UPSC GK Questions 2026

The correct answer is A, Sukumar Sen, an officer of the Indian Civil Service who held office from 1950 to 1958 and conducted the first two general elections, of 1951-52 and 1957, for an electorate that was largely unlettered and had never voted before.

The first use of an electronic voting machine in an Indian election was in 1982 at North Paravur in Kerala, in a by-election where the machine was used in a limited number of polling stations.

Section 34 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 requires a candidate for a Lok Sabha seat to deposit 25,000 rupees, and a candidate belonging to a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe deposits half of it.

Article 243K, inserted by the 73rd Amendment, gives the superintendence, direction and control of panchayat elections to a State Election Commission consisting of a State Election Commissioner appointed by the Governor, and Article 243ZA does the same for municipalities.

The correct answer is C, the 61st Amendment Act, passed in 1988, which amended Article 326 and lowered the voting age for elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies from 21 years to 18, so that the enlarged electorate voted in the general election of 1989.

It is the first article of Part XV and places the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and of the conduct of all elections to Parliament, the State legislatures and the offices of the President and the Vice-President in the Election Commission of India.

A VVPAT unit is attached to the balloting unit of an electronic voting machine and prints a slip showing the serial number, name and symbol of the candidate the voter has chosen; the slip is visible through a window for about seven seconds and then drops into a sealed box…

Article 324(2) says the Chief Election Commissioner and the other Election Commissioners shall be appointed by the President, and under the Act of 2023 the President acts on the recommendation of a Selection Committee of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the…

The Grand Old Man of India argued in it that a steady drain of wealth, through home charges, pensions paid in England, interest on sterling debt and the profits of British firms, was the real cause of Indian poverty, and the argument became the Moderates' strongest weapon.

He founded the Servants of India Society at Poona in 1905 to train men who would give their lives to public service on a modest allowance, and he worked through the Imperial Legislative Council on the budget, on primary education and on the conditions of indentured labour.

The correct answer is A, Badruddin Tyabji, a Bombay barrister and one of the founders of the Bombay Presidency Association, who presided over the Madras session of 1887 and was the first Muslim to hold the office.

The session of December 1907 on the bank of the Tapti broke up in disorder when the two groups could not agree on the president or on how far the Swadeshi and boycott resolutions of the previous year should be pushed; Rashbehari Ghosh was declared president and the Extremists were…

He edited Kesari in Marathi and Maratha in English, used the Ganapati festival from 1893 and the Shivaji festival from 1895 to take politics to the streets, was sentenced in 1908 to six years of transportation at Mandalay, where he wrote Gita Rahasya, and founded his Home Rule League in…

The correct answer is B, W. C. Bonnerjee, that is Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister who presided over the first session at Bombay in December 1885.

The Irish-born theosophist, who had made India her home and led the Theosophical Society from Adyar, presided over the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1917, the year in which the Government interned her for her Home Rule agitation.

Vande Mataram, written in Sanskritised Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and included in his novel Anandamath, was sung for the first time at a Congress session at the Calcutta session of 1896, and Rabindranath Tagore himself set the tune and sang it.

The first session of the Indian National Congress met at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay from 28 to 31 December 1885 and was attended by 72 delegates, most of them lawyers, journalists, teachers and merchants drawn from the presidency towns, with W. C. Bonnerjee presiding.

A retired officer of the Indian Civil Service who had served in the North-Western Provinces, Hume issued an appeal to the graduates of Calcutta University in 1883, organised the body he called the Indian National Union, and brought its first session together at Bombay in December 1885, where it took…

The correct answer is B, Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, from where the scheme was launched on 1 May 2016 to give deposit-free liquefied petroleum gas connections to adult women of poor households, so that cooking on firewood and dung cakes, with the smoke it puts into a kitchen, could be…

The scheme, launched in 2016, fixed a uniform maximum premium for the farmer and left the remaining actuarial premium to be shared by the Centre and the State: two per cent of the sum insured for kharif food crops and oilseeds, one and a half per cent for rabi crops…