UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is INS Kavaratti. The Ministry of Defence lists two Indian ships in SLINEX-26: INS Kavaratti, an indigenous Anti-Submarine Warfare Corvette, and INS Jyoti, the Fleet Tanker. INS Kavaratti also hosted the opening ceremony and the reception for the visiting Sri Lankan crew at the start of the Harbour Phase.

INS Jyoti is taking part, but as the fleet tanker, a support ship rather than an anti-submarine warship, so option A is wrong. SLNS Sindurala is not an Indian Navy ship at all; it represents the Sri Lanka Navy in the exercise, which rules out option C. INS Vikrant is not among the ships the release names for SLINEX-26, so option D is also incorrect. A common trap in such questions is to mix up the ships of the two navies, so note the prefix each name carries: INS for India and SLNS for Sri Lanka.

The correct answer is Sri Lanka. SLINEX is the bilateral maritime exercise between the navies of India and Sri Lanka, and the Ministry of Defence has described SLINEX-26 as its 13th edition, held at Visakhapatnam from 17 to 21 September 2026. The name itself carries the answer: SL for Sri Lanka, IN for India and EX for exercise. The Sri Lankan side is represented by SLNS Sindurala, while India has fielded INS Kavaratti and INS Jyoti.

Singapore, Thailand and the Maldives do not take part in SLINEX. The release names only two navies, the Indian and the Sri Lankan, and presents the exercise as a way of strengthening the maritime partnership between India and Sri Lanka, so options A, C and D are wrong. When a question gives you the name of an exercise, decode it first, because many bilateral exercise names are built from the initials of the partner countries.

The answer is the Delhi High Court, which received seven of the fourteen, half the total on its own. Of those seven, two were appointed as Judges and the other five as Additional Judges, a split the release sets out separately and which is itself worth noting.

The remaining seven were divided three ways. Jharkhand took three as Judges, Karnataka took three as Additional Judges, and the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh took one as a Judge. That last court is worth a second look for a different reason: a single High Court serves both Union Territories, which is a fact examiners like on its own. So the order by size runs Delhi, then Jharkhand and Karnataka level, then Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

The answer is the President, after consulting the Chief Justice of India. The release is explicit on both halves: the power is one the Constitution confers on the President, and it is exercised after consultation with the Chief Justice of India. The order of those two steps matters, because a question will sometimes reverse them.

Option C does exactly that reversal and is the strongest distractor. The Prime Minister and the Law Minister have no constitutional role in the appointment itself, which rules out option A. A Governor does figure in consultation for High Court appointments under the constitutional scheme, but the appointing authority is not the Governor, so option D fails on the same point. Hold the pair as consultation first, warrant afterwards.

The answer is fourteen. The Ministry of Law and Justice announced the elevation of fourteen serving judicial officers, spread over four High Courts. The largest share went to Delhi, which took seven of them, two as Judges and five as Additional Judges. Jharkhand received three as Judges, Karnataka three as Additional Judges, and one officer was appointed a Judge of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

Adding those up is the safest way to hold the figure: seven and three and three and one. Candidates who remember only the number of courts, which is four, or only the Delhi share, which is seven, will miss this. The other options are round numbers close enough to be tempting but none of them matches the announcement.

The answer is the Ministry of External Affairs. That pairing is not incidental: the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme is a foreign policy instrument, used to offer training and expertise to officials of other developing countries, so a course aimed at human rights institutions abroad naturally runs through External Affairs.

The other ministries listed all have some connection to human rights work within India, which is what makes them usable as distractors, but none of them is named as the partner here. For the examination, treat ITEC and the Ministry of External Affairs as a fixed pair, and note that this was the fifth edition of the programme, held over six days in New Delhi from 14 September 2026.

The answer is fourteen. Two numbers travel together in this item and are easy to swap: thirty-eight senior functionaries attended, and they came from fourteen national human rights institutions. The institutions are the smaller figure, the people the larger one.

The countries represented were Algeria, Chile, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Oman, Samoa, South Africa, Tajikistan and Zimbabwe, which spans Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. That spread matters for the framing of the programme, which is built on the idea that institutions doing similar work in different legal systems have a good deal to teach each other. Hold the pair as thirty-eight from fourteen and neither figure will slip.

Note the shape of the programme alongside the figures. It was the fifth edition, it ran six days from 14 September 2026 in New Delhi, and the sessions were interactive rather than lecture-led, covering civil and political rights as well as socio-economic and cultural ones.

The answer is Justice V. Ramasubramanian, who chairs the National Human Rights Commission of India and closed the programme. His theme was cooperation between human rights institutions across the Global South, and his argument was that these bodies improve by sharing experience openly, naming the problems they run into and treating their own mistakes as something to learn from.

The other options are drawn from offices that sound plausible for a human rights event but had no role here. The Ministry of External Affairs did partner on the programme, which makes option D the strongest distractor, but the valedictory address came from the Commission's own Chairperson. Present at the session were Joint Secretaries Shri Samir Kumar and Smt. Saidingpuii Chhakchhuak. Remember the Chairperson's name; it is the single most reusable fact here.