UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

He was a minister and a close friend of Akbar and wrote the Akbarnama, of which the Ain-i-Akbari forms the third volume, setting out the departments of state, the revenue of the provinces, the ranks of the nobility, the coins, the crops and the customs of the country.

Khusrau served a line of Sultans at Delhi, was a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and was given the title Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India.

This is one of the striking facts of Mughal cultural history: the emperor who withdrew court patronage from musical performance presided over a reign in which the largest number of Persian treatises on Indian classical music was written, as scholars turned from the court to the book.

He was an officer of Jahangir's court who continued the record of the reign after the emperor stopped writing his own memoir, and his Iqbalnama-i-Jahangiri is one of the main Persian sources for the period.

She was a daughter of Babur and a sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of the family at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the Akbarnama.

Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish and was translated into Persian in Akbar's time by Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, one of the nine jewels of the court, so that the book could be read by the Persian speaking nobility of the empire.

Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish, the language of his homeland in Central Asia, and the book is admired for its plain, observant prose about the men, fruits, animals and rivers of the countries he passed through.

From that date the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of a listed set of single-use plastic articles became an offence across the country; the list covers earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons and flags, candy and ice-cream sticks, thermocol used for decoration, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery…

The mission was launched on the 145th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, whose insistence on sanitation the campaign invokes, and it runs in two wings, one for urban areas and one for rural areas.

In pyrolysis the waste is heated to a high temperature in a closed chamber from which air is kept out, so the material does not burn but breaks into a liquid oil, a solid char and a combustible gas, all of which can be used as fuel or feedstock.

Vermicomposting uses earthworms, which swallow organic waste, grind it in their gizzard and pass it out as casts that are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, so the product is a finer and more nutritious manure than ordinary compost and is ready sooner.

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 to stop rich countries from shipping toxic and hazardous waste to poorer countries for cheap disposal, and it requires the prior informed consent of the receiving country before any such consignment moves.

Under this idea a producer, importer or brand owner stays answerable for its product after the consumer has finished with it, and must arrange to collect back and recycle an agreed quantity of packaging or equipment; the plastic waste, e-waste and battery waste rules all run on it.

In biomethanation, anaerobic bacteria break down organic matter inside a closed digester where no oxygen is present, and the gas they release is mainly methane, which is what makes biogas burn with a clean blue flame and gives it its fuel value.

Microplastics are plastic particles under five millimetres across, whether they were manufactured that small, as in cosmetic microbeads and synthetic textile fibres, or were formed when larger plastic articles weathered and broke up in sunlight and waves.

The yellow category covers human and animal anatomical waste, soiled waste such as dressings and cotton contaminated with blood, expired medicines and chemical waste, and this material is destroyed by incineration, plasma pyrolysis or deep burial; nothing from the yellow bin is recycled.

Biodegradable waste is waste that bacteria and fungi can break down into simpler substances within a short time, and kitchen waste such as vegetable peel is the classic example; it is exactly the wet fraction that Indian cities compost or send to a biogas digester.

Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar retold the story of King Yayati from the Mahabharata as a novel about desire and its cost, and for it he became the first writer in Marathi to receive the Jnanpith Award.

Ascribed to Tolkappiyar, it belongs to the Sangam age and lays down the rules of Tamil letters, words and poetic composition, including the division of poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of war and public life.

Written in the thirteenth century and also called the Bhavartha Dipika, the Dnyaneshwari explains the Gita verse by verse in Marathi poetry, and its importance lies in taking scripture out of Sanskrit and placing it before ordinary readers, which laid the foundation of the Varkari devotional tradition.