UPSC GK Questions 2026

Masulipatnam, the port town of coastal Andhra Pradesh, was the great centre of the painted and block printed cotton that European traders bought as chintz, and the same town is still one of the two homes of kalamkari.

In Patola weaving the yarn of both the warp and the weft is tied and dyed before weaving, so the motif is built up from the threads themselves and looks the same from either side; Patan in north Gujarat is its historic centre and the craft carries a GI.

Bidriware takes its name from Bidar, a town in northern Karnataka, where craftspersons cast an alloy of zinc and copper, engrave it, inlay pure silver wire and then rub the surface with a special soil that turns the alloy deep black while the silver stays bright.

Every GI application in India is filed at the Geographical Indications Registry in Chennai, which functions under the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.

Parliament passed the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act in 1999 to meet India's obligation under the TRIPS Agreement of the World Trade Organization, and the Act was brought into force on 15 September 2003.

After the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 came into force on 15 September 2003, the tea of the Darjeeling hills was the first Indian good entered in the register, and its logo is still the best known Indian GI abroad.

Kudankulam in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu uses pressurised water reactors of the Russian VVER type, supplied under an agreement signed with the Soviet Union in 1988 and carried forward by Russia.

The Jaduguda mine lies in the Singhbhum belt of Jharkhand and has been worked by the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, a public sector company set up in 1967, since the late nineteen sixties; it was the first uranium mine in the country.

On 11 May 1998 India tested three nuclear devices at Pokhran under Operation Shakti, followed by two more on 13 May, and the day was declared National Technology Day to mark that achievement along with the test flight of the Trishul missile and the first flight of the Hansa aircraft…

The test was carried out in the desert at Pokhran in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974 and was described by India as a peaceful nuclear explosion; Raja Ramanna led the team.

The second stage uses the plutonium 239 recovered from the spent fuel of the first stage as the fuel of a fast breeder reactor, with a blanket of thorium around the core that is converted into uranium 233; a breeder produces more fissile material than it burns, which is how…

Apsara went critical at Trombay near Mumbai on 4 August 1956 and was the first nuclear research reactor not only in India but in the whole of Asia; the CIRUS reactor of 1960 and the Dhruva reactor of 1985 were built at the same site, which is today the Bhabha…

Bhabha founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1945, became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, drew up the three stage plan built around India's thorium, and led the establishment at Trombay that was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after his death in 1966.

In a boiling water reactor, the design used at Tarapur, ordinary water is allowed to boil inside the reactor vessel itself, so the coolant leaving the core is a mixture of water and steam; the steam is separated at the top and driven straight to the turbine, without the separate…

The CANDU design, from which India's pressurised heavy water reactors descend, burns natural uranium, and natural uranium contains only about seven parts in a thousand of the fissile isotope uranium 235.

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country.

The cricketer Sachin Tendulkar was named for the Bharat Ratna in 2013 and honoured in 2014, the first sportsperson to receive the highest civilian award of the country and also the youngest recipient at that time.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted by the Government of India in 1995, the year marking the one hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is given for social, economic and political change through non-violence, to an individual or an institution, Indian or foreign.

National Sports Day is observed on 29 August, the birth anniversary of the hockey player Major Dhyan Chand, who was part of the Indian teams that won Olympic gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936, and the national sports awards are conferred around this day.

The prize is named after Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the first Director General of the Council, and is given by the Council to scientists working in India, usually announced around its foundation day on 26 September.