PERSONS IN NEWS - UPSC Current Affairs 2025

Sunita Williams is a distinguished NASA astronaut and retired U.S. Navy officer who recently returned to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom capsule as part of the Crew-9 mission, following an extended stay on the International Space Station (ISS).
She is the second American astronaut of Indian heritage to go into space, after Kalpana Chawla.
She has strong ties to India as her father, Deepak Pandya, was from Gujarat, India.

Literary theorist and post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has won the 2025 Holberg Prize.
Born in 1942 in Kolkata, Spivak gained prominence with her 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which critiques the exclusion of marginalized voices, especially women, in colonial India.
She coined the term ‘planetarity’ as a critique of capitalist-driven globalization, advocating for a more inclusive and ethical global perspective.
Holberg is one of the largest international research prizes awarded annually for outstanding research in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology.
Considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of humanities, social sciences, law or theology research, it carries a $5,40,000 cash prize.

Recently, the 59^th Jnanpith Award was awarded to Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla.
He will be the first writer from Chhattisgarh to receive the award.
He is famously known as a short story writer, poet and essayist. His acclaimed novels include Naukar Ki Kameez and Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi, the latter earning him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999.
The Jnanpith Award is considered the highest literary honour in India, given to authors who have excelled in literature in any of India’s 22 official languages, as specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.
The award carries a cash prize of Rs 11 lakh, a bronze statue of Vagdevi, and a citation.

Nandi-Ndaitwah was recently sworn in as Namibia’s first female president.
She became Namibia’s fifth president since its independence in 1990.
Nandi-Ndaitwah won the 2024 presidential election with 57% of the vote.
Previously the Vice President, she is a stalwart of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) that led the sparsely populated and uranium-rich country to independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990.

Kirsty Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe, has achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first woman and the first African to be elected as President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Out of a total of 97 possible votes, Coventry amassed 49 and became the 10th IOC president.
She will officially assume the presidency on June 23, 2025, succeeding Thomas Bach. Her term is set for eight years, concluding in 2033.

The Reserve Bank has appointed Ajit Ratnakar Joshi as Executive Director (ED) to oversee the Department of Statistics and Information Management and the Financial Stability Department.
Prior to this promotion, Dr Joshi served as the Principal Adviser in the Department of Statistics and Information Management.
He has a Master’s degree in statistics from Nagpur University, Ph.D. in monetary economics from IIT Madras, Diploma in Development Policy and Planning from the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi and is also a Certified Associate of the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (CAIIB).