UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Arikamedu stands on the bank of the Ariyankuppam river a few kilometres south of the territorial capital. Excavations there have produced Roman amphorae, glassware, rouletted ware and beads, and the site is generally identified with the port of Poduke listed in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

All four regions of Puducherry, including Mahe in Kerala and Yanam in Andhra Pradesh, come under the Madras High Court, which sits at Chennai.

Yanam is a small region of about seventeen square kilometres in the delta of the Godavari, surrounded by Andhra Pradesh, and Telugu is its official language.

Auroville, the city of dawn, was inaugurated on 28 February 1968. It was founded by Mirra Alfassa, the French-born disciple of Sri Aurobindo whom followers call the Mother, and planned by the French architect Roger Anger as a township where people of every nation could live together; the Matrimandir stands…

It listed Pondicherry in the First Schedule as a union territory after the legal transfer from France, and inserted Article 239A, which empowers Parliament to create by law a legislature and a Council of Ministers for the territory.

On that day France handed over the administration of Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam, and India began governing them, although France still held sovereignty in law.

Mahe is the smallest of the four regions of Puducherry, about nine square kilometres on the Malabar coast, and it is completely surrounded by the Kannur district of Kerala.

Himansh was established in 2016 in the Spiti area of Himachal Pradesh, in the upper reaches of the Chandra basin, so that scientists can measure the mass balance, melt and movement of Himalayan glaciers through the year instead of only on short visits.

India was the first country to be granted Pioneer Investor status by the International Seabed Authority, in 1987, and holds an exploration area of seventy-five thousand square kilometres in the Central Indian Ocean Basin for polymetallic nodules, which are lumps on the deep seabed rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and…

This autonomous institute of the Ministry of Earth Sciences designs and builds India's ocean engineering hardware, from desalination plants and moored buoys to deep-sea mining systems, and it is developing Matsya-6000 along with the systems that will support the dives.

Matsya-6000 takes its name from the design depth of six thousand metres and is built to carry a crew of three inside a titanium personnel sphere.

The Cabinet approved the Deep Ocean Mission in June 2021 with this ministry as the implementing agency and an estimated cost of about 4,077 crore rupees spread over five years in phases.

The Antarctic Treaty was signed on 1 December 1959 by twelve nations that had been active in the continent during the International Geophysical Year, and it came into force in 1961.

A marine biologist, he led the first Indian scientific expedition to Antarctica in 1981, a voyage that established India's presence on the continent and paved the way for accession to the Antarctic Treaty and for Consultative Party status in 1983.

The National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research is at Vasco-da-Gama in Goa and works under the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

Himadri was opened in 2008 at Ny-Alesund on the Svalbard archipelago, which belongs to Norway. Svalbard is governed by a treaty that allows the nationals of its parties to carry on research and economic activity there, which is what makes an international research village at Ny-Alesund possible.

Bharati was commissioned in 2012 at the Larsemann Hills on the coast of east Antarctica, roughly three thousand kilometres from Maitri.

Maitri was commissioned in 1989 on the rocky Schirmacher Oasis, a narrow ice-free strip, next to the freshwater lake named Priyadarshini.

It was built during the Indian expedition of 1983 to 1984 in Queen Maud Land and was India's first permanent base on the continent.

The long-standing guideline of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, formed in 1993 and including ISRO among its member agencies, is that a spacecraft or upper stage leaving the low Earth orbit protected region should be de-orbited, or placed in an orbit from which it will re-enter, within twenty-five years…