UPSC GK Questions 2026

The elephant is the reserved symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, founded by Kanshi Ram in 1984; because the elephant is also used by another party in Assam and Sikkim, the Election Commission allots it to the Bahujan Samaj Party elsewhere, a detail that shows how reserved symbols work under…

Article 324 places the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of all elections to Parliament, to the state legislatures and to the offices of President and Vice-President in the Election Commission of India, and this is the Article the Commission relies on when…

Nehru died in office on 27 May 1964, Gulzarilal Nanda served as acting Prime Minister for the thirteen days that followed, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was sworn in on 9 June 1964; he led the country through the war of 1965, gave the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan and died…

Sukumar Sen, an officer of the Indian Civil Service, was the first Chief Election Commissioner and conducted the first general election, held from October 1951 to February 1952 for the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies together, with about one hundred seventy-three million electors, most of whom could not read…

The five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence were written into the preamble of the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse with the Tibet region of China, signed on 29 April 1954 and associated with Nehru…

Indian forces entered Goa, Daman and Diu on 18 and 19 December 1961 in Operation Vijay, Portuguese rule of four and a half centuries ended, and Goa was administered as a union territory until it became the twenty-fifth state of India in 1987, with Konkani recognised as its official language.

The Balwantrai Mehta Committee of 1957 recommended democratic decentralisation through a three-tier structure of the gram panchayat, the panchayat samiti and the zila parishad, and Nehru inaugurated the scheme at Nagaur on 2 October 1959, which makes Rajasthan the first state to adopt Panchayati Raj.

The Second Five Year Plan, which ran from 1956 to 1961, was built on the two-sector model of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and gave the first place to heavy and basic industry; the public sector steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur belong to this plan, and the Industrial Policy Resolution…

The Bombay Reorganisation Act divided the bilingual state of Bombay into Maharashtra, with Bombay as its capital, and Gujarat, with Ahmedabad and later Gandhinagar as its capital, and the day is observed as Maharashtra Day and Gujarat Day.

The Act came into force on 1 November 1956 and, along with the Seventh Amendment of the same year, ended the old classification of Part A, Part B, Part C and Part D states that the Constitution had set out in 1950, leaving fourteen states and six union territories.

The States Reorganisation Commission was appointed in December 1953 under Justice Fazl Ali, with the historian and diplomat K. M. Panikkar and the educationist H. N. Kunzru as its two members, and its report of 1955 accepted language as a basis for reorganisation while rejecting the formula of one language…

He fasted for a separate Telugu-speaking state and died on 15 December 1952 on the fifty-eighth day of the fast; the protests that followed forced the government to announce Andhra State, which was created on 1 October 1953 as the first state formed on a linguistic basis, with Kurnool as…

The States Department was created in July 1947 with Patel as the minister in charge and V. P. Menon as its secretary, and the pair persuaded the rulers to sign the Instrument of Accession, which is why Patel is remembered as the Iron Man of India and his birthday is…

The Nizam of Hyderabad signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia terrorised the countryside; the Indian government sent in troops from 13 to 18 September 1948 in an action called Operation Polo, after which Hyderabad acceded to India.

Decimal coinage came into force on 1 April 1957 under the Indian Coinage Amendment Act, and the rupee, which had earlier been divided into sixteen annas, each of four pice or twelve pies, was divided into one hundred paise; the new coin was called the naya paisa until 1964, when…

Every banknote above one rupee is issued by the Reserve Bank under Section 22 of its Act and carries the promise to pay the bearer, signed by the Governor, which is why these notes are called promissory notes of the Bank.

On 19 May 2023 the Reserve Bank announced the withdrawal of the two thousand rupee note from circulation under its Clean Note Policy and asked banks to stop issuing it, while making it clear that the note was not being demonetised and would remain legal tender; holders were given a…

The notes of five hundred and one thousand rupees in the Mahatma Gandhi series ceased to be legal tender from the midnight of 8 November 2016, the stated purposes being action against unaccounted money, counterfeit currency and the financing of terrorism; a new five hundred rupee note and a two…

The High Denomination Bank Notes (Demonetisation) Act was passed in January 1978, when the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai was in office, and it withdrew the notes of one thousand, five thousand and ten thousand rupees that had been reintroduced in 1954.

The rupee symbol was adopted by the Union Cabinet on 15 July 2010 after a public competition, and the winning design by D. Udaya Kumar, then a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, joins the Devanagari letter ra with the Roman capital R and carries two parallel…