UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761 between the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, with Vishwasrao the Peshwa's son, and Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called Durrani, supported by the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh.

The Amatya, also called the Majumdar, kept the accounts of the kingdom and checked the income and expenditure of every district, which makes him the finance member of the eight.

Tanaji led the night assault that recovered the fort of Kondana from the Mughal garrison in 1670 and was killed in the fighting.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818 was settled by a set of separate treaties with the Maratha houses, and the one with the Holkar chief of Indore was signed at Mandsaur, or Mandeshwar, in January 1818.

The index counts a household as poor when it suffers deprivation in enough of the indicators grouped under these three heads, such as nutrition and child mortality under health, years of schooling and attendance under education, and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living.

The head count ratio simply counts how many people fall below the line and divides that by the total population, which makes it easy to understand and easy to compare across states.

Begun in 2017, it replaced the five-yearly employment and unemployment surveys and gives annual estimates for rural and urban areas together along with more frequent estimates for urban areas, using the usual status and current weekly status measures.

This measure notes what the person did in each half day of the seven days before the survey, so every day of idleness is counted; because it picks up short spells that the longer reference periods miss, it yields the highest estimate of unemployment of the three.

Agriculture needs labour at sowing, transplanting and harvest and very little in between, and industries tied to a crop, such as sugar mills and rice mills, work only for part of the year, so the workers attached to them are idle for the remaining months.

The task force of 1979 fixed the rural line at the consumption expenditure needed to obtain 2,400 calories a day, on the ground that rural work involves more physical labour.

The Tendulkar expert group reported in 2009, moved away from the calorie anchor, used a mixed reference period for consumption and brought private spending on health and education into the basket, which raised the estimated share of the poor.

The Act, passed in 2005, gives every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work a legal right to one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year, and if work is not provided within the prescribed period the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance.

Here the extra workers appear to be employed but their marginal contribution to output is close to zero, which is why the condition is called disguised or hidden; the classic Indian example is a family farm on which several members work a plot that two could manage.

In the standard classification the churning poor are those whose consumption crosses the poverty line and falls back below it again and again, the typical cases being small and marginal farmers and casual labourers whose earnings depend on the season.

The National Sample Survey Office carries out the large household surveys of consumption expenditure from which the number of people below the poverty line is worked out, and it now functions within the National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

The National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, an institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, works from Nagpur and prepares the soil maps and land capability surveys on which district planning rests.

Running water cuts gullies in the soft alluvium of the Chambal basin, and where those gullies deepen and spread over a wide tract the land becomes a maze of steep channels and ridges unfit for cultivation, which geographers call badland and local people call the ravines or beehad.

Gypsum, that is calcium sulphate, supplies calcium that replaces the sodium held on the soil particles, and once the sodium is set free it can be washed out of the field by irrigation and drainage, restoring structure to land that had become hard and impermeable.

Laterite soil forms on hill slopes of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Assam under heavy rain and high temperature, and after manuring it carries these plantation crops well; cashew in particular does well on the laterite of the Kerala and Karnataka coast.

Bhangar is the older alluvium of the northern plains, lying above the flood level on slightly raised terraces, coarser in texture and marked by nodules of calcium carbonate known as kankar, which lower its fertility and hinder the movement of water.