UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Harike wetland in Punjab, also called Hari-Ke-Pattan, was formed by a barrage at the point where the Beas joins the Sutlej, is the largest wetland of northern India, and is a Ramsar site rich in waterfowl.

The dugong is a marine mammal that grazes on sea grass, and the sea grass beds of the Gulf of Mannar between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka are its principal habitat in India; the Gulf of Mannar was declared the country's first marine biosphere reserve in 1989 and the dugong…

Salim Ali wrote this standard field guide, carried out the bird surveys on which several sanctuaries were notified, and was long associated with the Bombay Natural History Society; the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History at Coimbatore bears his name.

The Convention on Wetlands was signed in the Iranian city of Ramsar in 1971, which is why the sites designated under it are called Ramsar sites; it came into force in 1975, India became a party in 1982, and World Wetlands Day is observed on 2 February to mark the…

Pitti is a tiny uninhabited coral islet in Lakshadweep, notified as the Pitti Bird Sanctuary, and is the breeding ground of sooty terns and other sea birds; it is the only wildlife sanctuary of the territory.

Chilika is a brackish water lagoon on the Odisha coast, the largest of its kind in Asia, separated from the Bay of Bengal by a long sand bar.

Declared in Gujarat in 1980, it was the first area in India to be notified as a marine national park, and it covers a chain of islands carrying coral reefs and mangrove along the Gulf of Kachchh.

Gahirmatha, on the Odisha coast beside the Bhitarkanika mangroves, is the only turtle sanctuary notified in India and protects the world's largest mass nesting ground of the olive ridley turtle, where the phenomenon of arribada, or mass nesting, takes place.

Keoladeo National Park stands at Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan and is unusual in being a man-made wetland, created by a ruler of Bharatpur as a duck shooting reserve and later turned into a sanctuary and then a national park.

The Bankapura Peacock Sanctuary lies within the ruins of Bankapura fort in Haveri district of Karnataka and is one of the very few protected areas in India notified specifically for the Indian peafowl, the national bird.

Section 79 gives an intermediary such as a network service provider or a social media platform a safe harbour, provided it merely transmits or hosts the content, does not initiate or modify it, and observes the due diligence prescribed by the rules; the Shreya Singhal judgment read the section down…

A bench of nine judges held in 2017 that the right to privacy is intrinsic to the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, which became the constitutional basis for India's data protection framework and for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 came into force on 27 October 2009 and made the most important changes to the parent Act: it added section 3A on electronic signatures, inserted the computer-related offences of sections 66A to 66F and 67A to 67C, added section 43A on compensation for failure…

The helpline 1930 is run with the national cyber crime reporting portal by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre under the Ministry of Home Affairs, and is meant for the quick reporting of online financial fraud so that the transfer of money can be stopped.

Section 3 provides that an electronic record is authenticated by affixing a digital signature created by use of an asymmetric crypto system and a hash function; the hash function reduces the record to a message digest and the signer's private key encrypts it, while anyone can verify it with the…

The First Schedule to the Act excludes certain documents from electronic form: a negotiable instrument other than a cheque, a power of attorney, a trust deed, a will or other testamentary disposition, and any contract for the sale or conveyance of immovable property.

The model law was adopted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in 1996 and recommended to member states by the General Assembly, and India's Act follows its scheme for giving legal recognition to electronic records and signatures.

Section 70B, inserted in 2008, appoints the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team as the national nodal agency for collecting, analysing and circulating information on cyber incidents and for issuing advisories; it works under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and was set up in 2004.

Section 66F, inserted by the amendment of 2008, defines cyber terrorism and is the most severely punished offence in the Act, carrying imprisonment which may extend to life.

In 2015 the Supreme Court struck down section 66A, which punished the sending of offensive messages, holding it vague and overbroad and therefore a violation of the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a).