UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Under this Act a licence from the government was needed to set up a new factory, to expand capacity, to change the product line or to shift the location of a plant, which is how the state controlled the pattern of industrial growth until 1991.

It set the framework in which Indian industry worked for more than three decades, dividing industry into three schedules: Schedule A reserved seventeen industries for the state, Schedule B marked twelve for growing state participation and Schedule C left the rest to private enterprise.

The MSMED Act came into force on 2 October 2006. It defined micro, small and medium enterprises in law for the first time, provided for a National Board for MSME, required a memorandum of registration and laid down the rule that a buyer must pay a micro or small enterprise…

The National Small Industries Corporation was set up in 1955 to help small units with machinery on hire purchase, raw material supply, marketing and government purchase, and it works under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

This Act of 1985 had created the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction to deal with sick industrial units in the private sector.

Under the composite criteria notified in 2020, an enterprise with investment in plant, machinery or equipment up to one crore rupees and turnover up to five crore rupees is a micro enterprise, and the same ceilings apply whether it manufactures goods or renders services.

The expression comes from the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, which came into force on 2 October 2006 and gave the sector its first statutory definition, replacing the older language of small scale and ancillary industrial undertakings.

The Puga valley in Ladakh, with its hot springs and steam vents, is one of the two geothermal fields named in Indian geography, the other being Manikaran in the Parvati valley of Himachal Pradesh.

The beach sands of the Kerala coast, and the neighbouring coast of Tamil Nadu, are rich in monazite, from which thorium is obtained, along with ilmenite and other heavy minerals.

The Tarapur station on the Konkan coast north of Mumbai was the first nuclear power station to generate electricity in India, and it remains a working station.

Jaduguda in the Singhbhum region of Jharkhand is the oldest uranium mine in India, and the ore from it feeds the plants that make fuel for the country's pressurised heavy water reactors.

Oil was struck at Digboi in the upper Assam valley in the nineteenth century, the first successful well in India, and the refinery built beside it is the oldest working refinery in the country.

The Koderma and Gaya belt, spread over Jharkhand and Bihar, is the richest mica producing area of India, and Nellore in Andhra Pradesh and the Ajmer region of Rajasthan follow it.

The Khetri belt in the Jhunjhunu region of Rajasthan is one of India's main copper mining areas, the other being Malanjkhand in Madhya Pradesh, with Singhbhum in Jharkhand as the third.

The Panchpatmali plateau in the Koraput region of Odisha carries thick beds of bauxite, the ore from which aluminium is obtained, and the refinery and smelter complexes of the region were built to use it.

Magnetite is the finest quality of iron ore, black in colour, with excellent magnetic properties, which is why it is valued in the electrical industry as well as in steel making.

The Bailadila range in the Dantewada region of southern Chhattisgarh holds high grade haematite, and its ore has long been carried by a dedicated line to the port of Visakhapatnam for export as well as to the steel plants of the region.

The Neyveli field in the Cuddalore region of Tamil Nadu is the country's best known lignite mine, worked by open cast methods, and the thermal stations built beside it burn the lignite where it is dug because this soft brown coal is not worth carrying far.

It is the hardest and most lustrous coal, holds the highest percentage of carbon, gives the greatest heat and burns almost without smoke.

By the middle of 1991 India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to about one billion dollars, enough to pay for only about two weeks of imports, and the country stood close to default on its external payments.