SSC GK Questions 2026

The National Council of Science Museums was set up in 1978 as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Kolkata, and it runs the network of science centres and science cities across the country.

The Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Saraswathi Mahal Library stands within the Thanjavur palace complex in Tamil Nadu.

Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, a mathematician who became the first librarian of the University of Madras, is called the father of library science in India.

The Rampur Raza Library is at Rampur in western Uttar Pradesh, housed in the Hamid Manzil inside the Rampur fort.

International Museum Day has been observed on 18 May since 1977 on the announcement of the International Council of Museums, a non-governmental body founded in 1946 with its headquarters at Paris, and each year it carries a theme.

It obliges a publisher to deliver one copy of every book published in India to the National Library at Kolkata and one copy each to the Connemara Public Library at Chennai, the Central Library at Mumbai and the Delhi Public Library; these four are the National Depository Libraries.

It was set up at Calcutta in 1891 to bring together the scattered records of the Government of India, shifted to New Delhi after the capital was transferred, and occupied its present building on Janpath, designed by Edwin Lutyens, in 1926.

The Imperial Library was created by the Imperial Library Act of 1902 and opened to readers in 1903 on Curzon’s initiative; he merged the collections of the Calcutta Public Library of 1836 with the Home Department secretariat libraries to form a single library of record.

The National Library of India stands in the Belvedere Estate at Alipore in Kolkata, in a building that was once the residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal.

The Salar Jung Museum stands on the south bank of the Musi river at Hyderabad and holds the collection built up mainly by Mir Yousuf Ali Khan, Salar Jung III, the Prime Minister of the Nizam of Hyderabad.

It was founded in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is the oldest museum in India as well as the largest multipurpose museum in the country, with sections for art, archaeology, anthropology, geology, zoology and economic botany.

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.

The ASEAN Secretariat has been at Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, since 1976, and it supports the summits, the ministerial councils and the three community pillars into which the grouping's work was organised in 2015.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was created on 8 August 1967 by the Bangkok Declaration, also called the ASEAN Declaration, signed by the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand; 8 August is observed as ASEAN Day.

SAARC began with seven members, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan was admitted as the eighth member at the fourteenth summit held in New Delhi in 2007, making it the only country to have joined the grouping after its founding.

The SAARC Secretariat was established at Kathmandu in Nepal on 16 January 1987 and is headed by a Secretary-General chosen from the member states in turn; it coordinates the work of the technical committees and the regional centres.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation came into being on 8 December 1985, when the heads of state and government of seven South Asian countries adopted its Charter at the first summit in Dhaka; the proposal had been made by President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh at the start of…