SSC GK Questions 2026

Payments banks were licensed on the recommendation of the Nachiket Mor Committee to widen access to deposits and payments, and the Reserve Bank's guidelines expressly bar them from lending and from issuing credit cards; their funds must go into government securities and deposits with other banks.

NPCI, set up in 2008 as the umbrella organisation for retail payments in the country, built and runs the Unified Payments Interface, along with RuPay, IMPS, the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System, the National Automated Clearing House and FASTag.

The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana was launched on 28 August 2014 as the national mission for financial inclusion, offering a zero-balance Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account, a RuPay debit card with accident insurance cover and an overdraft facility for accounts operated satisfactorily.

Passed under Article 262, this Act requires the Union government to constitute a tribunal when a state asks for one and the dispute cannot be settled by negotiation, and the award of the tribunal, once notified, has the force of a decree of the Supreme Court.

The Mahanadi rises in Chhattisgarh and flows into Odisha, where the Hirakud reservoir depends on its flow, so the barrages built upstream in Chhattisgarh brought a dispute that led the Union government to constitute a tribunal in 2018 under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956.

The Sardar Sarovar dam stands on the Narmada in Narmada district of Gujarat, and the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal, whose award came in 1979, divided the water among these four states and fixed the dam's height.

The Rihand dam, in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, is built on the Rihand, a tributary of the Son, and the reservoir it created, Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar, is the largest artificial lake in India measured by volume of water stored.

The Tehri dam stands on the Bhagirathi in Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, close to the confluence with the Bhilangna, and at about 260 metres it is the tallest dam in India.

The Indira Gandhi Canal, which was called the Rajasthan Canal when it was begun, starts at the Harike barrage in Punjab, just below the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, and runs south-west through Haryana into the desert districts of Rajasthan.

The Kaveri rises in Karnataka at Talakaveri in the Brahmagiri hills, flows through Tamil Nadu to the delta, receives tributaries from Kerala and serves the Karaikal region of Puducherry, so all four are parties.

Article 262 allows Parliament to make a law for the adjudication of any dispute about the use, distribution or control of the waters of an inter-state river or river valley, and to bar the Supreme Court and all other courts from such disputes.

The Damodar Valley Corporation was created by an Act of 1948 as an autonomous body for an entire river basin, with flood control, irrigation, power and navigation under one management, exactly on the pattern of the Tennessee Valley Authority set up in America in 1933.

The Nagarjuna Sagar dam is built across the Krishna at Nandikonda, on the border of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and is one of the largest masonry dams in the country.

The Hirakud dam was built across the Mahanadi in Sambalpur district of Odisha, and with its earthen dykes on both flanks it is the longest dam in the country.

The Bhakra dam stands on the Sutlej at Bhakra in Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, with the Nangal barrage downstream in Punjab, and the reservoir behind it is Govind Sagar.

Homi Bhabha designed the programme around the fact that India has modest uranium but very large thorium reserves in the monazite sands of the Kerala coast.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station was the first nuclear power station in India and also the first in Asia, built with American collaboration and using boiling water reactors, unlike the pressurised heavy water reactors of the later Indian stations.

One becquerel is one disintegration per second, and it is the SI unit of the activity of a radioactive source, named after the discoverer of radioactivity.

In the core of the Sun, at temperatures of millions of degrees, hydrogen nuclei fuse in stages to form helium, and the small amount of mass lost in the process appears as energy according to Einstein's mass-energy relation.

Both absorb neutrons strongly, so pushing the rods into the core removes neutrons and slows the chain reaction, while withdrawing them allows the reaction to build up; this is how the power of a reactor is controlled and how it is shut down.