UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Aga Khan Palace stands at Pune in Maharashtra. It was built in 1892 by Sultan Muhammed Shah Aga Khan III, partly as famine relief work for the surrounding villages, and it mixes Italianate arches with wide Indian verandahs over five acres of built space.

This scheme, launched in 2015 as a component of the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, groups farmers into clusters, trains them in organic practice and certifies their produce through the Participatory Guarantee System of India, in which members of the group inspect one another's fields.

Endosulfan is an organochlorine insecticide that was sprayed from the air over state owned cashew plantations in Kasaragod for about two decades.

The Stockholm Convention lists chemicals that resist breakdown, travel long distances, accumulate in fatty tissue and harm health, beginning with the twelve named compounds often called the dirty dozen; DDT, aldrin, endrin, dieldrin and the dioxins are on that list, and DDT is allowed only in restricted disease vector control.

This Act, with the Insecticides Rules of 1971, sets up the registration of every pesticide before it may be sold, licensing of manufacturers and dealers, labelling and packing requirements and the appointment of insecticide inspectors and analysts.

This red worm, often called the red wiggler or tiger worm, lives in the surface litter layer rather than in deep burrows, eats a large weight of organic waste every day, tolerates crowding in a pit or bed and breeds quickly.

Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist, gathered the evidence on DDT and other sprays and argued that a chemical released into a field does not stay in that field.

Dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane is built on a chlorinated hydrocarbon skeleton, which makes it fat soluble, chemically stable and extremely slow to break down in soil and water.

Sikkim began phasing chemical fertilisers out in 2003, converted its entire cultivated area to certified organic practice and was declared a fully organic state.

A pesticide such as DDT dissolves in fat, is not broken down and is not excreted, so the amount in a predator's body is the sum of what all its prey carried.

Rhizobium is a symbiotic bacterium that enters the roots of pulses, groundnut, soybean and other legumes and multiplies inside swellings called root nodules.

Organic farming is defined by the inputs it refuses. In place of factory made fertilisers it uses farmyard manure, compost, vermicompost, green manure and biofertilisers such as Rhizobium and Azotobacter.

The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was adopted in 1985 as a framework agreement, and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 gave it teeth by fixing timetables for phasing out ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons and halons.

India has not signed the test-ban treaty of 1996, just as it is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, holding that both divide the world permanently into nuclear and non-nuclear states.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance was signed in 1971 at Ramsar, a city on the Caspian coast of Iran, and is the oldest of the modern global environmental treaties.

The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494, two years after Columbus reached the Americas, and drew an imaginary line down the Atlantic: lands found to the west of it were to belong to Spain and those to the east to Portugal.

Signed in 1992 in the Dutch city of Maastricht and in force from 1993, it created the European Union, introduced the idea of European citizenship and set out the path to the single currency.

The Shimla Agreement was signed in July 1972, after the war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh.

The Tashkent Declaration was signed in January 1966 by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and President Ayub Khan at Tashkent, then in the Soviet Union and now the capital of Uzbekistan, with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin as mediator.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed at Karachi in 1960 by Jawaharlal Nehru and President Ayub Khan, with the World Bank as the third party to the agreement.