State Exams GK Questions 2026

The chaitya at Karle, near Lonavala in Maharashtra, is the largest such hall in the country: an apsidal prayer chamber with a high barrel-vaulted roof still carrying its wooden ribs, a screen wall pierced by a great horseshoe window, a rock-cut stupa at the far end and rows of pillars…

The Great Stupa, Stupa 1 at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, began as a brick mound raised in Ashoka's reign in the third century BCE, beside which he also set up a pillar with a lion capital; the Shungas later encased the mound in stone and added the railings, and the…

The abacus of the Sarnath capital carries four animals, not a cow: an elephant, a horse, a bull and a lion, and in the usual reading the horse stands for the south while the bull stands for the west.

Its doorway copies in stone the curved wooden arch and lattice of a real chaitya hall, and above it runs a band of elephants moving towards a stupa; this carved arch is the ancestor of the horseshoe-shaped chaitya window, the gavaksha, seen later at Bhaja, Karle and Ajanta.

The Barabar and Nagarjuni hills lie near Gaya in Bihar and hold the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in the country, cut in the Mauryan period in the third century BCE and connected with the Ajivika sect; their polished interiors carry the mirror-like finish known as Mauryan polish.

The Sardar Sarovar is a concrete gravity dam on the Narmada in the Narmada district of Gujarat, and its water and power are shared by four states, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan; the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar, grew around the displacement it caused.

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up in 1948, the first statutory corporation of its kind in India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had shown how one authority could take up flood control, irrigation, power and navigation across a whole…

The Howrah Bridge, renamed Rabindra Setu in 1965, is a steel cantilever bridge over the Hooghly connecting Howrah with Kolkata; it was opened to traffic in 1943 and its deck was riveted rather than bolted, so it is often described as having been built without nuts and bolts.

The Bogibeel Bridge crosses the Brahmaputra in the Dibrugarh district of Assam, was opened in December 2018 and carries a double line of railway below a three lane road above, which makes it the longest rail cum road bridge in India at close to five kilometres.

The Chenab Rail Bridge was built on the Udhampur Srinagar Baramulla rail link in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, and its steel arch carries the track about three hundred and fifty nine metres above the bed of the Chenab, which makes it the highest railway arch bridge in…

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in the Palghar district of Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 and was the first nuclear power station in India and in Asia to generate electricity commercially; its first two units were boiling water reactors built with American assistance.

Gobind Sagar is the reservoir formed by the Bhakra Dam on the Sutlej in the Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, and it is named after Guru Gobind Singh; the dam is part of the Bhakra Nangal project that serves Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh.

The Hirakud Dam lies across the Mahanadi above Sambalpur in Odisha, and counting the main dam together with its earthen dykes it is among the longest dams in the world; it was built chiefly to control the floods that used to devastate coastal Odisha, and it also serves irrigation and…

The Tehri Dam stands on the Bhagirathi in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, close to the confluence of the Bhagirathi and the Bhilangana, and it is an earth and rock fill dam, the tallest in India at about two hundred and sixty metres.

Hydel or hydroelectric power depends on head, the vertical distance through which water falls on to the turbine, and on a narrow valley in hard rock where a tall dam can hold a deep reservoir.

Presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, the Lahore session of December 1929 passed the resolution of Purna Swaraj or complete independence, unfurled the tricolour on the bank of the Ravi and called on the country to observe the twenty sixth of January 1930 as Independence Day.

The Constituent Assembly adopted, enacted and gave to itself the Constitution on the twenty sixth of November 1949, and that day is kept every year as Constitution Day or Samvidhan Divas.

The fourth session of the Indian National Congress met at Allahabad in 1888 and elected George Yule as its president, and he was the first Englishman and the first non Indian to hold the office.

At Plassey on the bank of the Bhagirathi, Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, after buying over his commander Mir Jafar, and the victory made the Company the real power in the richest province of India.

Subhash Chandra Bose was elected president of the Indian National Congress at the Haripura session in Gujarat in 1938, where he set up a National Planning Committee under Jawaharlal Nehru.