UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The ministry decided against a uniform nationwide drive and instead identified the judicial districts where the number of pending cases is largest, settling on one hundred of them.

The pairing was deliberate: one laboratory showcased sustainable infrastructure and the other healthcare and genomics, the two themes the programme wished to place before Global South partners.

Ecofix is a steel slag-based mix developed for quick repair of road surfaces and was shown working at the CSIR-Central Road Research Institute, where the delegation also saw a driving simulator, a cyclic load test facility, a steel slag laboratory, a three-dimensional model of bio-binder technology and drone models.

The first edition brought together thirty-three Ambassadors and senior embassy officials who between them represented twenty-nine nations, most of them in the Global South.

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research worked with the New, Emerging and Strategic Technologies Division of the MEA to run the first edition of the programme, which was held on 14 October 2026 and designed to deepen India's scientific links with countries of the Global South.

The correct answer is 8 October 2026, the date from which the new technology area becomes eligible for funding under the RDI Scheme.

The RDI Scheme was launched in November 2025 with a corpus of that size, meant to catalyse private-sector investment in research, development and innovation rather than to fund government laboratories alone.

The Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals is wrong in this context because DCPC was the proposer, not the approving authority: it had sought that chemicals and petrochemicals be treated as a priority area and DST accepted that request.

The Government of India added Advanced Chemicals, Petrochemicals and Material Technologies as an extra technology area that can draw funding under this scheme, the change applying from 8 October 2026.

The Gulf of Khambhat has no coral reefs, because its water is muddy with silt and its tides are among the highest on India's coast.

It records that Kharavela of Kalinga broke up a confederacy of Tamil states that had been a threat to his kingdom for 113 years.

Under colonial rule laissez-faire meant that the state left the economy open to British goods and capital; it did nothing to promote Indian capitalism and in practice left Indian enterprise unprotected.

It joins north-eastern North America with Western Europe, two of the most industrialised regions on Earth, and carries the heaviest traffic of any ocean route.

Restructuring military commands for the best use of resources, including joint and theatre commands, is a task of the Department of Military Affairs, not of the Department of Defence.

Kodumanal is an excavated Sangam-age settlement in Erode district, on the northern bank of the Noyyal river, a tributary of the Kaveri.

These four dynasties ruled the Vijayanagara empire one after another. Harihara I and Bukka I of the Sangama dynasty founded Vijayanagara in 1336 on the banks of the Tungabhadra.

A drumlin is a smooth, oval hill shaped by a moving glacier out of glacial till, so it is a landform of glacial deposition.

Uranus cannot normally be picked out by the naked eye and was discovered only in 1781, so ancient Indian astronomers never wrote about it.

The 1835 resolution did the opposite: it stopped fresh stipends to students of Oriental institutions and stopped spending on printing Oriental texts.

A pull factor is something attractive at the destination that draws people towards it, and better pay is the classic example.