UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

It was constituted under the Environment (Protection) Act to advise the central government on coastal matters and to work with the State and Union Territory Coastal Zone Management Authorities, which examine proposals and prepare the Coastal Zone Management Plans that draw the High Tide Line and the zone boundaries on…

That strategy asked that land falling within ten kilometres of the boundaries of National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries be notified as ecologically fragile, and the National Wildlife Action Plan carried the same thought forward, which is how the ten kilometre figure entered the discussion on Eco-Sensitive Zones.

The first Coastal Regulation Zone notification was issued in February 1991 under the Environment (Protection) Act, declaring the coastal stretches and the waters influenced by the tide as a regulated zone and classifying them for the first time.

Anamudi rises to 2,695 metres in the Anaimalai or Elephant hills of Idukki district in Kerala and is the highest point not only of the Western Ghats but of the whole of peninsular India, higher than anything south of the Himalayas.

Eco-Sensitive Zone notifications sort activities into three lists, and the permitted list encourages exactly these practices along with the agriculture and horticulture that local people already carry on, the use of renewable energy and the adoption of green technology, because the purpose of the zone is to limit damaging industry…

This category holds the ecologically sensitive stretches of the coast, and the notification lists mangroves, coral reefs and coral areas, sand dunes, salt marshes, mudflats, biologically active areas and the nesting grounds of turtles and birds in its sub-category CRZ-I-A, where construction is effectively barred.

The Coastal Regulation Zone notification fixes the landward limit of the regulated belt at 500 metres from the High Tide Line along the sea, and that figure has stayed the same through the notifications of 1991, 2011 and 2019.

The group that K. Kasturirangan headed reported in 2013 and used satellite imagery to separate the natural landscape of the Ghats from the cultivated and built-up land.

Its report of 2011 held that the whole range deserved protection and divided it into three graded zones, ESZ-1, ESZ-2 and ESZ-3, with the strictest ban on mining, quarrying and large projects in ESZ-1, and proposed a Western Ghats Ecology Authority to supervise the regime.

The Western Ghats were added to the World Heritage List in 2012 as a serial natural property, that is, a single listing made up of thirty-nine separate sites scattered through Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra rather than one continuous block of land.

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notifies an Eco-Sensitive Zone using the power in Section 3(2)(v) of that Act, read with Rule 5(1) of the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, which lets the central government restrict industries and operations in an area it treats as fragile.

The correct answer is A, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who came as Director-General in 1944 and insisted that a mound be dug layer by layer, each layer recorded in section with its pottery, so that the order of occupation could be read from the earth itself; he applied the method at…

Appointed by Lord Curzon in 1902 and Director-General until 1928, he put Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the hands of Daya Ram Sahni and R. D. Banerji, saw that the seals and bricks from the two places belonged to one unknown civilisation and announced it in 1924, afterwards publishing the great…

Travelling by train through Raisen district in Madhya Pradesh in 1957, he noticed the rock formations rising above the forest, returned to examine them and found hundreds of shelters whose walls carry paintings of hunters, dancers and animals running from the Upper Palaeolithic to historical times; Bhimbetka was added to…

Lothal lies in Ahmedabad district of Gujarat on the Bhogava, and the baked brick basin found there, connected to the river by a channel, is generally identified as a dockyard, which makes Lothal the port town of the Harappan world; it also yielded a bead factory, a warehouse and the…

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who was appointed in 1931, having already made his name by excavating Harappa ten years earlier.

The amendment of 2010 declared the belt of a hundred metres around every centrally protected monument or site a prohibited area, in which construction and mining are barred except for repairs to the monument itself, and the next two hundred metres a regulated area, where building needs the permission of…

It lets the central government declare a monument or an archaeological site to be of national importance, controls excavation and punishes damage, and its amendment of 2010 fixed the hundred metres around such a monument as a prohibited area and the next two hundred metres as a regulated area.

He found the Survey starved of money and nearly wound up, restored its budget, appointed John Marshall as Director-General in 1902 and carried the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, the first law in India that let the government protect a monument and stop its owner from damaging or exporting…

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who dug at Harappa on the bank of the Ravi in 1921 while John Marshall was Director-General, and who ten years later became the first Indian to head the Survey.