40 Fun Facts About Kaun Banega Crorepati

KBC was nearly launched as Kaun Banega Lakhpati with a ₹1 lakh top prize; who ordered it raised to ₹1 crore?

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, the channel's parent, gave the order in February 2000, a month after Amitabh Bachchan was picked as host. Bachchan was initially sceptical about hosting at all.

Who hosted KBC's third season in 2007, after Amitabh Bachchan declined to return once illness had halted season two?

Shah Rukh Khan's season opened strongly but its ratings slid, and the show went dark for three and a half years before Bachchan returned in 2010.

Which phrase does Amitabh Bachchan use on KBC to confirm a contestant's choice, India's 'Is that your final answer?'

Lock kiya jaye, literally 'shall it be locked?', has spread to the regional editions too: Puneeth Rajkumar asked 'Lock maadoda?' in Kannada and Nagarjuna 'Lock cheseyana?' in Telugu.

Sushil Kumar, a ₹6,000-a-month computer teacher dubbed the real Slumdog Millionaire, won ₹5 crore from which state?

Bihar's Sushil Kumar taught computers under the MNREGA rural jobs scheme before his 2011 win, which drew the highest ratings of any Hindi entertainment channel in two years.

Who plays Prem Kumar, the sneering quiz host who feeds Jamal a wrong answer in Slumdog Millionaire?

Anil Kapoor has since sat in the real KBC hot seat himself, on a celebrity edition of the very show his character was modelled on.

KBC raised its top prize to ₹7.5 crore in 2022, with a new safety net, to mark the 75th anniversary of what?

Indian independence at 75 also brought a new safety rung just below the ₹1 crore question, so a wrong answer at the very top no longer wiped out most of the winnings.

Which British director's 2008 film about a KBC contestant from the Juhu slums won eight Academy Awards?

Danny Boyle nearly passed on Slumdog Millionaire because he had no interest in a film about a quiz show, until he learned that Simon Beaufoy of The Full Monty had written the script.

Sushil Kumar's ₹5 crore question asked which European country sold the Nicobar Islands to the British in 1868?

Denmark had colonised the Nicobars through its own East India Company in the 1750s, kept abandoning them to malaria, and turned down an Italian bid to buy them in 1865 before selling to Britain.

Which cricketer became the first sportsperson to receive the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 2014?

Sachin Tendulkar took the KBC hot seat himself in 2001, alongside Vinod Kambli, a decade before retiring as the only batter with 100 international centuries.

Which channel launched KBC on 3 July 2000, in the middle of turning itself into an all-Hindi network?

Star Plus reached number one among Indian channels for the first time within weeks, as the show's viewing share climbed to 54% in the last week of July 2000.

After a three-and-a-half-year gap, KBC returned in 2010 on which channel, its home for well over a decade since?

Sony TV's first season cut the ladder from 15 questions to 13, put a timer on the early questions and stamped the brand-new rupee symbol onto the logo.

Which KBC lifeline vanished in 2020 because COVID rules emptied the studio, and returned the following season?

Audience Poll gave way to Video a Friend for season 12, filmed with no spectators at all; that season Runa Saha also reached the hot seat without winning a qualifier, as no other contestant was left.

What is the name of KBC's classic qualifying round, where hopefuls order four answers in the shortest time?

Fastest Finger First was dropped for a three-question Triple Test in seasons 13 and 14, then restored in 2023; its winner originally stayed for one episode but from 2010 could hang on for a week.

KBC is the licensed Hindi version of a quiz format first broadcast in September 1998 in which country?

The United Kingdom's ITV launched the original on 4 September 1998, and the format has since aired in around 100 countries, making it the best-selling TV format in history.

Who became KBC's first crorepati on 19 October 2000, the month KBC hit its all-time peak rating?

Harshvardhan Navathe's win came as the series touched 27.13 TVR, a rating no later season came close to; a couple, Vijay Raul and Arundhati, were the next to win ₹1 crore, in May 2001.

What record prize did brothers Achin and Sarthak Narula win in 2014, the largest payout in KBC history to that point?

₹7 crore sent the Narulas leaping out of their seats as Bachchan shouted the amount, and the clip became an internet meme.

Which Air Force pilot aboard Soyuz T-11 in 1984 told Indira Gandhi that India looked 'better than the whole world'?

Rakesh Sharma had flown 21 MiG-21 combat missions in the 1971 war before the Soviet Interkosmos programme made him the first Indian in space.

In Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal's final ₹2 crore question asks for the third musketeer; which name does he guess?

Aramis is a pure guess: Jamal's phone-a-friend, Latika, answers only to say she is safe and does not know, so he picks the first option on the screen.

Which KBC lifeline, borrowed from America's Super Millionaire, gives two guesses but removes the right to walk away?

Double Dip arrived in season 4 in 2010, the year a clock was first put on the questions, and the timer pauses only for the first of the two guesses.

Which lifeline in Amitabh Bachchan's 2013 KBC season let a contestant reuse one already spent on an earlier question?

Power Paplu debuted on a new 360-degree multimedia stage, the season the question count went from 13 to 15 and the Phone-a-Friend call was stretched to 45 seconds.

Who was KBC's second ₹5 crore winner and the first woman to reach that prize, in January 2013?

Sunmeet Kaur Sawhney won on 12 January 2013, a fortnight before season 6 ended, in the season that also launched the Dusra Mauka specials for socially excluded contestants.

Who became the first blind contestant to win ₹1 crore on Kaun Banega Crorepati, in the season of its 1000th episode?

Himani Bundela won on 31 August 2021, barely a week into season 13, and Sahil Aditya Ahirwar added the season's second ₹1 crore that October.

KBC's first ₹1 crore question, in 2000, asked which official the Constitution lets join Parliament's proceedings?

The Attorney General may speak in either House under Articles 76 and 88 but has no vote, and unlike a minister is free to keep a private legal practice.

Which sportsman, India's first Khel Ratna winner, was the ₹1 crore answer on Junior KBC in 2001?

Viswanathan Anand was the answer 14-year-old Ravi Mohan Saini locked in to become a crorepati in May 2001; Anand had become India's first grandmaster in 1988 and went on to five world titles.

Which 8,586-metre peak, the world's third highest, rises on the border of Sikkim and Nepal?

Kangchenjunga was assumed to be the world's highest mountain until the Great Trigonometrical Survey's 1849 calculations showed that Everest, then called Peak XV, was taller.

Which 2023 ISRO mission made India the first country to soft-land a craft near the Moon's south pole?

Chandrayaan-3's lander Vikram and rover Pragyan touched down on 23 August 2023, making ISRO only the fourth agency to land on the Moon, after the Soviets, NASA and China; the lander was never built to survive the lunar night.

Slumdog Millionaire was adapted from Q & A, a 2005 novel by which Indian diplomat, later High Commissioner to Canada?

Vikas Swarup's hero is not Jamal but Ram Mohammad Thomas, a Mumbai waiter whose three-faith name the film dropped, and the novel has sold translation rights in 43 languages.

Which former India cricket captain hosted the Bengali edition, Ke Hobe Banglar Kotipoti, when it launched in 2011?

Sourav Ganguly fronted the show on the Mahuaa Bangla channel, and when it returned in 2018 the actor Prosenjit Chatterjee took over as host.

Who hosted the British original of KBC on ITV from 1998, asking contestants 'Is that your final answer?'

Chris Tarrant recorded 592 episodes across 30 series, in which just five contestants ever won the £1m jackpot.

Which quizmaster, host of Doordarshan's Quiz Time from 1985, produced KBC through his company Synergy?

Siddhartha Basu's Quiz Time contestants included future RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, and his company went on to make eight regional KBC editions.

Which IIT Guwahati professor designed the ₹ sign, chosen in a 2010 public competition and added to KBC's logo that year?

D. Udaya Kumar blended the Devanagari letter ra with a Latin R missing its vertical bar, and the Union Cabinet picked it from about 3,331 entries on 15 July 2010.

India's longest train route, the Vivek Express from Dibrugarh in Assam, ends at which town on the southern tip?

Kanyakumari to Dibrugarh is the 28th-longest rail route on Earth, launched in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda's birth.

Which shooter won India's first individual Olympic gold, in the men's 10-metre air rifle at Beijing 2008?

Abhinav Bindra had taken the 2006 world title in the same event, making him the first Indian to hold the world and Olympic titles at the same time.

Which physicist's 1930 Nobel Prize, for the scattering of light, made him the first Asian to win a physics Nobel?

C. V. Raman made the discovery on 28 February 1928, a date India now marks as National Science Day, and his nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar later won a Nobel too.

Gandhi's 1930 march of 240 miles from Sabarmati to Dandi broke the British monopoly on which commodity?

Salt could be scooped freely on the coast, yet the 1882 Salt Act forced Indians to buy it from government depots, and Gandhi set out with 78 volunteers on 12 March 1930.

Which Rajasthan city was painted pink in 1876 to welcome the Prince of Wales, earning an epithet it still carries?

Jaipur was founded in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II as one of modern India's earliest planned cities, laid out on Vastu Shastra principles by Vidyadhar Bhattacharya.

KBC's second ₹5 crore question, in January 2013, asked which climber was the first woman to summit K2?

Wanda Rutkiewicz climbed K2 in 1986 without bottled oxygen, and had reached Everest's summit on the very day her compatriot Karol Wojtyła was announced as Pope John Paul II.

The Narula brothers' final KBC question asked who captained the Hector, the first East India Company ship at Surat?

William Hawkins sailed on to Agra, where Emperor Jahangir made him a mansabdar with 400 horse, a 30,000-rupee allowance and an Armenian Christian bride, Mariam Khan.

Shashwat Goel, the first contestant to attempt KBC's ₹7.5 crore question, in 2022, got it wrong and left with how much?

₹75 lakh was the new safety net, and Goel had reasoned that a right answer meant a 650% gain against only a 25% loss, so he played on from ₹1 crore in 2022.

In KBC seasons 5 and 6, contestants chose their own guaranteed-winnings threshold, known by which Hindi word?

Padao was the single milestone a player could set anywhere on the money tree, and a wrong answer before reaching it meant going home with nothing.