State Exams GK Questions 2026

Para banking covers the financial services a bank may offer besides pure banking once the Reserve Bank of India allows it, such as distributing insurance policies and mutual fund units, equipment leasing, hire purchase, factoring, portfolio management and acting as a pension fund adviser, done departmentally or through a subsidiary.

Under the Reserve Bank of India directions on certificates of deposit, a certificate is issued for a minimum of ₹5 lakh to a single investor and thereafter in multiples of ₹5 lakh, which keeps the instrument in the hands of companies, trusts and institutions rather than small savers; it is…

A gold loan is a small, standardised, secured advance given to an individual against jewellery and belongs squarely to retail banking.

Under narrow banking a bank keeps taking deposits but parks them in short-term government securities instead of lending, so no new credit risk is created while its old bad loans are recovered or written off; the Tarapore Committee of 1997 suggested this for weak Indian banks.

Passed in 1933 after the stock market crash and the Great Depression, it stopped a deposit-taking commercial bank from doing securities business and also brought in federal deposit insurance, because lawmakers believed that speculation with depositors money had deepened the crisis.

Issue management, underwriting, book building and the rest of investment banking touch the securities market, which is SEBI domain, and a firm must hold a certificate of registration as a merchant banker under the SEBI (Merchant Bankers) Regulations, 1992; the lead manager to any public issue must be such a…

ICICI was set up as a development financial institution for long-term industrial finance, and in 2002 it merged into its own banking subsidiary ICICI Bank.

The Reserve Bank of India set up a Working Group under S. H. Khan, then chairman of IDBI, to examine the roles of development financial institutions and banks; its 1998 report recommended that the two be harmonised and that India move towards universal banking, which is why the idea is…

CASA stands for current account and savings account balances. A current account earns no interest and a savings account earns a low rate, so the money a bank collects through them costs it far less than any other source, and gathering such balances from lakhs of individuals is exactly what…

Bakhira, in Sant Kabir Nagar district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, is the largest natural lake of the state. It is protected as a bird sanctuary for the migratory birds that winter there and is also listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance.

The Yamuna rises at the Yamunotri glacier in Uttarakhand, flows past Delhi, Mathura and Agra and joins the Ganga at Prayagraj after a course of more than thirteen hundred kilometres, which makes it the longest tributary of the Ganga.

The Upper Ganga Canal, designed by Proby Cautley and opened in 1854, leaves the Ganga at Haridwar and waters the upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab through Meerut, Bulandshahr and Aligarh.

The Rihand dam in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh holds back the Rihand river, a tributary of the Sone, and its reservoir, named Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar after the state's first chief minister, is the largest man-made lake in India by surface area.

Pachnada, in Etawah district, takes its name from the meeting of five streams, where the Chambal joins the Yamuna along with the Sindh, the Kwari and the Pahuj.

The Betwa rises on the Vindhyan plateau in Madhya Pradesh, flows north-east across Bundelkhand past Jhansi and Orchha and joins the Yamuna at Hamirpur.

The Ramganga rises in the Kumaon Himalaya, enters the plain through Bijnor and Moradabad, waters Bareilly and the Rohilkhand districts and joins the Ganga near Kannauj.

The Gomti rises from Fulhar lake, also called Gomat Taal, in Pilibhit district of the terai belt, flows south-east through Lakhimpur Kheri, Sitapur, Lucknow, Sultanpur and Jaunpur, and joins the Ganga east of Varanasi.

The Yamuna, the longest tributary of the Ganga, joins it at Prayagraj, and the meeting place is called the Sangam.

After leaving the hills at Haridwar in Uttarakhand, the Ganga enters Uttar Pradesh in Bijnor district and then flows south-east past Kannauj, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Ghazipur before passing into Bihar near Ballia.

Bt cotton carries genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which make the plant produce a protein toxic to bollworm larvae.