UPSC GK Questions 2026

The north-eastern States were not placed in any of the five Zonal Councils, so Parliament gave them their own body by this Act, with headquarters at Shillong; Sikkim was added as a member in 2002.

Appointed in 1983 under Justice R. S. Sarkaria to review Centre-State relations, it submitted its report in 1988 and pressed for a permanent Inter-State Council under Article 263; the Council was created by a presidential order in 1990.

This article makes the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of the Union and of every State valid and provable everywhere in India, and it declares that the final judgments and orders of civil courts in any part of India may be executed anywhere in the country.

The Southern Zonal Council consists of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu along with the Union Territory of Puducherry, and its headquarters is at Chennai.

The States Reorganisation Act makes the Union Home Minister the common chairman of all five Zonal Councils, so that the Centre and the States of a zone meet under one presiding officer.

The five Zonal Councils were set up by this Act, which also reorganised the States on a linguistic basis, and they are therefore statutory bodies rather than constitutional ones.

Article 263 empowers the President to establish by order an Inter-State Council if it appears to him that the public interest would be served by it, and it lists the Council duties: inquiring into and advising upon disputes between States, investigating and discussing subjects of common interest to the Union…

The League of Nations, proposed in the Fourteen Points of President Woodrow Wilson and created under the Treaty of Versailles, began work in 1920 with its headquarters at Geneva in Switzerland; it failed to stop aggression in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Europe and was replaced by the United Nations in 1945.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on that day, and the date is observed worldwide as Hiroshima Day.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France, which had guaranteed Polish independence, declared war on Germany two days later, turning the attack into a world war.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination.

The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot at Sarajevo in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later, after which the alliance system drew in the other powers.

In the October Revolution, which took place on 7 November 1917 by the Western calendar, the Bolshevik party led by Lenin overthrew the provisional government and took power in Petrograd, with Leon Trotsky organising the Red Guards.

Watt added a separate condenser to the earlier Newcomen engine, patenting it in 1769, which made the steam engine efficient enough to drive factories, mines, railways and ships, and the unit of power is named after him.

He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, and he later became the third President of the United States.

His book The Social Contract, published in 1762, argued that legitimate political authority comes from the general will of the people and not from the divine right of a king, and it became the intellectual charter of the French Revolution.

On that day a Paris crowd attacked the Bastille, a royal fortress used as a prison, which stood for the arbitrary authority of the monarchy; the date is celebrated in France as the national day.

Mission Shakti is one of the three umbrella schemes of that ministry from 2021, along with Mission Vatsalya for child protection and Mission Poshan 2.0 for nutrition, and it has two parts, Sambal for safety and security and Samarthya for empowerment.

It is the round the clock emergency number for a child in need of care and protection, and it connects the caller to the child protection machinery under Mission Vatsalya and the Juvenile Justice Act.

The amendment of 2017 raised paid maternity leave for women in establishments covered by the Maternity Benefit Act from twelve weeks to twenty-six weeks for the first two children, and it also provided for a creche facility in establishments above a prescribed size and for work from home where the…