UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

This narrow gauge line in West Bengal, opened in the late nineteenth century and famous for its loops and zig zag reverses as it climbs to Darjeeling, was inscribed in 1999 and became the first railway property of India on the list.

When a country nominates a monument, a city or an archaeological site, ICOMOS studies the file, sends experts to the place and recommends to the World Heritage Committee whether it should be inscribed, referred back or rejected.

Kaziranga National Park lies on the floodplain of the Brahmaputra in Assam and holds the largest population of the Indian one-horned rhinoceros.

The Bhimbetka rock shelters lie in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, in the foothills of the Vindhyan range south of Bhopal, and were inscribed in 2003.

The Historic City of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, founded by Sultan Ahmad Shah in the fifteenth century on the eastern bank of the Sabarmati, was inscribed in 2017 and became the first city in India to enter the World Heritage List as a whole city.

The Ramappa temple stands at Palampet in the Mulugu district of Telangana. It was built in the early thirteenth century under the Kakatiya rulers of Warangal by their general Recharla Rudra, and is named after its sculptor Ramappa, a rare case of a temple carrying its craftsman's name.

Rani ki Vav stands at Patan on the bank of the Saraswati in Gujarat and was built in the eleventh century during the Solanki or Chaulukya period, by tradition as a memorial raised by Queen Udayamati.

This park in Sikkim was inscribed in 2016 under both the natural and the cultural criteria, which makes it India's only mixed site.

India's first four World Heritage Sites were inscribed together in 1983: the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort in Uttar Pradesh, and the Ajanta and Ellora caves in Maharashtra.

The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972 and came into force in 1975 once enough countries had ratified it.

Aryabhata was the first satellite built by India and it was launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet launch site, since India had no launch vehicle of its own at the time.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November 2013 by a PSLV and reached the orbit of Mars on 24 September 2014.

The Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the south polar region of the Moon on 23 August 2023, making India the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon and the first to do so near the lunar south pole.

The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph is the largest and the principal instrument aboard Aditya-L1. A coronagraph creates an artificial eclipse inside the instrument by covering the bright disc of the Sun, so that the faint outer atmosphere called the corona becomes visible.

The Lagrange point L1 of the Sun and the Earth lies between the two bodies, roughly 1.5 million or fifteen lakh kilometres from the Earth.

Aditya-L1 was launched on 2 September 2023 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota by the PSLV-C57 flight, which used the most powerful version of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Sindhu Netra was developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and was placed in orbit in February 2021 by the PSLV-C51 flight, the same flight whose main payload was the Amazonia-1 satellite of Brazil.

ChaSTE was carried on the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3. It has a probe fitted with a set of temperature sensors, which was pushed into the lunar soil to a depth of about ten centimetres near the south polar region.

STUDSAT, short for Student Satellite, was the first pico satellite built in India. A pico satellite is one that weighs under about one kilogram, and STUDSAT weighed less than that.

Gaganyaan is the programme under which the Indian Space Research Organisation is preparing to send Indian astronauts into a low orbit around the Earth in a crew module of its own and bring them back safely.