UPSC GK Questions 2026

It is titled Power of Parliament to amend the Constitution and procedure therefor, and it sets out both the special majority needed in each House and the cases in which the legislatures of the states must also ratify the change.

He held that the rising of 1857 was not the first armed challenge to British power, that it did not cover the whole country or unite its people, and that it was not fought for a clear idea of national independence; his summing up is quoted in this exact form…

Canning was Governor General when the revolt broke out and became the first Viceroy of India under the Act of 1858.

Known as the Act for the Better Government of India, it abolished the East India Company along with the Board of Directors and the Board of Control, vested the government of India in the Crown, created the office of Secretary of State for India with a Council of India of…

Sir Hugh Rose led the central India campaign, took Jhansi in April 1858 and pursued the rebels to Kalpi and Gwalior, where Rani Lakshmibai died fighting in June 1858.

The last Mughal emperor was captured at Delhi in September 1857, tried by the British, deprived of his title and sent to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862.

The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, passed while Lord Canning was Governor General, required new recruits of the Bengal Army to serve wherever they were sent, including overseas.

The new rifle needed a cartridge whose end had to be bitten open, and the sepoys believed the paper was greased with the fat of cows and pigs, which offended Hindus and Muslims alike.

Kunwar Singh, a zamindar of Jagdishpur in the Shahabad region, was about eighty years old when he took up arms, fought the British at Arrah with his brother Amar Singh and carried the revolt into central India before returning to Bihar, where he died in 1858.

Begum Hazrat Mahal, a queen of the deposed ruler of Awadh, led the revolt at Lucknow in 1857 and had her young son Birjis Qadr proclaimed the ruler of Awadh.

He was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, and the refusal of his pension by the Company was one of the causes of the revolt.

Mangal Pandey was a sepoy of this regiment stationed at Barrackpore near Calcutta. In March 1857 he attacked his officers rather than use the new greased cartridges; he was court martialled and hanged on 8 April 1857, and his regiment was disbanded.

On 10 May 1857 the sepoys of the garrison at Meerut refused the new cartridges, killed their European officers, released their imprisoned comrades and marched towards Delhi, which they reached on 12 May.

SIDBI was set up in 1990 as the principal financial institution for the promotion, financing and development of micro, small and medium enterprises, and it works mainly by refinancing banks and other lenders rather than by lending directly to every unit.

The Act provides that a buyer shall pay on or before the date agreed in writing and that in no case may the period exceed forty five days from the day the goods were delivered or the service rendered and accepted.

The employment generation programme gives a bank loan with a government margin money subsidy to help a person set up a micro enterprise, and the Commission, set up in 1957 under the Ministry of MSME, is the national nodal agency, working through state boards and district industries centres.

After the New Industrial Policy of 1991 licensing was abolished for almost all industries, and only a short list was kept under licence for reasons of security, health and social policy: defence equipment and aerospace, industrial explosives, specified hazardous chemicals, tobacco products such as cigarettes, and the distillation of alcoholic…

The MRTP Act had been framed for an economy of licences and was concerned with the size of firms; the Competition Act shifted the focus to conduct, prohibiting anti competitive agreements and the abuse of a dominant position and regulating combinations, and it created the Competition Commission of India to…

Under this Act a licence from the government was needed to set up a new factory, to expand capacity, to change the product line or to shift the location of a plant, which is how the state controlled the pattern of industrial growth until 1991.

It set the framework in which Indian industry worked for more than three decades, dividing industry into three schedules: Schedule A reserved seventeen industries for the state, Schedule B marked twelve for growing state participation and Schedule C left the rest to private enterprise.