Railway GK Questions 2026

A bench of five judges decided it in 2022 and upheld the Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019, which provides up to ten per cent reservation for the economically weaker sections, by a majority of three to two.

It reserves seats in the House of the People, that is the Lok Sabha, for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, the number being in proportion to their population; there is no reservation of seats for the Other Backward Classes in Parliament.

It empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes, the difficulties they face and the steps that should be taken to remove them, and both the Kalelkar Commission of 1953 and the Mandal Commission of 1979 were appointed under it.

The first Backward Classes Commission was appointed in 1953 under Article 340 with Kaka Saheb Kalelkar as its chairman, and it submitted its report in 1955; the report was not acted upon because its criteria for identifying backwardness were considered vague.

The Constitution (One Hundred and Second Amendment) Act, 2018 inserted Article 338B, which makes the National Commission for Backward Classes a constitutional body with the duty to investigate and monitor the safeguards provided to the socially and educationally backward classes; the same amendment added Article 342A for the central list…

It amended Article 16(4A) so that a government servant of the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes promoted under the reservation also keeps the seniority of the promoted post, which is called consequential seniority, and the change was given effect from 1995.

It was passed after the Supreme Court in State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan struck down a communal order reserving seats in colleges, holding that it offended Article 15(1); Parliament answered by adding clause (4) to Article 15, which permits special provision for the advancement of socially and educationally backward…

The nine-judge bench in Indra Sawhney upheld the twenty-seven per cent quota for the Other Backward Classes but held that the socially advanced members of those classes, described as the creamy layer, must be excluded so that the benefit reaches the genuinely backward; the same judgment laid down the fifty…

The 103rd Amendment Act of 2019 added clause (6) to Article 15 for reservation in admission to educational institutions and clause (6) to Article 16 for reservation in appointments, in each case up to ten per cent for the economically weaker sections of citizens who are not covered by the…

It says that nothing in Article 16 shall prevent the State from making any provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the State, is not adequately represented in the services under the State.

The Second Backward Classes Commission was appointed in 1979 under Article 340 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes.

As Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall carried out long excavations at Taxila from 1913 onwards and published a detailed account of the city's successive settlements; the site was later inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.

Ikhtiyaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a commander in the service of the Ghurids, overran Bihar at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century and destroyed the monastic universities of the region, after which organised Buddhist learning in eastern India came to an end.

Later Tibetan accounts call the library of Nalanda Dharmaganja, the treasury of the law, and say that it consisted of three buildings named Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka, the tallest of which is described as a nine-storeyed structure.

Valabhi, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, was the capital of the Maitraka rulers and a famous centre of Hinayana Buddhist learning; the pilgrim I-tsing wrote that it stood beside Nalanda in reputation, and students went from there into royal service.

Gopala, the founder of the Pala dynasty in the eighth century, established the Odantapuri monastery in the region of Bihar Sharif, and its plan is said to have been followed when the first monasteries were built in Tibet.

Atisha Dipankara Srijnana was the most famous teacher of Vikramashila, the Pala monastery at Antichak in Bhagalpur, and in the eleventh century he was invited to Tibet, where he reformed Buddhist practice and is remembered as one of its great masters.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang studied the Yogachara philosophy at Nalanda under Shilabhadra, who was then the aged head of the monastery, during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century.

Takshashila, called Taxila by Greek and later English writers, was the capital of the Mahajanapada of Gandhara in the north-west of the subcontinent, in what is now the Rawalpindi district of Pakistan, and it was already a famous centre of learning in the time of the Buddha.

The Pala king Dharmapala founded Vikramashila at Antichak in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar about the turn of the ninth century, and it became famous for tantric studies and for the scholars called dvarapanditas who examined candidates at its gates.