UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

These western districts lie outside the command of the Yamuna canals, so their supply comes from the Sutlej through the Bhakra Nangal works: the Bhakra Main Line and the Narwana branch carry it into Hisar, Fatehabad, Sirsa and parts of Jind and Bhiwani, and it is this water that turned…

In check or check basin irrigation the field is levelled and divided into small rectangular plots, each enclosed by low bunds or levees, and water is let into one plot at a time until the required depth stands in it.

A sprinkler breaks water into drops and spreads it like rain, so the field does not have to be levelled and no flowing sheet of water is needed.

The agreement signed in 1981 between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan reallocated the surplus Ravi and Beas waters, and Haryana's share was fixed at roughly 3.5 million acre feet, to be carried by the proposed Sutlej Yamuna Link canal.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone of the canal in 1982 at Kapoori in Patiala district, after the 1981 agreement between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan on the sharing of the Ravi and Beas waters.

Both canals are headed at the Okhla barrage on the Yamuna below Delhi.

The Delhi sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq had a canal cut from the Yamuna in the fourteenth century to carry water westwards towards Hisar, where he founded Hisar Firoza, and that channel is the ancestor of today's Western Yamuna Canal.

The barrage was built on the Yamuna in Yamunanagar district a short distance upstream of the old Tajewala headworks and was commissioned in 1999.

Ambala lies in the north-eastern corner of Haryana, inside the command of the canals drawn from the Yamuna system, and its fields are watered mainly by that flow supply rather than by any other source; the Dadupur head on the Western Yamuna Canal was built to carry water into this…

Fa-Hien travelled to India at the turn of the fifth century CE, in the reign of Chandragupta II, to collect Buddhist texts.

Brihadratha was the last of the Mauryas, and around 185 BCE his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Shunga killed him and took the throne, founding the Shunga dynasty with its centres at Pataliputra and Vidisha.

James Prinsep, secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, worked out the values of Brahmi letters and published his reading in 1837, which made the edicts speak.

Excavations at Kumhrar in Patna uncovered the plinth and pillar stumps of a large pillared hall of the Mauryan period, counted at eighty pillars of Chunar sandstone with the characteristic mirror polish.

Ashoka's Thirteenth Rock Edict names the Hellenistic kings to whom he sent dhamma missions, and their kingdoms are known from Greek history: Antiochus II Theos ruled the Seleucid kingdom of Syria, Ptolemy II Philadelphus ruled Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas ruled Macedonia and Magas ruled Cyrene in north Africa.

Kumaragupta I, who took the title Mahendraditya, founded the monastery and seat of learning at Nalanda in the fifth century CE.

Harisena was Samudragupta's court poet and a high officer, and he composed the long eulogy engraved on an older Ashokan pillar now at Allahabad.

Mahapadma Nanda overthrew the Shishunagas and founded the Nanda dynasty in the fourth century BCE.

Shulka was a duty on goods, collected at the gates of towns and at ferries and frontiers on trade, not on land or its produce.

The First Buddhist Council met at the Sattapanni cave in Rajagriha soon after the death of the Buddha, under the patronage of Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty.

Udayin, the son and successor of Ajatashatru, built a fort at the meeting point of the Ganga and the Son and moved the Magadhan capital there from Rajagriha.