UPSC GK Questions 2026

The International Union for Conservation of Nature was founded in 1948 and works from Gland, a town in Switzerland near Geneva, where several environmental bodies have their offices.

Project Tiger was launched in 1973, the year after the Wildlife (Protection) Act came into force, and it was the first species recovery project of its kind in India.

The Progressive Writers' Association held its first conference at Lucknow in 1936 and Premchand, who had begun his career writing in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai before turning to Hindi, presided over it and delivered its opening address.

He wrote the poem in Urdu early in the twentieth century as a song in praise of the land, and it was later set to music and became one of the best loved patriotic songs of the country.

The ruler of Golconda who founded the city of Hyderabad wrote verse in Dakhani, the southern form of the language, and the collection that survives under his name is counted as the first complete diwan in it, which is why the earliest chapter of Urdu literature belongs to the Deccan…

Akbar set up a translation department in which Sanskrit works were rendered into Persian, and the Mahabharata was translated there as the Razmnama, a name that means the book of war.

Barani lived at the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and wrote in the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq.

He was a minister and a close friend of Akbar and wrote the Akbarnama, of which the Ain-i-Akbari forms the third volume, setting out the departments of state, the revenue of the provinces, the ranks of the nobility, the coins, the crops and the customs of the country.

Khusrau served a line of Sultans at Delhi, was a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and was given the title Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India.

This is one of the striking facts of Mughal cultural history: the emperor who withdrew court patronage from musical performance presided over a reign in which the largest number of Persian treatises on Indian classical music was written, as scholars turned from the court to the book.

He was an officer of Jahangir's court who continued the record of the reign after the emperor stopped writing his own memoir, and his Iqbalnama-i-Jahangiri is one of the main Persian sources for the period.

She was a daughter of Babur and a sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of the family at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the Akbarnama.

Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish and was translated into Persian in Akbar's time by Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, one of the nine jewels of the court, so that the book could be read by the Persian speaking nobility of the empire.

Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish, the language of his homeland in Central Asia, and the book is admired for its plain, observant prose about the men, fruits, animals and rivers of the countries he passed through.

From that date the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of a listed set of single-use plastic articles became an offence across the country; the list covers earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons and flags, candy and ice-cream sticks, thermocol used for decoration, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery…

The mission was launched on the 145th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, whose insistence on sanitation the campaign invokes, and it runs in two wings, one for urban areas and one for rural areas.

In pyrolysis the waste is heated to a high temperature in a closed chamber from which air is kept out, so the material does not burn but breaks into a liquid oil, a solid char and a combustible gas, all of which can be used as fuel or feedstock.

Vermicomposting uses earthworms, which swallow organic waste, grind it in their gizzard and pass it out as casts that are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, so the product is a finer and more nutritious manure than ordinary compost and is ready sooner.

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 to stop rich countries from shipping toxic and hazardous waste to poorer countries for cheap disposal, and it requires the prior informed consent of the receiving country before any such consignment moves.

Under this idea a producer, importer or brand owner stays answerable for its product after the consumer has finished with it, and must arrange to collect back and recycle an agreed quantity of packaging or equipment; the plastic waste, e-waste and battery waste rules all run on it.