UPSC GK Questions 2026

Gram, also called chana, is the biggest rabi pulse of the country and Madhya Pradesh grows more of it than any other state, mostly without irrigation, on the moisture that black soil holds after the monsoon.

Soybean spread across the black soil of the Malwa plateau and the Narmada valley from the nineteen seventies and now covers more area in Madhya Pradesh than anywhere else in the country, which is why the state is nicknamed the soya state.

The Hariana is the indigenous cattle breed of the Rohtak, Hisar, Jind and Gurugram tract, a dual purpose animal that gives milk and whose bullocks were once the standard draught animal of the north western plains.

Vita is the brand of the Haryana Dairy Development Cooperative Federation, which collects milk from village societies and sells milk, ghee, butter, paneer and sweets under that name.

Decades of the paddy and wheat rotation have pushed the water table down sharply in central Haryana, and many blocks are classed as over exploited.

This is the drier half of Haryana, where rainfall is low, summers are hot and the soil is light, and cotton suits those conditions better than paddy does.

The barrage stands on the Yamuna in Yamunanagar district, where the river enters the plains, and it feeds the Western Yamuna Canal of Haryana on one bank and the Eastern Yamuna Canal of Uttar Pradesh on the other.

The Murrah is a jet black buffalo with short tightly curled horns, bred in Rohtak, Jind, Hisar and the neighbouring districts.

The National Dairy Research Institute, a deemed university under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, has its main campus at Karnal and works on dairy cattle and buffalo breeding, milk processing and dairy technology.

The agricultural university of Haryana was set up at Hisar soon after the state was formed and was later named after Chaudhary Charan Singh.

The first high yielding varieties available to Indian farmers were dwarf wheats, and they were planted in the irrigated north western plains where water and fertiliser could be supplied on time.

He was the geneticist who brought the Mexican dwarf wheat to India, worked with Indian breeders to adapt it, and persuaded the government and the farmers to take it up, so he is called the father of the Green Revolution in India.

The dwarf wheat varieties Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64 were bred in Mexico at the research programme where Norman Borlaug worked, and seed of these varieties was imported into India in the mid nineteen sixties.

Haryana was carved out of the Hindi speaking districts of the former state of Punjab on that day, and the date is observed every year as Haryana Day.

The Gandak rises in the Nepal Himalaya, where it is called the Narayani or the Sapta Gandaki, enters India at Valmiki Nagar in West Champaran and flows south east across north Bihar to join the Ganga opposite Patna, near Sonpur and Hajipur.

Bihar lies close to the coalfields of Jharkhand and West Bengal, and its large stations at Kahalgaon, Barh, Nabinagar, Barauni and Muzaffarpur all burn coal.

The Bansagar dam was built on the Son in Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh, and because the river flows on into Uttar Pradesh and then joins the Ganga in Bihar, the three states signed an agreement to share its water and its cost.

Bhartiya Rail Bijlee Company Limited was formed as a joint venture between NTPC and the Ministry of Railways to build a coal fired station at Nabinagar in Aurangabad district, with most of its power dedicated to the traction and other needs of the railways.

Barauni in Begusarai district grew into an industrial centre around its oil refinery and fertiliser works, and the thermal station built there in the early decades after independence was the first large generating station of the state.

The Kahalgaon super thermal power station, run by NTPC, stands at Kahalgaon on the Ganga in Bhagalpur district of eastern Bihar, close to the coal routes from the Jharkhand and Bengal fields and to the river that supplies its cooling water.