SSC GK Questions 2026

The Vikas Adhikari, known in general administration as the block development officer, is the government officer posted to a panchayat samiti to execute its resolutions, run the development schemes of the block and control its staff and accounts.

The panchayat samiti is the middle or block level tier, and its elected members choose one of themselves as Pradhan, with an Up-Pradhan as deputy.

The Eleventh Schedule, added by the 73rd Amendment, lists twenty nine subjects that a state may entrust to its panchayats, from agriculture, minor irrigation and rural housing to drinking water, primary education, health and the public distribution system; devolution of these subjects, along with funds and functionaries, is what decides…

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 inserted Part IX with Articles 243 to 243O and the Eleventh Schedule, making regular elections, reservation and a fixed five year term binding on the states, and it came into force on 24 April 1993, now National Panchayati Raj Day.

This committee, which reported in 1957 after studying the working of the Community Development Programme, held that rural development could not succeed without participation, and recommended democratic decentralisation through elected bodies at three levels, the village panchayat, the panchayat samiti at the block and the zila parishad at the district.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated panchayati raj at Nagaur on 2 October 1959, acting on the recommendation of the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee, and Rajasthan therefore became the first state in India to begin the three tier system of local self government.

The potato is native to the Andes of South America and reached Europe only after the Spanish conquest of Peru, after which it became a staple that supported a rising population; maize, tomato, chilli, tobacco, groundnut and cocoa travelled the same way, and Indian cooking took the chilli and the…

The two Iberian kingdoms were the pioneers of oceanic voyages, and after the first voyage of Columbus they agreed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, with the Pope as arbiter, to divide the non Christian world along a line in the Atlantic: lands to the west of it for…

The expedition left Spain in 1519 under Magellan, who crossed the strait now named after him and named the Pacific Ocean for its calm waters.

The Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488. He called it the Cape of Storms, and the king of Portugal renamed it the Cape of Good Hope because the way to India now lay open.

The Council of Trent, summoned by the Pope, sat in several sessions between 1545 and 1563, abolished the worst abuses such as the sale of indulgences, imposed discipline and training on the clergy and restated Catholic doctrine against the Protestants.

When the Pope refused to annul the marriage of Henry the Eighth to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which declared the king the supreme head of the Church of England and cut the English church off from Rome.

Calvin set out his theology, including the doctrine of predestination, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and built a reformed church order at Geneva that spread to Scotland, the Netherlands and France.

An indulgence was a pardon for sin sold for money, and the campaign to sell indulgences in Germany to pay for building work at Rome was the immediate provocation for Martin Luther, who nailed or posted his Ninety Five Theses at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 arguing that no payment…

Gutenberg of Mainz in Germany built the first European printing press with movable metal type about the middle of the fifteenth century and printed the Bible that carries his name.

Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat, wrote the Prince as advice to a ruler on how to win and keep power, judging actions by their results rather than by religious morality, and the word Machiavellian comes from this book.

Francesco Petrarch, an Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century, collected and studied classical Latin manuscripts and placed human life, reason and the individual at the centre of learning, which is why he is remembered as the father of humanism.

Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, was captured by the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed the Second in 1453.

Rajasthan is divided into ten agro-climatic zones, which run from the arid western plain and the hyper arid partially irrigated zone in the west, through the irrigated north western plain and the two transitional plains of inland drainage and the Luni basin, to the semi arid and flood prone eastern…

The Lower Gangetic Plain, essentially West Bengal, has heavy rainfall, humid air and the alluvium of the delta, the conditions jute needs for growing and for retting, and it grows rice and potato along with it.