UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

The rules provide that not more than 120 Padma awards may be conferred in a year, and awards made posthumously and those given to foreigners and non-resident Indians are counted outside that ceiling.

The Padma Awards Committee is constituted afresh by the Prime Minister each year and is headed by the Cabinet Secretary, with the Home Secretary, the Secretary to the President and a number of eminent persons as members.

Because of it, the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards may not be used as a prefix or suffix to a recipient's name, and the awards were challenged on this ground before the Supreme Court upheld them in the Balaji Raghavan case.

Known as the Frontier Gandhi, he led the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the North-West Frontier Province and remained a citizen of Pakistan after partition, which makes him the first recipient who was not an Indian national.

She was Prime Minister at the time, and the award followed the events of that year.

Until then the honour had been given only to living persons.

All three were honoured in 1954, the first year of the award. Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, Radhakrishnan was a philosopher who later became President, and Raman was the physicist who discovered the effect that carries his name.

The order of precedence of the civilian honours runs Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the Padma Vibhushan is given for exceptional and distinguished service.

Both honours were instituted on 2 January 1954 by President Dr. Rajendra Prasad, and the first Bharat Ratna was conferred in the same year on C. Rajagopalachari, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman.

The words, meaning truth alone triumphs, were adopted as the national motto and are inscribed below the state emblem of India in Devanagari script.

A horse was set free to wander for a year, guarded by the king's soldiers; every territory it crossed unchallenged was counted as accepting his overlordship, and the animal was then sacrificed with great ceremony.

Iron appears only in the later Vedic period, and the axes and ploughshares made from it allowed the forests of the Ganga-Yamuna doab to be cleared, which is why this single word carries so much historical weight.

The correct answer is C, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who argued in his book The Arctic Home in the Vedas that the Vedic hymns preserve memories of long days and long nights, which he took as evidence of an Arctic origin.

The whole of the ninth mandala consists of hymns to Soma, at once a plant, the drink pressed from it and the god of that drink, which shows how central the soma offering was to Vedic sacrifice.

The early Vedic people were mainly pastoral and grew little, and the one grain their hymns name repeatedly is barley, used both as food and in offerings.

The phrase is quoted so often in examinations because it fixes both the names of the assemblies and the text they are described in.

The Rigveda praises it as the naditama, the best or holiest of rivers, and treats it as a goddess as well as a stream.

He is the god of rain and of war, called Purandara, the breaker of forts, and the largest number of Rigvedic hymns is addressed to him, which matches a people whose life turned on rainfall and on cattle raids.

The Purusha Sukta describes the sacrifice of the cosmic being from whose parts the brahmana, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra are said to have come, and it is the first statement of the fourfold varna order.

The seventh mandala of the Rigveda describes how Sudas, the king of the Bharata tribe, defeated a confederacy of ten tribes on its banks, and the battle is the clearest political event recorded in the whole of Rigvedic literature.