UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The campaign started on that date across the department, its autonomous institutions and the offices of the Survey of India located throughout the country, and officials took the Swachhata Pledge the very next day, administered by the Secretary.

At the Safai Mitra Suraksha Evam Samman Shivir held on 29 September 2026, the Secretary of the department felicitated 110 Safai Mitras in recognition of their contribution to cleanliness and hygiene at the department, an exercise meant to underline the dignity of sanitation work.

The inaugural session saw the launch of a BRICS Compendium on Perspectives in Sustainable Transport, which gathers approaches to sustainability in the transport sector and gives the conclave an international dimension alongside its Centre-state agenda.

The venue is worth remembering in full, because questions are set on the district as readily as on the state, and Ekta Nagar is the settlement beside the Statue of Unity that now hosts a steady stream of national conferences.

The motto is not decorative: one of the thematic sessions is devoted to PM GatiShakti and integrated infrastructure planning, so the slogan and the agenda match.

The correct answer is Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, who inaugurated the conclave at Tent City 2 near the Statue of Unity at Ekta Nagar in the Narmada district of Gujarat.

The Sanchar Saathi mobile application is offered in English, Hindi and 21 regional languages, so that a user anywhere in the country can reach the same services in a language of their own, and its total downloads have crossed 2.8 crore.

The Sanchar Saathi dashboard shows that 60.96 lakh lost or stolen handsets have been blocked across the networks of all telecom operators, that 37.85 lakh of them were traced, and that more than 14 lakh have actually been recovered and returned to their owners.

It is the reporting facility on Sanchar Saathi through which a citizen can flag suspicious calls, SMS or WhatsApp messages, including fake KYC and bill-payment alerts, people impersonating government, police or bank officials, and fraudulent investment, job or loan offers.

The Financial Fraud Risk Indicator, built partly from what citizens report on Sanchar Saathi, provides risk-based intelligence on mobile numbers that may be linked to financial fraud, and the ministry credits it with preventing suspected losses of more than 5,000 crore rupees.

The ministry statement records that 46 CHP-silos give Coal India 432 MT of mechanised closed-loop evacuation capacity, and that the company is considering more such silos at greenfield mines about to be opened.

Generation from domestic coal rose to 640.05 billion units in the first half of the financial year 2026-27 from 582.5 billion units in the corresponding period a year earlier, an increase of roughly 57.5 billion units or 9.9 per cent.

Of the coal Coal India lifted in the first half of the financial year 2026-27, nearly 79 per cent was directed to the power sector, which confirms how central electricity generation is to the company’s distribution strategy.

Coal India lifted 384.2 MT in the first six months of the financial year 2026-27, an increase of 27.2 MT or 7.6 per cent over the same months of the previous year.

The backgrounder says the seven announced high-speed rail corridors span nearly 4,000 km with an estimated investment of 16 lakh crore rupees, and that they are meant to bring major city pairs within roughly one to four hours of each other.

Besides cutting the running time from roughly eight hours to half an hour, it shortened the distance between the two points from about 300 km to 22 km, which is why it is quoted as one of the sharpest connectivity gains in the document.

The corridor will serve 12 stations and includes India’s first undersea rail tunnel, which runs about 7 km beneath Thane Creek, and the first service on it is targeted for August 2027.

The backgrounder states that the 2026 railway timetable speeded up 549 trains across the network, and it breaks that total into four bands.

India noted that it had hosted the world’s largest artificial intelligence summit in February this year, and said Switzerland would carry that journey forward through the Geneva AI Summit next year, with both countries committed to making artificial intelligence responsible, inclusive and human-centric.

The summit produced an agreement on transport, mobility and infrastructure, which builds on Swiss involvement in the Varanasi ropeway, the Jewar airport at Noida and railway and tunnelling work in hill areas, so option C was indeed signed.