State Exams GK Questions 2026

The Act let paramountcy lapse with effect from 15 August 1947, so in strict law every princely state became free either to accede to India, to accede to Pakistan, or to attempt to remain outside both.

The Maharaja had hoped to stay out of both dominions and had signed a standstill arrangement, but when tribal raiders supported from across the border entered the valley and advanced towards Srinagar in late October 1947 he asked India for military help.

The Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia under Kasim Razvi attacked villagers.

As Secretary of the States Department he drafted the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement, travelled from court to court to collect signatures, and wrote the standard first-hand account of the episode, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States.

The Instrument of Accession was kept deliberately narrow so that a ruler could sign it without feeling that he had surrendered his state, and all other powers stayed with him for the time being.

The States Department was set up in early July 1947, weeks before independence, and Patel took charge of it as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, with V. P. Menon as its Secretary.

Sen argued that development should be judged by what people are actually able to be and to do, their capabilities, rather than by the goods they own or the income they earn, and this is the reasoning behind the HDI's choice of health, education and a decent standard of living.

The Gender Inequality Index replaced the Gender Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Measure of 1995 and shows the human development cost of inequality between women and men in those three dimensions.

The further the curve sags away from the straight diagonal of perfect equality, the greater the inequality, and the Gini coefficient measures exactly that gap on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to 1, perfect inequality.

Morris gave equal weight to three indicators only, life expectancy at age one, the infant mortality rate and basic literacy, and the striking feature of his index is that income appears nowhere in it; he argued that income is a means and that the results of development should be measured…

The index was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report and is produced jointly with that initiative at the University of Oxford, whose Alkire-Foster method identifies households deprived at the same time in several of ten indicators grouped under health, education and standard of living.

The Human Development Report groups countries in four bands: very high at an HDI of 0.800 and above, high from 0.700 to 0.799, medium from 0.550 to 0.699 and low below 0.550.

Until 2010 the health, education and income indices were averaged arithmetically, which allowed a country to offset a very poor score in one dimension with high scores in the other two.

The switch was made in the 2010 Human Development Report. Gross national income was preferred to gross domestic product because it includes incomes earned abroad and sent home and excludes incomes earned in the country by foreigners, so it is closer to what residents can actually spend; and purchasing power…

It is the composite measure that puts health, education and income together in a single figure between 0 and 1, built as the geometric mean of one index for each of the three dimensions, and published by the UNDP since 1990.

The Human Development Index is built from exactly three dimensions and nothing more: a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

The Pakistani economist led the team that produced the first Human Development Report for the UNDP in 1990 and designed the index, drawing on the capability approach of Amartya Sen, who advised the work.

The UNDP brought out the first Human Development Report in 1990, with the Human Development Index as its centrepiece, and it has published the report and the index since.

It rises in the Black Forest of Germany, flows east across central and south-eastern Europe past Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary and Belgrade in Serbia, and ends in a delta on the Black Sea.

The Rub al Khali, whose name is usually translated as the Empty Quarter, occupies the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula across Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and it is the largest unbroken sand sea on earth.