UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

When the Government announced the rabi Minimum Support Prices for the marketing season 2021-22, it also published the margin of each price over the A2 plus FL cost of production.

The public distribution system was made targeted in 1997, when households were divided into those above and those below the poverty line and the subsidy was concentrated on the poorer group.

The Government of India announces a Minimum Support Price for twenty-two mandated crops on the recommendation of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices.

It was founded in 1929 as the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research on the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Agriculture, has its headquarters at New Delhi and coordinates research, education and extension through a national network of institutes and agricultural universities.

Plantation agriculture is a type of commercial farming in which one crop such as tea, coffee, rubber, sugarcane or banana is grown over a large area with hired labour, capital investment and a processing unit on or near the estate.

Pulses are leguminous plants whose roots carry nodules containing Rhizobium bacteria. These bacteria convert nitrogen from the air into compounds the plant can use, and part of that nitrogen stays in the soil after harvest, so the cereal that follows needs less fertiliser.

Operation Flood was the dairy development programme of the National Dairy Development Board that linked village milk producers' cooperatives to city markets and made India the largest milk producer in the world.

Jute is called the golden fibre because of its shining golden brown colour and the high export value it once commanded.

Podu is the local name for slash and burn or shifting cultivation in Andhra Pradesh, where a patch of forest is cleared, burnt and cropped for a few years and then left to recover while the cultivator moves to a fresh patch.

Black soil, also called regur or black cotton soil, covers much of the Deccan plateau and is formed from the weathering of lava.

The pink bollworm is the most damaging pest of the cotton plant.

In the colour coding of India's agricultural revolutions the Silver Fibre Revolution stands for cotton, the fibre crop of the black soil regions of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Telangana.

Both are sown in October and November after the monsoon withdraws and harvested in March and April. Barley is a coarse cereal grown mainly in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and gram is the most important rabi pulse of India, grown in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

Wheat is the leading rabi crop of India. It is sown in October and November, needs a cool season of about fifty to sixty centimetres of rainfall for growth and bright sunshine at the time of ripening, and is harvested in March and April.

Kharif crops are sown in June and July with the onset of the south-west monsoon and harvested in September and October, because they need both high temperature and heavy rainfall while growing.

LHB stands for Linke Hofmann Busch, the German firm whose design Indian Railways adopted at the end of the 1990s and now builds at Kapurthala and other coach factories.

The Chenab bridge on that link stands about 359 metres above the bed of the river, higher than the Eiffel Tower, and is built as a steel arch to span the deep gorge in an earthquake prone and wind swept setting.

The correct answer is A, Gatimaan Express, which began running in 2016 between Delhi and Agra and became India's first semi-high-speed train at 160 kilometres an hour, a speed the Agra route could take because of its straight alignment and fenced sections.

The correct answer is B, the National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited, a company set up specifically to build and later operate high-speed rail in India, with the Union Government and the Governments of Gujarat and Maharashtra as shareholders.

The corridor uses the Shinkansen system, the high-speed technology Japan has run since 1964, and the project is financed largely by a soft loan from Japan carrying a long repayment period and a low rate of interest.