State Exams GK Questions 2026

The Ain-i-Akbari was written by Abul Fazl, the courtier and friend of Akbar, and it forms the third volume of the Akbarnama; it is an administrative gazetteer, listing departments and officers, the subas with their sarkars and parganas, measured areas, revenue rates, prices and wages, which is why historians use…

The Mir Bakhshi was the head of the military establishment: he kept the muster rolls of the mansabdars, verified the horses and men at inspection, recommended candidates for rank and countersigned their pay orders, and the news writers and intelligence reporters of the provinces also sent their reports through his…

Set up by the Finance Ministry after a decade in which stalled road and power concessions turned into bad loans, the Kelkar Committee reported in 2015 that risk had been pushed on to whoever would accept it rather than on to the party best able to manage it.

Infrastructure needs loans of twenty years or more, while a commercial bank takes deposits for a few years, and the mismatch between the two had crippled infrastructure lending after earlier development finance institutions were converted into banks.

Launched on 13 October 2021, PM Gati Shakti is an institutional answer to the old complaint that a road is dug up soon after it is laid because a pipeline or a cable was planned separately.

The National Monetisation Pipeline was released in August 2021 in two volumes, the second of which lists the assets ministry by ministry, with an aggregate monetisation potential of about six lakh crore rupees over four years from roads, power transmission, railways, pipelines, warehouses, stadiums and airports.

In an EPC contract the government owns the project, funds it from its own budget and simply buys construction services; the contractor is paid for the work done, keeps no operating responsibility and takes no revenue risk, so none of the defining features of a partnership is present.

Under TOT the authority bundles completed highway sections that have a proven traffic record and auctions the right to collect toll on them for a long concession, usually thirty years, against a single upfront payment.

It is the standing inter-ministerial committee that examines the concession agreement, the risk sharing and the financial structure of a central sector PPP proposal before approval, and its chair is the Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, with the secretaries of Expenditure, Legal Affairs, NITI Aayog and the sponsoring…

Viability Gap Funding is a one-time or deferred capital grant for a project that is economically necessary but commercially unviable, such as a rural road or a water supply line whose user charges can never repay the capital.

The Hybrid Annuity Model was adopted to revive road construction after both the toll and the annuity models ran into trouble.

The National Infrastructure Pipeline was announced in the Budget speech of 2019-20 and the task force under the Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, drew it up for the five years from 2019-20 to 2024-25, with projected capital expenditure of about 111 lakh crore rupees.

The panel was created in 1988, four years before the climate convention existed, which is why B is wrong: the IPCC is not an organ of the convention, although its reports set the agenda for every conference and the first assessment report of 1990 led directly to the negotiation of…

The agreement works on a five-year ambition cycle: parties submit nationally determined contributions, implement them, and then the stocktake assesses where the world stands on mitigation, adaptation and the means of implementation, so that the next round of contributions can be stronger.

Panchamrit, the five nectar elements announced by India at COP26, consists of five hundred gigawatts of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030, meeting half of the country's energy requirement from renewable sources by 2030, reducing projected emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030, reducing the emissions intensity of the economy by…

The article directs parties to protect the climate system on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and adds that the developed country parties should take the lead.

Loss and damage is the third pillar of climate policy, after mitigation and adaptation, and covers harm that can no longer be prevented: land lost to the sea, a crop destroyed by an extreme event, an island made uninhabitable.

Copenhagen in 2009 had produced the political pledge of a hundred billion dollars a year by 2020, and the Cancun decisions of the following year created the institution to channel that money, along with the Cancun Adaptation Framework.

Its central feature is the nationally determined contribution, written by each country itself and revised every five years, together with the goal of holding warming well below two degrees Celsius.

Under it a country with a Kyoto target financed a project such as a wind farm, a biomass plant or a more efficient kiln in a developing country, and the emissions avoided were issued to it as certified emission reductions that counted towards its own target, while the host country…