Medium Level – GK Questions

Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy stated in July 2026 that after the proposed delimitation exercise, the Assembly constituencies in Telangana are likely to increase from the current 119 to 182. He also mentioned that Lok Sabha seats would increase from 17 to 26. This delimitation exercise would impact the timing of the next Assembly elections.

The bandh was called by a combine of Left student organizations including SFI, AISF, PDSU, AIDSO, AIFDS, AISB and AIPSU. ABVP and NSUI were not mentioned as part of this particular protest combine in Telangana.

According to the article, IISER Tirupati was placed at the 20th position among academic and research institutions in India in the Nature Index 2026, which was a significant improvement from the 33rd position in 2025. This demonstrates the institute's growing research capabilities and international recognition.

YiP 3.0 was organized by Yi Coimbatore Chapter in collaboration with Kumaraguru Centre for Public and Competitive Careers (KCPC) and the Department of Political Science, Kumaraguru College of Liberal Arts and Science (KCLAS). The event witnessed 109 student delegates from 14 schools participating in legislative proceedings.

The Quad is an informal security grouping consisting of India, Australia, United States, and Japan. According to the article, this grouping has become the backbone of the Indo-Pacific strategy of India and Australia, reflecting a decade of institution-building between these nations.

In the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the BJP won 207 out of 294 seats with 45.84% of the vote share, marking a paradigm shift in Bengal's political landscape. The Trinamool Congress was reduced to 80 seats with 40.8% vote share, while the Left Front and Congress combined got only 7.42% votes.

According to the article, a group of eminent citizens led by Gandhian O.P. Shah drafted a joint appeal to the leaders of India and Pakistan urging them to engage in dialogue. This appeal led to a public debate on whether India should restart dialogue with Pakistan. Mani Shankar Aiyar was mentioned as a signatory to the letter.

The article clearly states that India and Pakistan have not engaged in dialogue since 2016 when talks broke down after the terror attacks at Pathankot and subsequently at Uri. This marks the last formal engagement between the two nations at the government level, making it 12 years without dialogue as of 2026.

The visit produced a Joint Declaration on Defence and Security Cooperation that included a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Australia's Maritime Border Command and the Indian Coast Guard, and adopted an India-Australia Maritime Security Collaboration Roadmap to address shared threat perceptions. These mechanisms aim to deepen interoperability between the two nations.

The Lowy Institute Poll found trust in the United States at a record low of 31%, with a narrow margin of Australians suggesting that Canberra should distance itself from Washington under U.S. President Donald Trump. This reflects the strain on Australia's alliance dependence and its push for diversification in strategic partnerships, including with India.

Nikhil Agarwal is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-director of Blueprint Labs. He received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Economics for developing empirical methods to study and improve allocation mechanisms — practical systems like school admission lotteries, medical residency matching, and kidney exchange programmes that need to match people to places or resources without using prices.

The conventional Haber-Bosch process produces ammonia (used in fertilisers feeding ~50% of the world) by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure, using natural gas as both fuel and hydrogen source. Manthiram at Caltech developed electrochemical pathways — including lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction and oxygen-atom transfer catalysis — that use renewable electricity instead, at room temperature and pressure, reducing the process's carbon footprint.

Andrew Ollett of the University of Chicago is the world's leading scholar of Prakrit languages — the ancient South Asian spoken languages distinct from Sanskrit, including Pali, Ardhamagadhi, and Maharashtri. His work covers Prakrit grammar, the cultural history of why authors chose Prakrit over Sanskrit, and the circulation of Prakrit texts across the subcontinent. He is the first Prakrit language scholar to win the Infosys Prize Humanities category.

The Vigyan Team award under RVP 2025 was given to the CSIR Aroma Mission team for their work in Agricultural Science. The mission introduced aromatic crops (lavender, rose, lemongrass, patchouli) to farmers across northern and northeastern India, demonstrating a pathway to the essential oils market that improved incomes without drastically changing traditional farming practices.

Vedika Khemani of Stanford University received the Infosys Prize 2024 in Physical Sciences for her contributions to non-equilibrium quantum matter, most notably the discovery of time-crystals. A time-crystal is a phase of matter that breaks time-translation symmetry — it oscillates periodically without consuming energy. Khemani's theoretical work provided the framework that enabled experimental groups to verify the phenomenon in the lab.

The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar was instituted in 2023 and first awarded in 2024. It effectively replaced the standalone Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, which had been given annually by CSIR since 1958. The SSB Prize was last awarded in 2022. The RVP retained the SSB name in its third category — Vigyan Yuva–Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar — for young scientists under 45.

Gayatri Gopichand was nominated for the Arjuna Award as a player in the women's doubles badminton category, forming the top-ranked women's doubles pair in India alongside Treesa Jolly. Her father Pullela Gopichand is India's national badminton coach and former All England Open champion (2001).

Divya Deshmukh, a chess grandmaster born in 2005, won the FIDE Women's World Cup in 2025 — making her the first Indian to win that title. She was twenty years old at the time. She was nominated alongside Vidit Gujrathi, giving chess two nominees in the 2025 Arjuna list.

Six hockey players received the Khel Ratna before Hardik Singh's 2025 nomination: Dhanraj Pillay (1999-2000), Sardar Singh (2017), Rani Rampal (2020), P.R. Sreejesh and Manpreet Singh (both 2021, the year India won its first Olympic hockey medal since 1980), and Harmanpreet Singh (2024, Paris bronze). If Hardik Singh is confirmed, hockey will have produced 7 Khel Ratna recipients.

Thirty-two Arjuna Awards were given at the 17 January 2025 ceremony. Seventeen of these went to para-athletes — an unprecedented proportion — driven by India's historic 29-medal haul (7 gold, 9 silver, 13 bronze) at the Paris 2024 Paralympics, which was India's best-ever performance at the Paralympic Games.