UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Also called Mahabalipuram, the site on the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu was developed by the Pallavas, and its five rathas, named after the Pandavas and Draupadi, are each cut from a single boulder in a different temple form, which makes them a stone catalogue of early southern architecture.

The Hathigumpha or Elephant Cave inscription, cut in the Udayagiri hill near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, is a Prakrit record in the Brahmi script listing the campaigns and public works of Kharavela, the Chedi or Cheti king of Kalinga in the first century BCE, who was a patron of Jainism; the…

The great three-headed bust in the main cave on Elephanta island in Mumbai harbour shows Shiva in three aspects, the calm, the fierce and the gentle, and the Elephanta group as a whole is Shaiva in character.

It stands at Bodh Gaya in Bihar beside the Bodhi tree under which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment, and the teaching he then carried to the world is tied to this spot; a shrine was first raised here in Ashoka's time and the tall brick temple that survives belongs to the…

Cave 16 at Ellora, the Kailasa temple, was cut out of a single mass of rock from the top downwards in the eighth century during the reign of the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, and it is the largest monolithic excavation in the world.

The Ajanta caves in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra are excavated in the curved cliff of a gorge cut by the small Waghora river, and it was on this cliff that a British hunting party led by John Smith came upon the caves in 1819.

The chaitya at Karle, near Lonavala in Maharashtra, is the largest such hall in the country: an apsidal prayer chamber with a high barrel-vaulted roof still carrying its wooden ribs, a screen wall pierced by a great horseshoe window, a rock-cut stupa at the far end and rows of pillars…

The Great Stupa, Stupa 1 at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, began as a brick mound raised in Ashoka's reign in the third century BCE, beside which he also set up a pillar with a lion capital; the Shungas later encased the mound in stone and added the railings, and the…

The abacus of the Sarnath capital carries four animals, not a cow: an elephant, a horse, a bull and a lion, and in the usual reading the horse stands for the south while the bull stands for the west.

Its doorway copies in stone the curved wooden arch and lattice of a real chaitya hall, and above it runs a band of elephants moving towards a stupa; this carved arch is the ancestor of the horseshoe-shaped chaitya window, the gavaksha, seen later at Bhaja, Karle and Ajanta.

The Barabar and Nagarjuni hills lie near Gaya in Bihar and hold the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in the country, cut in the Mauryan period in the third century BCE and connected with the Ajivika sect; their polished interiors carry the mirror-like finish known as Mauryan polish.

The Sardar Sarovar is a concrete gravity dam on the Narmada in the Narmada district of Gujarat, and its water and power are shared by four states, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan; the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar, grew around the displacement it caused.

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up in 1948, the first statutory corporation of its kind in India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had shown how one authority could take up flood control, irrigation, power and navigation across a whole…

The Howrah Bridge, renamed Rabindra Setu in 1965, is a steel cantilever bridge over the Hooghly connecting Howrah with Kolkata; it was opened to traffic in 1943 and its deck was riveted rather than bolted, so it is often described as having been built without nuts and bolts.

The Bogibeel Bridge crosses the Brahmaputra in the Dibrugarh district of Assam, was opened in December 2018 and carries a double line of railway below a three lane road above, which makes it the longest rail cum road bridge in India at close to five kilometres.

The Chenab Rail Bridge was built on the Udhampur Srinagar Baramulla rail link in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, and its steel arch carries the track about three hundred and fifty nine metres above the bed of the Chenab, which makes it the highest railway arch bridge in…

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in the Palghar district of Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 and was the first nuclear power station in India and in Asia to generate electricity commercially; its first two units were boiling water reactors built with American assistance.

Gobind Sagar is the reservoir formed by the Bhakra Dam on the Sutlej in the Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, and it is named after Guru Gobind Singh; the dam is part of the Bhakra Nangal project that serves Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh.

The Hirakud Dam lies across the Mahanadi above Sambalpur in Odisha, and counting the main dam together with its earthen dykes it is among the longest dams in the world; it was built chiefly to control the floods that used to devastate coastal Odisha, and it also serves irrigation and…

The Tehri Dam stands on the Bhagirathi in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, close to the confluence of the Bhagirathi and the Bhilangana, and it is an earth and rock fill dam, the tallest in India at about two hundred and sixty metres.