State Exams GK Questions 2026

The National Investment Fund was set up in that year so that money raised by selling government equity would not simply fill the revenue gap.

The Disinvestment Commission was constituted in 1996 as an advisory body to examine enterprises referred to it and to recommend the extent, method and timing of disinvestment in each case, and it was chaired by G. V. Ramakrishna, formerly the chairman of SEBI.

The three real grades are Maharatna, Navratna and Miniratna, and the last is itself divided into category one and category two, so there are four levels in practice.

In 1999 and 2000 the government sold seventy-four per cent of this bread-making company to Hindustan Lever along with management control, and it is counted as India's first strategic sale, that is, the first real privatisation of a central enterprise.

In official usage strategic disinvestment, or strategic sale, means that the government sells a substantial block of shares and hands over management control to the buyer, so the enterprise passes out of the public sector.

It was created as the Department of Disinvestment in 1999, was a separate Ministry of Disinvestment from 2001 to 2004, returned as a department and was given its present name in April 2016.

In that financial year, following the balance of payments crisis and the New Industrial Policy, the government began selling small blocks of shares of selected enterprises to financial institutions and mutual funds.

It is called the Economic Constitution of India because it settled for more than three decades which industries belonged to the state and which to private enterprise, through its Schedules A, B and C, and because it gave the Second Five Year Plan its heavy industry direction under the Mahalanobis…

Under this Act a company needed a licence to start a new undertaking, to expand capacity substantially, to make a new article or to change its location, and the schedule to the Act listed the industries covered.

The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 made only three fields an exclusive monopoly of the central government: arms and ammunition, the production and control of atomic energy, and the ownership and management of railway transport.

The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 placed every industry in one of three schedules.

Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, works a nickel and copper deposit of the Canadian Shield formed in an ancient impact structure, and it is the first name in any question on nickel, with Norilsk in Russia and New Caledonia in the Pacific as the others.

Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria grow most of the world's cocoa, on small farms under shade trees in the hot, wet equatorial belt along the Gulf of Guinea.

All three are temperate grasslands with 50 to 75 centimetres of rain, a cool moist growing season and a warm dry harvest, which is exactly what wheat needs, and all three are farmed on large mechanised holdings for export.

The Corn Belt lies in the central lowland of the United States, where warm summer nights, 50 to 100 centimetres of summer rain and deep well-drained loam suit maize, and most of the crop is fed to pigs and cattle, so the belt is also a livestock and meat region.

The rubber tree is native to the equatorial forests of Brazil, and the boom of the nineteenth century made Manaus a wealthy city.

The practice means clearing a patch of forest, burning the slash for ash, cropping it for two or three years until the soil is exhausted and then moving to a fresh patch.

The Mesabi Range in Minnesota lies on the western side of Lake Superior, and the ore is carried by lake steamer to the steel towns of the lower lakes, among them Gary, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where it meets Appalachian coal.

Osaka, in the Kansai industrial region, became the leading cotton textile centre of Japan, helped by a humid climate suited to spinning, a good harbour, cheap labour drawn from the countryside and a large home market, and the comparison with Manchester in England, the original Cottonopolis, is standard in textbooks.

The Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg has produced a large share of all the gold ever mined, from conglomerate reefs that dip deep underground, and the city of Johannesburg itself grew out of the gold rush of 1886.