UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

By tying every village to one branch, the Service Area Approach had removed the borrower's choice: a farmer served badly by his service area branch could not take his account elsewhere, and competition between branches disappeared.

A branch's service area was drawn up of roughly fifteen to twenty-five villages, chosen on the twin tests of proximity and contiguity so that the cluster could actually be served and surveyed by the staff of one branch.

The Service Area Approach took effect from April 1989 and carried the logic of the Lead Bank Scheme down to the individual branch.

The State Level Bankers' Committee was constituted in 1977 as the apex forum of a state, where all the commercial banks, the regional rural banks, the cooperative banks, the state government and the Reserve Bank meet to review credit flow and agree on the state's annual credit plan.

The Block Level Bankers' Committee is the lowest forum of the Lead Bank Scheme and exists so that the branches of a block, the block administration and the field level development agencies can settle practical questions of credit flow together.

The District Consultative Committee is the working coordination forum of the district, bringing together all the banks operating there, the district administration and the development agencies, and it is chaired by the District Collector so that the administration and the banks sit together under one authority.

After the Gadgil Study Group recommended the area approach, the Reserve Bank appointed a Committee of Bankers under F. K. F. Nariman, which agreed with the area approach and added the mechanism that gave the scheme its name: each district should be allotted to one bank, which would act as…

The Study Group of the National Credit Council on the organisational framework for the implementation of social objectives, headed by Professor D. R. Gadgil, reported in 1969 that large parts of the country had no banking facility at all and recommended that credit be planned area by area, with a…

The Reserve Bank introduced the Lead Bank Scheme in December 1969, a few months after the nationalisation of fourteen major commercial banks in July of the same year, so the year is easy to anchor to the nationalisation year.

The Vijayanagara workshops extended the bronze tradition from deities to royal portraiture, and the standing copper figures of the emperor Krishnadevaraya with his two queens, Tirumala Devi and Chinnaji Devi, were placed in the Venkateshvara temple at Tirumala, where they remain.

Swamimalai is a temple town in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, in the old Chola heartland near Kumbakonam, and its stapathi families have cast panchaloha images by the solid lost-wax method in an unbroken line from the Chola workshops.

Dhokra takes its name from the Dhokra Damar metal workers and is the hollow lost-wax craft of this eastern and central belt, with Bikna village in the Bankura district of West Bengal and the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh as its best known centres; Bastar Dhokra carries a geographical indication tag.

Daimabad lies on the Pravara river in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and is the southernmost late Harappan site known.

Under the Pala rulers of Bengal and Bihar, from about the ninth century onwards, the monastery workshops of Nalanda and the village of Kurkihar near Gaya cast hundreds of small metal images of the Buddha, Tara, Avalokiteshvara and other Bodhisattvas in ashtadhatu, the eight-metal alloy.

The image was dug up in 1861 at Sultanganj in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar during railway work, stands over two metres high, and was cast in copper in the transition between the Gupta and Pala periods.

The upper right hand of Nataraja holds the damaru, the small hour-glass shaped drum whose beat stands for the sound from which creation begins.

The dwarf is Apasmara, also called Muyalakan in Tamil, and he personifies ignorance and forgetfulness; by pressing him down with the right foot while dancing the ananda tandava, Shiva shows that knowledge subdues the darkness of the mind.

The workshops of the Kaveri delta produced their finest images under Chola rule, and the term Chola bronze is used for the whole class of processional icons cast in that period at centres connected with Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Tiruvarur and Tiruvenkadu.

Panchaloha means five metals, and the Shilpa texts of the south prescribe this mixture for an icon that is to be consecrated and worshipped, with copper as the dominant metal and only a token quantity of gold and silver.

The craftsman models the image in beeswax, covers it with fine clay, heats the mould until the wax runs out through a vent, and fills the cavity with molten alloy; when the metal sets the clay is broken away, so each cast is a single original.