UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Once both Houses pass a Bill it is presented to the President, who may declare assent, declare that assent is withheld, which is the absolute veto, or return an ordinary Bill once with a message for reconsideration, which is the suspensive veto; if the Houses pass it again the President…

The two Houses disagreed over its amendments, a joint sitting was summoned in 1961, and the Bill became the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961.

Article 368 requires each House to pass such a Bill separately by a special majority, and the Constitution provides no joint sitting for it; a Money Bill is also outside the scope of Article 108.

A joint sitting is summoned by the President but presided over by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha; if the Speaker is absent the Deputy Speaker presides, and in the absence of both the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha takes the chair.

Article 108 allows the President to summon a joint sitting of the two Houses when the other House has rejected the Bill, when the Houses have finally disagreed on the amendments to be made, or when more than six months have passed without the other House passing it.

Under Article 109 a Money Bill passed by the Lok Sabha is transmitted to the Rajya Sabha, which may only make recommendations and must return the Bill within fourteen days.

Article 110(3) says that if any question arises whether a Bill is a Money Bill, the decision of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha is final, and Article 110(4) requires the Speaker to endorse the certificate on the Bill when it is transmitted to the Rajya Sabha or sent for…

Article 110 lists the matters that make a Bill a Money Bill: taxation, borrowing by the Union, the custody of the Consolidated Fund and the Contingency Fund, appropriation of money from the Consolidated Fund, the declaring of expenditure charged on that Fund, and the receipt or audit of money on…

After the Battle of Buxar in 1764 and the Treaty of Allahabad, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granted the Company the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha in 1765, which made it the revenue authority of the richest provinces of India and began the system of Dual Government.

The line of about thirty-four kilometres was opened in 1853 during the governor-generalship of Lord Dalhousie, who had set out the policy of railway construction in his famous minute.

A member of the Indian Civil Service who later presided over the Congress, Dutt documented in The Economic History of India how revenue policy, the decline of handicrafts and the pattern of trade impoverished the countryside, and his work stands beside Naoroji's as a classic of economic nationalism.

The cotton boom of the American Civil War years ended, prices fell, the revenue demand was raised, and the Deccan ryot who had borrowed heavily turned on the Marwari and Gujarati sahukars, burning their bonds and account books in 1875.

It was applied in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies and in parts of Assam and Coorg, which together made up about half of British India, the largest share of the three settlements.

The word mahal means an estate or a village, and in this settlement the demand was fixed for the whole mahal; the village headman, called the lambardar, collected the shares from the co-sharers, and the village as a body was jointly responsible for the full amount.

Under its rules the revenue instalment had to reach the treasury before sunset on the appointed day; if it did not, the estate was liable to be sold at public auction, and many old families lost their zamindaris to Calcutta merchants in the first two decades.

The settlement required the zamindar to pay ten-elevenths of the rental he collected from the peasants to the state and to retain one-eleventh for himself, which is why the demand pressed so heavily and so many estates changed hands in the early years.

Munro, with Captain Alexander Read, worked out the Ryotwari settlement in the Baramahal and Madras region, and extended it widely after he became Governor of Madras in 1820; the state dealt directly with the ryot, the individual cultivator, who held the land so long as he paid the assessment.

Cornwallis, Governor-General from 1786 to 1793, made the settlement permanent in 1793 on the advice of John Shore, recognising the zamindars as proprietors of the soil against a revenue demand fixed for ever.

The Great Depression that began in 1929 pulled down the prices of primary produce such as wheat, cotton and jute far more sharply, and for far longer, than the prices of the manufactured goods the peasant had to buy.

In Poverty and Un-British Rule in India Naoroji gathered his estimates of India's national income and set out the theory of the drain of wealth, showing that a part of the country's wealth was carried to Britain every year without any return, through home charges, the salaries and pensions of…