Indian States & UTs GK Questions with Answers – Page 6

Parliament passed the Pondicherry (Alteration of Name) Act in 2006, replacing the anglicised Pondicherry with the Tamil original Puducherry, which means the new village or new town.

When the French East India Company obtained the fishing village of Pondicherry in 1674, Francois Martin was placed in charge and is counted as its first governor.

The Puducherry Legislative Assembly, constituted under the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963, has thirty directly elected seats. The Central Government may in addition nominate up to three members, so the house can reach a strength of thirty-three.

Arikamedu stands on the bank of the Ariyankuppam river a few kilometres south of the territorial capital. Excavations there have produced Roman amphorae, glassware, rouletted ware and beads, and the site is generally identified with the port of Poduke listed in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

All four regions of Puducherry, including Mahe in Kerala and Yanam in Andhra Pradesh, come under the Madras High Court, which sits at Chennai.

Yanam is a small region of about seventeen square kilometres in the delta of the Godavari, surrounded by Andhra Pradesh, and Telugu is its official language.

Auroville, the city of dawn, was inaugurated on 28 February 1968. It was founded by Mirra Alfassa, the French-born disciple of Sri Aurobindo whom followers call the Mother, and planned by the French architect Roger Anger as a township where people of every nation could live together; the Matrimandir stands…

It listed Pondicherry in the First Schedule as a union territory after the legal transfer from France, and inserted Article 239A, which empowers Parliament to create by law a legislature and a Council of Ministers for the territory.

On that day France handed over the administration of Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam, and India began governing them, although France still held sovereignty in law.

Mahe is the smallest of the four regions of Puducherry, about nine square kilometres on the Malabar coast, and it is completely surrounded by the Kannur district of Kerala.

With a population of 3,80,581 spread over 8,249 square kilometres, the territory recorded a density of only 46 persons per square kilometre at the 2011 Census, by far the lowest among the union territories, because most of its land is forest and most of its islands are uninhabited.

The Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, set up near Wandoor on the south-western coast of South Andaman, protects a stretch of coral reefs, mangroves and small islands along with the turtles, molluscs and reef fish that live there.

The union territory has no High Court of its own and comes under the jurisdiction of the Calcutta High Court, which holds a circuit bench in the territorial capital so that litigants do not have to travel to the mainland for every hearing.

Ross Island, which had been the administrative headquarters of the British in these islands before an earthquake damaged it, was renamed after Netaji in 2018 to honour his visit and his claim of the islands as free Indian soil.

During the Japanese occupation of the islands in the Second World War, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose visited Port Blair and hoisted the tricolour there, claiming the islands as the first Indian territory freed from British rule.

The jail was built at Port Blair over those ten years in the shape of a wheel, with seven wings radiating from a central watchtower and a total of 693 cells.

The indigenous communities of this territory fall into two racial groups. The Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese of the Andaman group are of Negrito descent and are among the oldest surviving human populations outside Africa.

The Government of India announced in September 2024 that the capital of the union territory would be renamed Sri Vijaya Puram, replacing a name that came from the colonial period.

Indira Point lies at the southern tip of Great Nicobar, the largest island of the Nicobar group, and marks the southernmost land point of the Republic of India, a little above six and three quarter degrees north.

Saddle Peak rises to 732 metres in North Andaman and is the highest point in the whole union territory. It gives its name to Saddle Peak National Park, which protects the tropical evergreen forest on its slopes.