UPSC GK Questions 2026

Dinabandhu Mitra wrote the Bengali play Nil Darpan, published in 1860, which showed how indigo planters coerced the cultivators of Bengal, and it reached the English reading public and the administration soon after.

The Indigo Revolt, called the Neel Bidroha, began in 1859 in the Nadia district of Bengal, where the ryots refused to sow indigo on the terms the planters forced on them.

Besides a free meal through the local anganwadi during pregnancy and for six months after childbirth, the Act entitles every pregnant woman and lactating mother to a maternity benefit of not less than six thousand rupees, paid in instalments; women already receiving a similar benefit as government employees are excluded.

The High Level Committee on restructuring the Food Corporation of India, chaired by Shanta Kumar, reported in 2015.

The Targeted Public Distribution System was introduced in June 1997. Until then the distribution system was universal, open to any cardholder; from 1997 households were classified as Below or Above the Poverty Line and given different quotas at different prices, with the poorer group receiving a larger subsidy.

Article 47, a Directive Principle of State Policy, declares that the State shall regard the raising of the level of nutrition and of the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health as among its primary duties, and the same Article speaks of prohibiting intoxicating drinks…

The Commission, set up in 1965 as the Agricultural Prices Commission and renamed in 1985, recommends the minimum support price for twenty-two mandated crops after weighing the cost of production, demand and supply, price trends and the terms of trade; the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs takes the final decision…

The Food Corporation of India was established in 1965 under the Food Corporations Act of 1964, in the years of acute shortage that preceded the Green Revolution, to procure foodgrain at the support price, store it, move it across the country and issue it to the distribution system.

The Antyodaya Anna Yojana was launched in December 2000 for one crore of the poorest households, which were given foodgrain at the lowest issue price; the quota was twenty-five kilograms a household a month at first and was raised to thirty-five kilograms in 2002.

The Act fixed the issue price at three rupees a kilogram for rice, two rupees for wheat and one rupee for coarse grains, and provided that these prices would hold for three years from the date of commencement, after which the Central Government could revise them up to the minimum…

The Act provides that the ration card shall be issued in the name of the eldest woman of the household who is eighteen years of age or more, so that the entitlement is held by a woman; if there is no such woman, the eldest male member holds it until…

Those two ceilings together work out to about two-thirds of the country, and the Union Government fixes the state-wise coverage within them while the states identify the households.

The Act creates two categories of beneficiary. A priority household receives five kilograms of foodgrain for every member every month, so a family of five draws twenty-five kilograms.

The National Food Security Act, often called the Right to Food Act, was passed by Parliament in 2013 and converted the subsidised grain of the Targeted Public Distribution System from a scheme benefit into a legal entitlement, enforceable through a District Grievance Redressal Officer and a State Food Commission.

Each of the three grew around a factory: Jamshedpur around the steel works set up by the Tata enterprise, Bhilai around the public sector steel plant built with Soviet collaboration, and Modinagar around the industries of the Modi group, so industry is their dominant function.

A dispersed or isolated pattern, in which a farmstead or two or three houses stand far from the next, is found where the terrain is broken and the patches of cultivable land are small and scattered, as in Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and the hills of Kerala.

An urban agglomeration is the built-up whole rather than the municipal unit: it is a town together with its outgrowths, or two or more physically contiguous towns with their outgrowths, where an outgrowth is a clearly identifiable area such as a railway colony, a university campus, a port area or…

At the Census of 2011 about sixty-two per cent of Goa's population lived in urban areas, the highest share among the states, followed by Mizoram at about fifty-two per cent and Tamil Nadu at about forty-eight per cent.

Migration is studied through push factors in the place of origin and pull factors in the place of destination, and all three items listed belong to that study.

The Seventy-fourth Constitutional Amendment Act of 1992 inserted Part IXA into the Constitution with Articles 243P to 243ZG, gave municipalities a fixed term of five years with elections conducted by a State Election Commission, provided for reservation of seats, and added the Twelfth Schedule listing eighteen subjects for urban local…