SSC GK Questions 2026

The great Bihar earthquake of 1934 destroyed the rail link across the Kosi between Nirmali and Saraigarh, and the river’s shifting course kept it broken for decades; the Kosi Rail Mahasetu, opened in 2020, restored the connection and cut the journey between Mithila and Kosi by hundreds of kilometres.

The Ganga waterway from Haldia to Prayagraj, declared in 1986 as the first national waterway of the country, is 1,620 kilometres long, and under the Jal Marg Vikas Project its channel was deepened and terminals were built, including the multimodal terminal at Patna.

National Waterway 1 follows the Ganga, the Bhagirathi and the Hooghly from Haldia in West Bengal up to Prayagraj, and a long stretch of it passes through Bihar by Buxar, Patna, Munger and Bhagalpur.

Vikramshila Setu, about four and a half kilometres long and opened in 2001, joins Bhagalpur on the south bank with Naugachhia on the north, and it takes its name from the ancient university of Vikramshila, whose ruins stand in the same district at Antichak.

The Mahatma Gandhi Setu, about 5.75 kilometres long and opened in 1982, runs from Patna to Hajipur in Vaishali district, the town that also holds the headquarters of the East Central Railway, and it is the main road link between the capital and north Bihar.

The bridge between Mokama and Simaria, opened in 1959 and inaugurated by Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, carried both a railway line and a road and was the first bridge of that kind over the Ganga anywhere in the country.

The East Central Railway, created in 2002 when the railways were reorganised into new zones, has its headquarters at Hajipur in Vaishali district, and it is the only zonal headquarters of the Indian Railways in Bihar.

The board, with its office at Patna, holds the matriculation and the intermediate examinations of the state and publishes their results, and its papers are the ones that lakhs of students of Bihar sit every year.

Kala-azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, is caused by a parasite carried by the sandfly, which breeds in the damp cracks of mud walls and cattle sheds in the plains of north Bihar, so the control programme sprays the inside walls of houses, offers free diagnosis and treatment at the block level…

The Nalanda University Act was passed by Parliament in 2010, creating a central university at Rajgir in Nalanda district as a revival of the ancient mahavihara, with an international character and schools of Buddhist studies, historical studies, ecology and international relations.

Magadh University, set up in 1962, has its campus at Bodh Gaya in Gaya district and affiliates a very large number of colleges across south Bihar, which is why it figures so often in state papers.

Under the Bal Hriday Yojana the state pays for the surgery and the care of children with congenital heart disease, screening them through the school health programme and sending them to recognised hospitals, so that a family does not have to sell land for an operation.

The institute at Agamkuan in Patna works under the Indian Council of Medical Research and is the national centre for research on kala-azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, the disease whose heaviest Indian burden lies in the plains of north Bihar.

The institution opened in 1925 under that name and was renamed Patna Medical College after independence; its hospital is still among the largest in eastern India and the oldest teaching hospital of the state.

The Indian Institute of Management of the state works at Bodh Gaya in Gaya district, the town of the Mahabodhi temple, and it was among the institutes opened in the second round of expansion of the IIM system.

The Census of 2011 recorded Bihar’s literacy rate as 61.8 per cent, the lowest among the states of India, with 71.2 per cent for men and 51.5 per cent for women.

In the Census of 2011 Rohtas, with its headquarters at Sasaram in the Shahabad region, recorded the highest literacy rate among the districts of Bihar, ahead of Patna and Munger, which came next.

It was set up on 1 October 1917 as an examining and affiliating university for the province of Bihar and Odisha, and it is the oldest university in the state as well as one of the oldest in the country.

Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller from Tangier, reached India in 1333. Muhammad bin Tughluq, impressed by his learning, made him the qazi (judge) of Delhi, a post he held for several years.

After years of travel, Guru Nanak (1469-1539) settled at Kartarpur on the banks of the Ravi and set up a centre there.