SSC GK Questions 2026

The cotton boom of the American Civil War years ended, prices fell, the revenue demand was raised, and the Deccan ryot who had borrowed heavily turned on the Marwari and Gujarati sahukars, burning their bonds and account books in 1875.

It was applied in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies and in parts of Assam and Coorg, which together made up about half of British India, the largest share of the three settlements.

The word mahal means an estate or a village, and in this settlement the demand was fixed for the whole mahal; the village headman, called the lambardar, collected the shares from the co-sharers, and the village as a body was jointly responsible for the full amount.

Under its rules the revenue instalment had to reach the treasury before sunset on the appointed day; if it did not, the estate was liable to be sold at public auction, and many old families lost their zamindaris to Calcutta merchants in the first two decades.

The settlement required the zamindar to pay ten-elevenths of the rental he collected from the peasants to the state and to retain one-eleventh for himself, which is why the demand pressed so heavily and so many estates changed hands in the early years.

Munro, with Captain Alexander Read, worked out the Ryotwari settlement in the Baramahal and Madras region, and extended it widely after he became Governor of Madras in 1820; the state dealt directly with the ryot, the individual cultivator, who held the land so long as he paid the assessment.

Cornwallis, Governor-General from 1786 to 1793, made the settlement permanent in 1793 on the advice of John Shore, recognising the zamindars as proprietors of the soil against a revenue demand fixed for ever.

The Great Depression that began in 1929 pulled down the prices of primary produce such as wheat, cotton and jute far more sharply, and for far longer, than the prices of the manufactured goods the peasant had to buy.

In Poverty and Un-British Rule in India Naoroji gathered his estimates of India's national income and set out the theory of the drain of wealth, showing that a part of the country's wealth was carried to Britain every year without any return, through home charges, the salaries and pensions of…

It was set up in 1988 on the recommendation of the Vaghul Working Group to deal in short-term instruments such as treasury bills and commercial bills and so give depth and liquidity to the money market; it later became a primary dealer.

Cash Management Bills were introduced by the Government of India and the Reserve Bank in 2010 to meet temporary mismatches in the government's cash flow, and they are issued for periods shorter than 91 days, sometimes for just a few weeks.

M1, narrow money, is the most liquid aggregate: currency, that is notes and coins, with the public, plus the demand deposits of banks, which are withdrawable at any time, plus other deposits with the Reserve Bank, a small residual item.

In a repo the bank that needs funds sells government securities to the Reserve Bank and simultaneously agrees to repurchase them a day or a few days later at a slightly higher price; the difference is the interest, and the rate charged is the repo rate, which is the policy…

An equity share has no maturity date at all; it represents ownership of a company for as long as the company exists, so it is the classic capital market instrument, issued in the primary market and traded on stock exchanges under SEBI's regulation.

Following the Vaghul Committee's recommendations on the money market, the Reserve Bank allowed scheduled commercial banks to issue negotiable certificates of deposit in 1989, and commercial paper followed a year later in 1990.

Call money is the overnight, unsecured borrowing between banks and primary dealers that lets a bank square its cash reserve position at the end of the day; the interest on it is the call rate, the most sensitive interest rate in the system.

These are the three tenors of treasury bills auctioned by the Reserve Bank, with the 91-day bill auctioned most frequently.

A treasury bill is an instrument of the government's short-term borrowing, and the Reserve Bank of India, as banker and debt manager to the government, issues it on the government's behalf through auctions.

By definition the money market is the market for short-term funds, and the dividing line drawn in India and everywhere else is a maturity of one year; anything longer belongs to the capital market.

M3, called broad money or aggregate monetary resources, is the measure the Reserve Bank watches most closely, and it adds the time deposits of the banking system to narrow money.