IBPS GK Questions 2026

The Constitution nowhere uses the words right to information, but the Supreme Court has held that the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by Article 19(1)(a) is meaningless unless a citizen can know how the government works.

That Act was passed in 2002 but was never notified, so it never came into force; the RTI Act, 2005 replaced it with a stronger scheme that added time limits, penalties and independent Information Commissions, and Section 31 of the new Act repealed it.

The Act provides two appeals. Under Section 19(1) the first appeal is filed within thirty days of the reply or of the expiry of the time limit, and it goes to an officer senior in rank to the Public Information Officer within the same public authority, the First Appellate Authority.

Section 22 states that the provisions of the RTI Act have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in the Official Secrets Act, 1923, in any other law in force or in any instrument having effect by virtue of any other law.

Section 20(1) provides that where an Information Commission finds that a Public Information Officer has refused an application without reasonable cause, has not furnished information within the time specified, has given incorrect or misleading information or has destroyed information, it may impose a penalty of two hundred and fifty rupees…

Section 7(1) of the RTI Act lays down two limits. The ordinary limit is thirty days from the receipt of the application, but where the information sought concerns the life or liberty of a person the Public Information Officer must supply it within forty-eight hours of the request.

The RTI Act received the assent of the President on 15 June 2005, and Section 1(3) provided that the remaining provisions would come into force on the one hundred and twentieth day of its enactment.

Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon were French thinkers of the early nineteenth century who, with Robert Owen in Britain, argued that competition should be replaced by cooperative and planned communities in which property is held in common.

Consumer sovereignty means that the spending of consumers decides what is produced: a producer who makes what buyers do not want earns no profit and leaves the business, so in a market economy the consumer is said to rule.

It is called a command economy because a central planning authority, and not the market, commands how resources are used: it fixes the targets of output, allots raw materials to factories and often fixes prices and wages as well.

A severe balance of payments crisis, with foreign exchange reserves down to a few weeks of imports, forced the government to announce the New Economic Policy in July 1991.

It inserted the words socialist, secular and integrity into the Preamble, so the description of India became a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic.

The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 followed the Congress session at Avadi that called for a socialistic pattern of society, and it gave the public sector the commanding role.

Because resources are scarce and wants are unlimited, every economy must answer three questions, and these are called its central problems: what goods and in what quantity to produce, how to produce them, that is by which technique and combination of labour and capital, and for whom to produce, that…

Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867; it analysed capital, surplus value and the exploitation of labour and became the basic text of what is called scientific socialism.

In such an economy the state owns and runs the industries that need very large capital or serve strategic and social purposes, regulates the rest by law, and leaves ordinary production to private enterprise, while keeping responsibility for welfare and employment.

The Scottish economist published the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and is called the father of economics; he argued that if each person pursues his own interest in a free market, an invisible hand guides the outcome to the good of society, which became the classic defence of capitalism and…

In a capitalist or market economy the means of production are privately owned and nobody issues orders about production.

The laws passed between 1948 and the middle of the nineteen fifties ended zamindari, jagirdari and similar tenures across the country and brought about twenty million cultivators into direct relation with the state, and the First Amendment of 1951 secured those laws, so the class of rent collecting intermediaries disappeared.

Passed in 1978, it deleted the right to property from Part III and re-enacted it as Article 300A, under which no person may be deprived of property except by authority of law, so the protection is now a legal right enforceable through the ordinary courts rather than a fundamental right.