Static GK GK Questions with Answers – Page 17

The commission was appointed in 1983 under Justice Ranjit Singh Sarkaria, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, to review the working arrangements between the Union and the states.

Appointed in 1957 to examine the working of the community development programme, it reported that development could not succeed without democratic decentralisation and recommended a three-tier structure: the gram panchayat at the village level, the panchayat samiti at the block level and the zila parishad at the district level, with…

The First Backward Classes Commission was appointed in January 1953 under Article 340 with Dattatreya Balkrishna Kalelkar, known as Kaka Kalelkar, as chairman, and it submitted its report in 1955.

Every major Indian education commission has held that a child learns best in the language spoken at home.

The Second Backward Classes Commission, known as the Mandal Commission after its chairman Bindheshwari Prasad Mandal, was appointed on the first of January 1979 by the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai under Article 340 of the Constitution.

The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was adopted in 1985 as a framework agreement, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 gave it teeth by fixing timetables for phasing out ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons and halons.

India has not signed the test-ban treaty of 1996, just as it is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, holding that both divide the world permanently into nuclear and non-nuclear states.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 at Ramsar, a city on the Caspian coast of Iran, and is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties.

The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494, two years after Columbus reached the Americas, and drew an imaginary line down the Atlantic: lands found to the west of it were to belong to Spain and those to the east to Portugal.

Signed in 1992 in the Dutch city of Maastricht and in force from 1993, it created the European Union, introduced the idea of European citizenship and set out the path to the single currency.

The Shimla Agreement was signed in July 1972, after the war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh.

The Tashkent Declaration was signed in January 1966 by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and President Ayub Khan at Tashkent, then in the Soviet Union and now the capital of Uzbekistan, with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin as mediator.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed at Karachi in 1960 by Jawaharlal Nehru and President Ayub Khan, with the World Bank as the third party to the agreement.

Signed in 1802, it bound Peshwa Baji Rao II to Lord Wellesley's subsidiary alliance after his defeat by the Holkars at Poona.

The Treaty of Salbai of 1782 closed the First Anglo-Maratha War, which had begun with the Company's attempt to place Raghunath Rao in power at Pune.

The Treaty of Allahabad was signed in 1765 by Robert Clive with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh after the Company's victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1764.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, created at Shanghai in 2001 out of the Shanghai Five of 1996, keeps its Secretariat at Beijing and its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, usually shortened to RATS, at Tashkent in Uzbekistan, where it coordinates intelligence and joint exercises against terrorism, separatism and extremism.

SAFTA was signed at the twelfth SAARC summit held at Islamabad in 2004 and came into force on 1 January 2006, replacing the SAARC Preferential Trading Arrangement, which had been signed in 1993 and had come into force in 1995.

BIMSTEC has seven members: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand, of which five are in South Asia and two in Southeast Asia.

The BIMSTEC Secretariat was opened at Dhaka in Bangladesh in 2014, seventeen years after the grouping was created by the Bangkok Declaration of 6 June 1997.