UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

NITI Aayog, the National Institution for Transforming India, was created by a resolution of the Union Cabinet dated 1 January 2015, and it therefore has neither constitutional nor statutory standing.

The Commission was first set up in 1964 by a resolution of the Government of India on the recommendation of the Santhanam Committee on Prevention of Corruption, and for nearly four decades it worked as an executive body.

The article was inserted by the 101st Constitutional Amendment Act, 2016, the amendment that introduced the goods and services tax, and it requires the President to constitute a Council of the Union Finance Minister, the Union Minister of State in charge of revenue or finance, and the Minister in charge…

Until that amendment a single National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes worked under Article 338.

It is a statutory body created by the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, and no article of the Constitution mentions it, so Parliament could alter or repeal its parent Act by an ordinary majority.

Article 324 vests in the Election Commission the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and of the conduct of all elections to Parliament, to the legislature of every State, and to the offices of President and Vice-President of India.

The princely states were not a small fringe of the map. Standard accounts place their share at roughly two-fifths of the land area of the subcontinent, and some put it close to a half, with around a quarter of the population; about 565 states of every size, from Hyderabad and…

It made Sikkim the twenty-second state of the Union after a referendum in which its people voted to end the rule of the Chogyal and to join India.

These were the former princely units and unions of states, among them Hyderabad, Mysore, Rajasthan, Saurashtra, Madhya Bharat, Travancore-Cochin, PEPSU and Jammu and Kashmir, and each was headed by a Rajpramukh rather than by a Governor.

It was formed in 1948 by grouping Patiala with Kapurthala, Jind, Nabha, Faridkot, Malerkotla, Nalagarh and Kalsia, with the Maharaja of Patiala as Rajpramukh, and it became a Part B state under the Constitution of 1950.

The Nawab of Junagadh, Mahabat Khan III, announced accession to Pakistan in September 1947 although his small state in Kathiawar was surrounded by Indian territory and had a largely Hindu population.

The Act let paramountcy lapse with effect from 15 August 1947, so in strict law every princely state became free either to accede to India, to accede to Pakistan, or to attempt to remain outside both.

The Maharaja had hoped to stay out of both dominions and had signed a standstill arrangement, but when tribal raiders supported from across the border entered the valley and advanced towards Srinagar in late October 1947 he asked India for military help.

The Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia under Kasim Razvi attacked villagers.

As Secretary of the States Department he drafted the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement, travelled from court to court to collect signatures, and wrote the standard first-hand account of the episode, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States.

The Instrument of Accession was kept deliberately narrow so that a ruler could sign it without feeling that he had surrendered his state, and all other powers stayed with him for the time being.

The States Department was set up in early July 1947, weeks before independence, and Patel took charge of it as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, with V. P. Menon as its Secretary.

Sen argued that development should be judged by what people are actually able to be and to do, their capabilities, rather than by the goods they own or the income they earn, and this is the reasoning behind the HDI's choice of health, education and a decent standard of living.

The Gender Inequality Index replaced the Gender Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Measure of 1995 and shows the human development cost of inequality between women and men in those three dimensions.

The further the curve sags away from the straight diagonal of perfect equality, the greater the inequality, and the Gini coefficient measures exactly that gap on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to 1, perfect inequality.