UPSC GK Questions 2026

Speaking at AIIMS Rajkot, the Union Health Minister said the country had moved from a single AIIMS in New Delhi to 18 operational institutions out of 22, which he described as a significant strengthening of access to specialised tertiary healthcare.

That is the catchment the facility is expected to cover across Saurashtra, taking in Rajkot, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Porbandar, Amreli, Bhavnagar, Morbi, Surendranagar, Gir Somnath, Devbhumi Dwarka and Botad, a region made up largely of rural, semi-urban and economically weaker communities.

The facility at AIIMS Rajkot was established under this scheme at a cost of about Rs 39 crore, and the stated purpose was to reduce regional imbalance in the availability of tertiary healthcare.

The conference featured four thematic technical sessions. The first dealt with health and survival across the life course, the second with girls education, learning and transition, the third with women work, wages, formality and care, and the fourth with women livelihoods, enterprises, skills and financial inclusion.

The conference was called to deliberate on and disseminate the findings of this flagship publication of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, so that the people who design and run programmes could read its results more deeply and use them across sectors.

The one-day national conference on the theme Gender Data and Statistics: From Evidence to Policy Insights was organised by MoSPI in collaboration with UN Women, and it was held in New Delhi on 2 November 2026.

Pumped storage schemes are grouped by how their reservoirs relate to natural watercourses, and the closed-loop variety keeps both reservoirs away from them.

The authority attributes this to the topography of the area and to the steep gradients of rivers that rise in the Western Ghats, since a pumped storage project needs two reservoirs at different heights within a short distance.

The correct answer is 7.43 GW, spread over ten projects, each with an installed capacity above twenty-five megawatts.

Installed geothermal capacity across the world reached a little over fifteen and a half gigawatts by the close of that year, and five countries, namely Indonesia, the United States, the Philippines, Turkiye and New Zealand, together accounted for roughly sixty-seven per cent of it.

The provinces run across very different terrains, from the Himalayan belt and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the West Coast, the Cambay Graben, the Son-Narmada-Tapi zone and the cratonic region of southern India.

The valley sits more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level and has long been known for its hot springs and underground heat reserves, which is why it is counted among the most promising geothermal sites in India.

Winners and runners-up of the hackathon held on this theme were honoured at the same ceremony at Raipur, and their entries applied artificial intelligence to problems of operational efficiency, mine safety and environmental sustainability in the coal sector.

The correct answer is Singareni Collieries Company Limited, which took the First Prize among underground mines.

At the Annual Star Rating Awards Ceremony held at Raipur in Chhattisgarh, fifty coal mines were given Five-Star Ratings for the assessment year.

The expedition of INS Sudarshini was presented as an expression of this vision, together with the civilisational idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, meaning that the world is one family.

The voyage took INS Sudarshini to ports in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America, and it included two crossings of the Atlantic Ocean.

The sail training ship returned to Kochi on 2 November 2026 after a ten-month transoceanic expedition named Lokayan 26, during which it covered more than 22,000 nautical miles and called at 17 ports in 11 countries spread across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.

The Man and the Biosphere Programme was launched that year to promote scientific approaches to improving the relationship between people and their environment, and biosphere reserves work under its framework as living laboratories for testing sustainable development practices.

According to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, India has 18 notified biosphere reserves and 13 of them belong to UNESCO’s World Network of Biosphere Reserves, which gives the country the highest number of internationally recognised reserves in South Asia.