UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Held in the reign of Ashoka under the presidency of Moggaliputta Tissa, it purged the order of dissenters, added the Abhidhamma Pitaka, the philosophical third basket, to the canon, and decided to send missionaries to Sri Lanka and other lands.

Parshvanatha had prescribed four restraints, and Mahavira added celibacy to them, so Jain monastic discipline rests on five great vows: ahimsa, satya, asteya, aparigraha and brahmacharya.

He was the twenty-third Tirthankara, a prince of Varanasi and son of King Ashvasena, whose emblem is the serpent. He is placed about two hundred and fifty years before Mahavira and gave his followers four vows: non-violence, truth, non-stealing and non-possession.

The Fourth Buddhist Council met at Kundalvana in Kashmir in the first century CE under the Kushana king Kanishka, with Vasumitra presiding and Ashvaghosha assisting him.

After his enlightenment the Buddha walked to the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi and taught the Four Noble Truths to the five ascetics who had earlier deserted him.

NITI Aayog advises the Union and the state governments, prepares strategy, monitors programmes and acts as a forum for the states, but no money passes through it; that is the sharpest difference from the Planning Commission it replaced.

The mission promotes a culture of innovation and enterprise, chiefly through tinkering laboratories in schools and incubation centres in colleges and institutions, and it is run under NITI Aayog as part of its role as the government think tank.

It ran from 2012 to 2017 with the aim of faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth, and when it ended no thirteenth plan followed, because NITI Aayog had replaced the Planning Commission and put a long-term vision with a shorter action agenda in place of five year plans.

The National Development Council was set up on 6 August 1952 by an executive resolution so that the states could take part in national planning; chaired by the Prime Minister, it included the chief ministers and the members of the Planning Commission, and it gave a plan its final approval…

The engineer and statesman set out a ten year programme to move labour from agriculture into industry, and his book of 1934 is treated as the first systematic proposal for planning in India.

The Governing Council brings together the Prime Minister, the chief ministers of all the states, the chief ministers of union territories that have legislatures and the lieutenant governors of the remaining union territories, so that the Union and the states can settle priorities in one room.

The office of Prime Minister carries the chairmanship of NITI Aayog, exactly as it carried the chairmanship of the Planning Commission before 2015 and as it carries the chairmanship of the Governing Council and of the National Development Council.

Running from 1974 to 1979, it took the removal of poverty and the attainment of self-reliance as its twin objectives, and it is remembered by the slogan Garibi Hatao.

The plan of 1961 to 1966 was overwhelmed by the war with China in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965 and a severe drought, so instead of a new five year plan the government ran three annual plans from 1966 to 1969, a stretch called the plan holiday.

The statistician who founded the Indian Statistical Institute gave the Second Plan its framework, in which investment was directed towards heavy and basic industries such as steel, machinery and power on the argument that they would build the capacity to produce everything else.

On that date a cabinet resolution created the National Institution for Transforming India in place of the Planning Commission, keeping the Prime Minister as the head of the new body but changing its work from allocating funds to advising governments.

The Planning Commission was constituted on 15 March 1950 by a resolution of the Union Cabinet, with the Prime Minister as its chairman, and it drafted every Five Year Plan until it was replaced in 2015.

Nife is formed from the chemical symbols of nickel and iron, the two metals believed to make up the central part of the planet, and the flow of that metal in the liquid outer core is what generates the Earth magnetic field.

Coal is a sedimentary rock formed from buried plant matter, and prolonged heat and pressure drive off its volatile content and rearrange the carbon, first into harder anthracite and finally into graphite, a metamorphic rock of nearly pure carbon.

It lies in the upper mantle just below the rigid outer shell, is weak and partly molten, and is the main source of the magma that reaches the surface through volcanoes; the plates slide over it.