UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

He was stabbed to death by Sher Ali Afridi, a convict, during a visit to the penal settlement at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands in February 1872, and remains the only Viceroy killed in office.

The Government of India Act of 1858 transferred the administration of India from the East India Company to the Crown and renamed the Governor-General of India as the Viceroy; Canning, who was already Governor-General when the Revolt of 1857 broke out, became the first Viceroy in 1858 and held the…

The Office of the Economic Adviser in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, which is a department of that ministry, compiles and releases the Wholesale Price Index every month, along with the index of eight core industries; the wholesale index covers primary articles, fuel and power and…

The index measures the short term change in the volume of production of the industrial sector and is published every month, with mining, manufacturing and electricity as its three sectors and a use-based classification into primary goods, capital goods, intermediate goods, infrastructure and construction goods, consumer durables and consumer non-durables.

It empowers the Union, the State and local governments to collect statistics on economic, demographic, social, scientific and environmental matters, obliges the informant to furnish the information asked for, and bars the disclosure of the information of an individual informant for any purpose other than statistics; it was amended in…

The commission headed by C. Rangarajan reviewed the Indian statistical system and recommended a permanent and autonomous body to lay down standards, so the National Statistical Commission was constituted in 2005 as an advisory body with a part-time chairperson, members and the chief executive officer as its secretary; the chief…

The survey was launched in 2017 in place of the earlier five-yearly employment and unemployment rounds of the National Sample Survey, and it reports the labour force participation rate, the worker population ratio and the unemployment rate on the three activity statuses, namely usual status, current weekly status and current…

The census of 1881, taken under the Viceroy Lord Ripon and directed by W. C. Plowden, was the first to be carried out on one reference date across the whole country, and the unbroken decennial series of Indian censuses is counted from it.

The census is taken by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, which works under the Ministry of Home Affairs, under the authority of the Census Act of 1948; the same office maintains the civil registration system of births and deaths.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata in 1931, set up the National Sample Survey in 1950, gave statistics the distance measure named after him, pioneered large scale sample surveys and pilot surveys, and prepared the plan frame of the Second Five Year Plan, which placed heavy…

National Statistics Day has been observed on 29 June every year since 2007 to mark the birth anniversary of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and to create awareness about the use of statistics in planning and policy; a theme is announced each year by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

In 2019 the government merged the two bodies into a single National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, so that the preparation of the national accounts and the conduct of the large sample surveys would sit in one office.

The western coastal plain is narrow, steep and submergent, so the rivers of the Western Ghats reach the sea through estuaries rather than deltas, and the drowned valleys give deep natural harbours such as Mumbai, Marmagao, New Mangalore and Kochi, besides the Kerala backwaters called kayals.

In this belt the coastal State is not sovereign, but it may exercise the control needed to prevent and punish the infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration and sanitary laws within its territory or territorial sea.

Indira Point at the southern tip of Great Nicobar is the southernmost point of the territory of India and lies close to the equator; it was earlier called Pygmalion Point and Parsons Point, and its lighthouse subsided during the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004.

Barren Island lies in the Andaman Sea to the east of Middle Andaman and is the only confirmed active volcano in India; Narcondam, also in the Andaman group, is treated as dormant.

Chilika is a shallow lagoon on the Utkal coast, cut off from the Bay of Bengal by a long sand bar and connected to it by a narrow mouth, which is why its water is brackish; it is the largest lagoon of the country, a Ramsar site and the winter…

The Ten Degree Channel runs roughly along the parallel of ten degrees north and separates Little Andaman in the south of the Andaman group from Car Nicobar in the north of the Nicobar group.

Within this zone the coastal State has sovereign rights for exploring, exploiting, conserving and managing the living and non-living resources of the water, the seabed and the subsoil, and exclusive jurisdiction over artificial islands, marine scientific research and the protection of the marine environment.

Under the Maritime Zones Act of 1976 the territorial waters extend to twelve nautical miles from the baseline, and within them India has sovereignty over the water, the seabed, the subsoil and the air space, subject only to the right of innocent passage of foreign ships.