UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

It is the sale of a part of the government's equity in a public enterprise, either to the public through the stock market or to institutional and strategic buyers; when a majority holding is sold and management also passes to the buyer, it is called a strategic sale.

The World Trade Organisation came into being on that date at the end of the Uruguay Round of negotiations, taking the place of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947, and India, having been a party to the GATT, became a founder member.

The older Act of 1973 treated a breach of exchange control as a criminal offence and presumed guilt; the new Act treats most breaches as civil contraventions punishable with a penalty, and its purpose is stated as facilitating external trade and payments and the orderly development of the foreign exchange…

His committee of 1991 recommended reducing the statutory pre-emption of bank funds through the Cash Reserve Ratio and the Statutory Liquidity Ratio, allowing new private banks, introducing prudential norms for the recognition of income and for capital adequacy, and giving banks freedom in branch expansion; a second committee under him…

The Reserve Bank lowered the value of the rupee on 1 July and again on 3 July 1991 to make exports cheaper abroad, discourage imports and restore confidence in the currency during the crisis.

As Finance Minister in the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao he presented the budget of July 1991, which cut subsidies, reduced the fiscal deficit, lowered tariffs and set out the framework of the reforms, following the devaluation of the rupee earlier that month.

Liberalisation removed licensing and other controls on industry and trade, privatisation reduced the ownership and the role of the public sector through disinvestment and strategic sales, and globalisation opened the economy to foreign trade, investment and technology.

The Statement on Industrial Policy of that date ended licensing for all industries except a short reserved list, cut back the industries kept for the public sector, removed the requirement of prior government approval for expansion by large firms under the monopolies law, and allowed foreign direct investment up to…

Liberalisation means freeing economic activity from government controls: industrial licences, import licences and quantitative restrictions, ceilings on investment and administered interest rates.

He became Prime Minister in June 1991, in the middle of the balance of payments crisis, and his government devalued the rupee, borrowed from the International Monetary Fund and announced the New Economic Policy of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, with the Statement on Industrial Policy issued on 24 July 1991.

The works, begun in the time of the Mysore state and later named after Sir M. Visvesvaraya, lies on the Bhadra river and is remembered in geography as the plant that uses electricity generated from water power, along with charcoal from the nearby forests, because the region has no coking…

An agro-based industry uses a farm product as its raw material, and sugar is made from sugarcane, which is why the mills stand in the cane belts of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; cotton textiles, jute, vegetable oil, tea and paper from bagasse belong to the same class.

Because their raw material is light, valuable and easy to move, and because they need little power or water, such units are free of the usual pulls of ore, coal and bulky material; electronics, computer assembly, diamond cutting and software are the standard examples, and they depend mainly on skilled…

The city has a very large number of cotton textile mills and hosiery units, helped by cotton grown nearby, the hydel power of the Western Ghats and a long tradition of engineering workshops that make textile machinery, and so it is called the Manchester of South India, as Ahmedabad is…

Rishra stands on the Hugli near Kolkata, and the mill set up there in 1855 began an industry that is still packed into a narrow belt along that river.

The first successful cotton textile mill began work there in 1854, and the city had every advantage the industry needed: cotton from the black soil of the Deccan, a port through which machinery arrived, capital from its merchants, a humid climate that suited spinning, and workers from the surrounding districts.

The Tata Iron and Steel Company set up its works there in 1907, choosing the site because iron ore, coal, manganese and limestone all lay within a short distance in the Chota Nagpur region, water was available from the Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers, and the railway ran to the port…

Rourkela stands in the Sundargarh district of Odisha, on the Brahmani river, and was built in the Second Five Year Plan with German collaboration; it drew iron ore from the Odisha deposits, coal from the Jharia belt and limestone from Purnapani.

Of the three integrated plants taken up in the Second Five Year Plan, Bhilai in what is now Chhattisgarh was built with Soviet help, and the later plant at Bokaro in Jharkhand came up with Soviet help as well, so the two Soviet plants are Bhilai and Bokaro.

An industrial city does not stand alone: the country around it supplies food for its workers, agricultural raw material such as cotton, cane, oilseed and jute for its mills, and labour from the villages, while the city in turn sells manufactured goods and services back to that countryside.