UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Ganga splits in West Bengal, with the main stream going into Bangladesh as the Padma and the Bhagirathi and Hooghly running south past Kolkata.

The collection of devotional poems, which Tagore himself rendered into English, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, making him the first Indian and the first non European to receive the award.

The Corporation was created soon after independence to control the floods of the Damodar, a river so destructive that it was called the sorrow of Bengal, and it was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, combining flood control, irrigation, power generation and navigation in one body.

It was established in 1862 under the Indian High Courts Act of 1861, a few days before the High Courts at Bombay and Madras, which makes it the oldest in the country; its jurisdiction also extends beyond the state to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

West Bengal is the only Indian state that touches three foreign countries: Nepal lies to its north west, Bhutan to its north and Bangladesh to its east along a long eastern frontier.

The first accord was a simple framework that asked banks to hold capital equal to at least eight per cent of their risk weighted assets, with risk weights of zero, twenty, fifty and a hundred per cent assigned according to the creditworthiness of the borrower.

The Reserve Bank issued its framework for Domestic Systemically Important Banks in 2014 and has since placed these three in the list, on the view that their size, interconnectedness and complexity make their failure a danger to the whole system.

The Bank is located in Basel, Switzerland, was established in 1930 and is the oldest international financial institution in the world; it is often described as the bank for central banks because its members are central banks rather than private customers.

The Liquidity Coverage Ratio is a short term standard: a bank must hold enough high quality liquid assets, mainly cash, central bank reserves and sovereign securities, to survive the net cash outflows of a thirty day stress scenario, and the ratio must be at least a hundred per cent.

The buffer of two and a half per cent of risk weighted assets is meant to be built up in good years and drawn down in bad ones, so it must consist of the highest quality capital, that is common equity.

The crisis showed that banks had too little capital of genuinely loss absorbing quality and no cushion of liquid assets, so the Basel Committee issued Basel III in 2010 with stricter definitions of capital, the capital conservation and countercyclical buffers, a leverage ratio and the two liquidity standards.

Common Equity Tier one is the purest form of going concern capital, able to absorb losses while the bank continues to trade, and it is made up of paid up equity capital, share premium, statutory reserves and retained earnings.

The Reserve Bank has deliberately set the Indian minimum one percentage point above the Basel figure, so Indian banks must maintain a capital to risk weighted assets ratio of nine per cent, of which Common Equity Tier one must be at least five and a half per cent and total…

The third pillar works through disclosure: a bank must publish enough about its risk profile, capital and risk management for depositors, investors and rating agencies to judge it, so that the market itself exerts pressure for prudent behaviour.

It was set up in 1974 by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten countries and has its secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

The Ministry of Home Affairs issued a notification in 2024 declaring 25 June as Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas, to pay tribute to those who suffered during the Emergency, which was proclaimed on 25 June 1975 and withdrawn on 21 March 1977.

It therefore predates 2014.

The initiative offers recognised startups tax benefits, easier compliance and funding support, and it is run by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.

The day was announced in 2021 to remember the suffering, violence and displacement that accompanied the Partition of 1947, and it falls on the eve of Independence Day.

With it India became the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to land in that polar region, and the landing site was named Shiv Shakti Point.