UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Commemorative coins are issued by the Government of India under the Coinage Act, and the set marking the Nabakalebara of the Jagannath temple was released at a function in Puri in March 2018 by the President.

The first ice climbing festival of Ladakh was held in the Nubra valley in January 2021, on the frozen waterfalls near the villages of the upper Nubra, as a way of building winter adventure tourism in a region that otherwise earns only in summer.

Bali Yatra is held on the bank of the Mahanadi at Cuttack on Kartik Purnima and remembers the days when merchants of Kalinga sailed to Bali, Java and Sumatra.

Thrissur Pooram is held at the Vadakkunnathan temple in Thrissur during the Malayalam month of Medam, which falls in April and May.

The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972, and countries that join it nominate sites of outstanding universal value, which a committee then inscribes on the World Heritage List as cultural, natural or mixed sites.

UNESCO presents the King Sejong Literacy Prize and the Confucius Prize for Literacy every year on 8 September, the day it observes as International Literacy Day, and the prizes reward governments, organisations and individuals whose programmes have spread reading and writing.

The award has been given since 1954 by the refugee agency of the United Nations to a person, group or organisation that has served refugees, displaced people or those without a state.

The United Nations Population Award was instituted by the General Assembly in 1981 and first presented in 1983, when Indira Gandhi of India was one of the two individual laureates, honoured for India's early work on population policy.

Champions of the Earth was launched in 2005 by the United Nations Environment Programme, whose headquarters are at Nairobi in Kenya, and it recognises leaders from government, civil society and business whose work protects the environment, in categories such as policy leadership, entrepreneurial vision and science and innovation.

The prize was instituted by the General Assembly in 1966 and first awarded in 1968, which was observed as the International Year for Human Rights and marked twenty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The prize was created in 1995, a year that marked both the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations and the hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is named after Madanjeet Singh, the Indian artist, writer and diplomat who endowed it.

The UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was instituted in 1997 and honours a person or an organisation that has defended freedom of the press, often at great personal risk.

UNESCO is the specialised agency of the United Nations for education, the sciences, culture, communication and information, with its headquarters at Paris.

Biju Patnaik, the aviator and industrialist who later became Chief Minister of Odisha, gave the endowment in 1951 that allowed UNESCO to create the prize, and it was named after the ancient kingdom of Kalinga in that region, where the Mauryan emperor Ashoka fought the war that changed him.

The Kalinga Prize honours writers, editors, lecturers, film makers and broadcasters who explain science, research and technology to the general public, and it is awarded by UNESCO.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has its headquarters at Place de Fontenoy in Paris, France. Its Constitution was signed in London in November 1945 and came into force in November 1946, and India was among the founding members.

Amartya Sen published this book in 1981 and showed, using the Bengal famine among other cases, that famines occur not merely because food is short in a country but because groups of people lose the ability to command food, which he called a failure of entitlement; the work was central…

The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published this long three-volume study of South and South East Asia in 1968, examining why the region stayed poor and pointing to institutions, land relations, administration and what he called the soft state; the title deliberately echoes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Ambedkar, trained as an economist before he became the chief architect of the Constitution, submitted this study at the London School of Economics and published it in 1923; it traces the history of Indian currency and argues for a stable measure of value, and its reasoning fed into the debate…

Azad, who presided over the Congress during the Quit India years and became independent India's first Education Minister, dictated this account of the last phase of the freedom struggle and of Partition; his birthday, the eleventh of November, is observed as National Education Day.