be taken back. The scheme keeps one power in reserve: “The President may cancel and annul the award of the decoration to any person.”

What the process still does not explain

The government publishes who won a Padma award, and almost never publishes why.

The Ministry’s press note of January 25, 2026 runs to four columns: serial number, name, field and state. It carries no citation, no score, no shortlist and no nominator.

Some awardees do get a written profile, at the ceremony rather than at the announcement. The list of recipients for the second 2026 ceremony names 66 people and describes only a few of them.

Dr Padma Gurmet, the Padma Shri for medicine from Ladakh, sits at number 22 on that list with a name and nothing more. Peoples Feed read both documents line by line.

The Ministry has said in Parliament that the test is not written down. Answering the Lok Sabha on February 4, 2025, it said “no rigid criteria or formula for selection is applied”.

The Supreme Court raised the same worry thirty years ago. In the 1995 judgment, Justice Kuldip Singh recorded that awards had gone to businessmen and industrialists “with little or no contribution”. The system, Justice Kuldip Singh wrote, “is getting degenerated with the passage of time”.

The Court recommended a high level committee to examine the criteria. It warned that the number of awards “should not be so large as to dilute their value”.

The ceiling still has room in it. Strip out the 16 posthumous awards and the five living awardees listed against a foreign country. By our count of the country column, 110 of the 131 sit under it.

The spread is uneven in two directions. Art alone took 44 of the 131 awards, or 33.6%, on a Peoples Feed count of the Ministry’s list.

Eight awards fell outside the nine disciplines. Three went to agriculture and two to archaeology. Animal husbandry, radio broadcasting and spiritualism took one each.

The map is lopsided too. Maharashtra took 15, Tamil Nadu 13, Uttar Pradesh 11 and West Bengal 11, which is 50 of the 131 between four states.

Thirty of India’s 36 states and union territories appear on the 2026 list. Six do not. They are Goa, Mizoram, Sikkim, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.

The totals are drifting down. India gave 139 Padma awards in 2025 and 131 in 2026. Women fell from 23 to 19, and Padma Bhushan awards from 19 to 13.

About the Padma awards

The Padma awards are civilian honours of the Republic of India in three grades: Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri. The Ministry of Home Affairs runs the scheme, which dates them to 1954. A Padma Awards Committee named by the Prime Minister recommends the names, and the Prime Minister and the President approve them. India announced 131 Padma awards on January 25, 2026.

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