CDS GK Questions 2026

The board was constituted in 1996 as a statutory body under that Act and works under the Department of Science and Technology, providing loans and equity to Indian companies that take home-grown technology to the market.

INSPIRE stands for Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research and was launched by the Department of Science and Technology in 2008 to draw young people to science.

The body was founded in 1911 as the Indian Research Fund Association to sponsor and coordinate medical research in the country, and it was renamed the Indian Council of Medical Research in 1949 after independence.

The Department of Space, created in 1972, and the Department of Atomic Energy, created in 1954, are not placed under the Ministry of Science and Technology; both report directly to the Prime Minister, which is why ISRO and the atomic energy establishment are described as working under the Prime Minister's…

The Department of Science and Technology was created in 1971 as the nodal department for the promotion of new areas of science and technology and for the coordination of scientific work across ministries; it now runs the INSPIRE programme, the fellowships and the Vigyan Dhara scheme.

The Science and Engineering Research Board Act was passed in 2008 and the board was constituted as a statutory body under the Department of Science and Technology to fund basic research in the sciences and engineering through competitive grants to individual scientists.

The Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act was passed by Parliament in 2023 to create a single apex body for funding research across the sciences, including in state universities and colleges, which earlier received very little central research money.

CSIR was set up in 1942 and is registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act of 1860, and by its rules the Prime Minister holds the office of President of the society by virtue of the post.

It was the first policy statement on science adopted by independent India, placed before Parliament during the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru and shaped in large part by Homi Bhabha.

Trained as a physicist, she turned to agriculture and founded Navdanya, a network of community seed banks that collects, stores and freely exchanges traditional varieties of rice, millet, pulses and oilseeds, and that campaigns against the patenting of seed and of plants long used in India.

The Tawa project on a tributary of the Narmada in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh brought canal irrigation to black cotton soil that already held water well.

From the late nineteen seventies Jadav Payeng planted saplings year after year on a bare, eroding sandbar of the Brahmaputra near Majuli, and the patch grew into a forest of several hundred hectares that is now called the Molai forest after him.

In 1982 the government proposed to convert the natural sal forests of Singhbhum, then in Bihar and now in Jharkhand, into plantations of teak, which fetches a far higher price as timber.

He carried the Chipko message on foot across the Himalaya and summed up its argument in the phrase that ecology is permanent economy, meaning that a standing forest yields soil, water and pure air for ever while felled timber yields money once.

Through the Tarun Bharat Sangh he revived the johad, the traditional crescent-shaped earthen check dam, across the dry Alwar district of Rajasthan.

At Khejarli near Jodhpur in 1730, the men of the Maharaja of Jodhpur came to fell khejri trees for lime kilns needed to build a new palace.

The Kerala State Electricity Board proposed a hydroelectric dam across the Kunthipuzha river in Palakkad district, which would have submerged a tract of undisturbed tropical evergreen rainforest and the habitat of the lion-tailed macaque.

She has led the Narmada Bachao Andolan since it took shape in 1985 against the Sardar Sarovar and other large dams on the Narmada, arguing that the displaced, many of them tribal, were never given land or proper rehabilitation.

The Appiko movement began in 1983 at Salkani village in the Sirsi taluk of Uttara Kannada district, in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, under Pandurang Hegde.

The movement began in 1973 at Mandal village in Chamoli district of the Garhwal Himalaya, then part of Uttar Pradesh and today in Uttarakhand.