UPSC GK Questions 2026

By the Treaty of Allahabad the next year the Company received the diwani, the right to collect revenue, in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, and Clive built the system of dual government on it.

Bengal, the richest province of India, passed under the Company's political control.

In 1565 the allied Deccan sultanates of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar defeated the Vijayanagara army led by Rama Raya at Talikota, a battle also called Rakshasa-Tangadi or Bannihatti; the capital city of Vijayanagara, today's Hampi, was plundered and the empire never recovered.

Akbar was only about thirteen years old in 1556, and his regent Bairam Khan commanded the army that defeated Hemu, the able general of the Sur side who had captured Delhi and crowned himself Hemchandra Vikramaditya.

The following year Sher Shah defeated him again at Kannauj, also called Bilgram, and Humayun left India for about fifteen years while the Sur dynasty ruled Delhi.

Babur defeated and killed Ibrahim Lodi, the last Sultan of the Lodi dynasty, on the field of Panipat in 1526, using the tulughma flanking division and field guns served by Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa Rumi, and founded the Mughal Empire.

Ghori had been defeated by Prithviraj Chauhan at the First Battle of Tarain in 1191 and returned the next year with a better organised army of mounted archers; the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 ended in the defeat and death of Prithviraj and opened north India to Turkish rule.

Porus ruled the Paurava kingdom between the Jhelum and the Chenab and fought Alexander on the Hydaspes, the Greek name for the Jhelum.

Its weaknesses led to the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee of 1957, whose recommendation of democratic decentralisation gave India panchayati raj.

It organises poor rural women into self help groups, federates them at the village and block level, and supports them with a revolving fund, a community investment fund and interest subvention on bank loans.

The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana was launched on 25 December 2000 to connect unconnected habitations with all weather roads, generally those with a population above five hundred in the plains and above two hundred and fifty in hill, tribal and desert areas, and it later added the upgradation of…

At least sixty per cent of the cost of the works must go on wages and not more than forty per cent on material, so that the scheme remains an employment programme rather than a construction programme.

The correct answer is C, Section 17, which makes the Gram Sabha responsible for monitoring the execution of works within the panchayat and for conducting a regular social audit of all the projects taken up under the scheme, with every record open to public inspection.

Priority has to be given to women in such a way that at least one third of the beneficiaries are women who have registered and asked for work, and the Act also requires equal wages for women and men for the same work.

The Act requires that work be provided ordinarily within five kilometres of the village of the applicant, and if the worksite is farther away, the worker is paid an extra ten per cent of the wage rate to meet the cost of travel and living.

If employment is not provided within fifteen days of the application, or of the date from which work is sought, whichever is later, the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance, which the State Government pays from its own funds.

The Act was renamed on Gandhi Jayanti in 2009, and from then it has been known as MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The correct answer is B, 2 February 2006, when the Act came into force in 200 of the poorest districts of the country, the first launch taking place at Bandlapalli in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh.

Section 3 of the Act obliges the State Government to provide at least one hundred days of unskilled manual wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for such work, and the guarantee belongs to the household, not to each member.

The Masai are a cattle-keeping people of the East African savanna, moving their herds with the seasonal rains; their life is the standard textbook example of pastoral nomadism in the tropical grasslands.