RBI GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is 1 October 2026. The Ministry of Finance says a notification appointed that day as the date on which the provisions of the Act take effect. Option A is the trap most often set on this item, since that is the day the President gave assent to the Act; assent and commencement are separate steps and a law may take effect weeks or months after it is assented to. Option B is the other trap, because that is the date of the gazette notification itself, which fixed the commencement date rather than starting the Act. Option D is wrong because no such date appears anywhere in the release. For the examination hall, hold the three dates in order as a single chain: assent in August, notification in September and commencement in October, all in the same year. Questions are set on each of the three links.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Communications. India Post Payments Bank has been established under the Department of Posts, which sits in that ministry, and the entire equity of the bank is owned by the Government of India. This is a point aspirants often get wrong, because a bank feels as though it should belong to the Ministry of Finance, and option A is placed there for that reason. The postal link is the whole design of the institution: its reach rests on about 1,65,000 post offices, of which roughly 1,40,000 are in rural areas, and around 3,00,000 postal employees, so the doorstep model works through postal staff rather than branches. Its services are built on India Stack, delivered through a smartphone linked to the core banking system with a biometric device, and offered in 13 languages across 5.57 lakh villages and towns.

The correct answer is 13.25 crore. The release gives this as the pan-India customer base as on 31 March 2026, and adds two shares worth remembering: 77 per cent of these customers are in rural areas and 49 per cent are women. Their deposits with the bank stood at ₹29,104 crore. Every wrong option here is another genuine figure from the same list, which is exactly the trap. The 6.5 crore in option A is the number of direct benefit transfer beneficiaries who received about ₹1.55 lakh crore. The 9.47 crore in option B counts Aadhaar mobile updates done by the bank, alongside 1.35 crore Bal Aadhaar enrolments. The 12.06 crore in option C counts Aadhaar enabled payment system transactions, through which ₹36,140 crore was disbursed. Read the label before the number in such tables.

The correct answer is the DakPay Sound Box. The release describes it as a launch for merchants, designed to simplify and strengthen the acceptance of everyday digital payments at their end. The other three options are real products of the bank, which is what makes this question worth attempting carefully. The Digital Mutual Fund Platform and the Digital Insurance Technology Platform were indeed launched on the same Foundation Day, but both are meant for customers rather than merchants: one opens a digital route to investment, the other connects customers to life, health and general insurance. The Surakshit Savings Account belongs to an earlier set of three account variants rolled out during the year, along with the SHG Savings Account and the Sampoorna Savings Account, and it carries cyber insurance of ₹25,000 against phishing, spoofing and SIM jacking.

The correct answer is the 9th Foundation Day, observed as IPPB Day 2026. The arithmetic is easy to hold if the launch date is remembered: India Post Payments Bank was launched on 1 September 2018, so the same date in 2026 completes nine years of working. The release itself says the bank has emerged over the past nine years as an important platform connecting citizens with banking, digital payments and government benefits. The other options are near misses of the kind a paper setter likes, and each is wrong only by a year or two, so the safer method is to anchor the launch year and count forward rather than to memorise the ordinal alone. Note also that the bank is set up under the Department of Posts in the Ministry of Communications, with the whole of its equity held by the Government of India.

The correct answer is that the new base year is 2022-23. The annual revised estimates use new price and production indices on that base, including an Output Producer Price Index and a Banking Services Price Index, along with updated administrative data drawn from several sources. Option B reverses the direction of the change, because real GDP growth was revised upwards for all three earlier years. Option C is wrong for the same reason of fact: the Output Producer Price Index is one of the new indices brought in, not one removed. Option D misplaces a number that does appear in the release; 7.1 per cent was the earlier estimate for 2024-25, which was itself revised to 7.2 per cent, while the estimate for 2025-26 moved up from 7.7 to 7.8 per cent. The revisions matter because they show the strong quarter sitting on an already stronger path.

The correct answer is Gross Fixed Capital Formation, the measure of investment funded within the economy. It grew 11.9 per cent in the first quarter of 2026-27 against 5.8 per cent in the same quarter of the previous year, and that jump is the sharpest change among the expenditure components listed. Option A is wrong on the number rather than the idea: Private Final Consumption Expenditure, which is household spending on goods and services, grew 7.1 per cent, up from 6.8 per cent. Exports grew 12.0 per cent, up from 6.0 per cent. Government consumption and imports are not among the components given growth figures in this release, so options C and D cannot be supported from it. For revision, remember the trio of drivers in order: exports 12.0, investment 11.9 and household consumption 7.1 per cent.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, usually shortened to MoSPI. Every table in the release, whether the expenditure components, the sector-wise Gross Value Added or the revised annual estimates, is sourced to that ministry. MoSPI also carried out the upward revision of real GDP growth for the three earlier years and moved the estimates to new price and production indices with base year 2022-23, among them an Output Producer Price Index and a Banking Services Price Index. Option C is wrong but close to the fact: the Reserve Bank of India had projected 7.0 per cent growth for this quarter, a forecast rather than the estimate itself, and the actual outcome was higher. NITI Aayog and the Department of Economic Affairs are not named in the release as the source of these national accounts figures at all.

The correct answer is 7.8 per cent. Real GDP, that is GDP at constant prices, is estimated at ₹81.36 lakh crore for the first quarter of 2026-27, and that level represents growth of 7.8 per cent. The figure is the highest first-quarter growth recorded in the four years from 2023-24 onwards, and manufacturing and services carried it. Each wrong option is a real number from the same release, which is what makes them tempting. Option A is the growth rate of the first quarter of the previous year, so it is the base against which this quarter is compared. Option B is the Reserve Bank of India's projection for the quarter, which the outcome exceeded. Option D is the growth of real Gross Value Added, not of GDP; real GVA stood at ₹73.82 lakh crore. Keep the three apart: 7.0 was the forecast, 7.8 the GDP outcome and 8.2 the GVA outcome.

The correct answer is C, Open market operations. Open market operations, or OMO, are the buying and selling of government securities by the central bank in the open market to control the money supply. When the RBI buys government bonds it pays money to banks, so liquidity in the system rises and interest rates tend to fall; when it sells bonds it pulls money out, tightening liquidity and pushing rates up. OMO is a quantitative tool of monetary policy, used along with the cash reserve ratio, the statutory liquidity ratio, the repo rate and the bank rate, and the RBI also uses it to manage the government's borrowing programme. A is wrong because national market operations is not a term used in monetary policy. B is wrong because closed market operations does not exist; the whole point is that the trades happen in the open market. D is wrong because international market operations would refer to foreign exchange dealings, not government securities. Exam tip: RBI buys securities means more money, RBI sells securities means less money; that is OMO.

The correct answer is 237. The release carries this as one of its headline findings, stating that in 237 districts women constitute one-third of the total workforce in the unincorporated sector. Every other option is also a real figure from the same release, which is what makes this question difficult, so each one must be attached to the right fact. The figure 280 is the number of districts where gross value added per worker exceeds the all-India average of Rs 1,56,539. The figure 331 is the approximate number of districts where gross value added per worker lies between one lakh and one and a half lakh rupees. The figure 25 is the number of districts where women make up more than half of the workforce. Two related findings are worth adding: the districts with the highest share of women-led establishments lie in Telangana, Manipur and Meghalaya, and in Mizoram at least half the establishments in every district are owned by women.

The correct answer is 757. The release says that estimates of the indicators are given for 757 out of the 770 districts available in the sampling frame at the time the ASUSE sample was selected. Option C is the sharpest distractor precisely because that figure also appears in the release, but it is the size of the sampling frame and not the number of districts actually shown, so the two must be kept apart. The gap between the two numbers is explained in the release itself. Lakshadweep and Chandigarh each have a single district, so their district estimates coincide with their union territory estimates and were already published. Delhi is excluded for a different reason, namely that its rural population is very small and its villages few, so all its districts were merged into one stratum and district estimates could not be generated. Options A and D do not appear anywhere in the release.

The correct answer is the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises 2025, abbreviated as ASUSE 2025. The release states that the report, titled Unincorporated Sector at the District Level, draws upon ASUSE data to present the scale, structure and economic performance of the sector district by district, and that this is the first initiative of the National Statistics Office to disseminate district-level estimates from a large-scale nationwide survey. The other three surveys named in the options are genuine statistical exercises, which makes them convincing distractors, but none of them is mentioned in this release and none supplies these estimates. Remember the supporting details as well: the survey covers rural and urban areas across the country, it takes in manufacturing, trade and other services, and the data were collected on tablets using computer assisted personal interviewing, with relative standard errors reported so that users can judge reliability.

The correct answer is 56%. The Staff Welfare Fund is money that public sector banks set aside for the welfare of working and retired staff, covering health expenses, canteen subsidies, sports and cultural activities and educational help. The Finance Ministry listed its 56% increase in August 2024 among the measures taken for bank employees.

The other percentages are distractors. The same list includes other points worth knowing: PSBs recruited about 4,82,800 employees from FY 2014-15 to FY 2025-26, with recruitment doubling in the last three years; as of 1 July 2026, 95.84% of officer posts and 92% of subordinate/award staff posts were filled; and negotiations on the next Bipartite Settlement began early, aiming to finish before the November 2027 deadline. Bipartite settlements are wage agreements between bank managements and unions.

The correct answer is 2015. In its appeal of 21 September 2026, the Ministry of Finance recalled that the Government, in the interest of bank employees, declared the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of every month as holidays for public sector banks in 2015. The remaining Saturdays are working days and, the Ministry said, an important opportunity for many citizens to use banking services.

The other years are distractors. This fact matters because the unions' pending demand, five-day banking, would turn every Saturday into a holiday. The Government's argument is that customers already lose two Saturdays a month, and that the planned strike from 28 to 30 September, next to a weekend and the half-yearly closing on 30 September, would mean an effective five-day shutdown of banking at a sensitive time of the financial year.

The correct answer is Implementation of five-day banking. The United Forum of Bank Unions and some other unions in public sector banks, supported by Regional Rural Banks, raised two principal demands: a five-day working week for banks and withdrawal of the Performance Linked Incentive scheme. The Finance Ministry says the strikes are now about the single demand of a five-day week, which is still being examined.

Withdrawal of the PLI scheme is the trap. It was one of the two original demands, but the Government met it by keeping the scheme in abeyance, so it is no longer pending. The Old Pension Scheme and the merger of Regional Rural Banks are not part of these strikes. A one-day strike was held on 11 September 2026; a three-day strike is set for 28 to 30 September and an indefinite one from 26 October 2026.