UPSC GK Questions 2026

The Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848 to 1849 ended with the defeat of the Sikh army at Gujrat, and Dalhousie annexed Punjab in 1849, placing it under a board of administration and sending the boy Maharaja Duleep Singh into exile.

Appointed Peshwa by Shahu in 1713, he secured from the Mughal court the right to collect chauth and sardeshmukhi in the Deccan, and the office became hereditary in his family, so that later Peshwas ruled from Poona while the Chhatrapati at Satara became a figurehead.

Chauth, from the word for four, was one-fourth of the revenue of a territory outside the Maratha kingdom, paid so that Maratha armies would not raid it and would in principle defend it.

By it Ranjit Singh and the East India Company agreed that the river Sutlej would divide their spheres, so the cis-Sutlej Sikh chiefs passed under Company protection and Ranjit Singh turned his energy westwards towards Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar.

The fifth Guru gathered the hymns of his predecessors along with verses of saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, and completed the Adi Granth in 1604, installing it in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar with Baba Buddha as the first granthi.

On Baisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five volunteers, the Panj Pyare, with the ceremony of the double-edged sword and created the Khalsa, giving its members the five articles of faith and the names Singh and Kaur.

The Panditrao was the ecclesiastical head in the Ashta Pradhan, fixing the dates of religious ceremonies, supervising grants to temples and learned men, and punishing offences against religious custom.

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761 between the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, with Vishwasrao the Peshwa's son, and Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called Durrani, supported by the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh.

The Amatya, also called the Majumdar, kept the accounts of the kingdom and checked the income and expenditure of every district, which makes him the finance member of the eight.

Tanaji led the night assault that recovered the fort of Kondana from the Mughal garrison in 1670 and was killed in the fighting.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818 was settled by a set of separate treaties with the Maratha houses, and the one with the Holkar chief of Indore was signed at Mandsaur, or Mandeshwar, in January 1818.

The index counts a household as poor when it suffers deprivation in enough of the indicators grouped under these three heads, such as nutrition and child mortality under health, years of schooling and attendance under education, and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living.

The head count ratio simply counts how many people fall below the line and divides that by the total population, which makes it easy to understand and easy to compare across states.

Begun in 2017, it replaced the five-yearly employment and unemployment surveys and gives annual estimates for rural and urban areas together along with more frequent estimates for urban areas, using the usual status and current weekly status measures.

This measure notes what the person did in each half day of the seven days before the survey, so every day of idleness is counted; because it picks up short spells that the longer reference periods miss, it yields the highest estimate of unemployment of the three.

Agriculture needs labour at sowing, transplanting and harvest and very little in between, and industries tied to a crop, such as sugar mills and rice mills, work only for part of the year, so the workers attached to them are idle for the remaining months.

The task force of 1979 fixed the rural line at the consumption expenditure needed to obtain 2,400 calories a day, on the ground that rural work involves more physical labour.

The Tendulkar expert group reported in 2009, moved away from the calorie anchor, used a mixed reference period for consumption and brought private spending on health and education into the basket, which raised the estimated share of the poor.

The Act, passed in 2005, gives every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work a legal right to one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year, and if work is not provided within the prescribed period the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance.

Here the extra workers appear to be employed but their marginal contribution to output is close to zero, which is why the condition is called disguised or hidden; the classic Indian example is a family farm on which several members work a plot that two could manage.