List of top General Awareness Questions asked in CLAT

On 26th January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of democracy, which this Constituent Assembly has so laboriously built up.
I feel that the constitution is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peacetime and in wartime. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that man was vile?
The third thing we must do is not be content with mere political democracy. We must note that our political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life, which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.
… however, good a constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However, bad a constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution.
[Excerpts from Dr. Ambedkar’s address to the Constituent Assembly, 25 November 1949]

On the evening of the 10th, General Dyer arrived at Amritsar, and the Deputy-Commissioner handed over the civil power to him. He issued a proclamation by word of mouth that no meetings should be held. Two days later, after there had been no sort of riot, nor murder, General Dyer heard that a meeting was to be held at the Jallianwala Bagh. He proceeded there with about fifty troops, half British, half Indian, and a certain number of Ghurkas, armed with their kukris. The Jallianwala Bagh is an open space, half a mile square, which has one entry wide enough for three persons. The troops got in and lined up on a mound of debris. The walls, seven feet high, and the surrounding houses enclosed the people. There were, too, three alleys through which the people might have been able to pass. Within thirty seconds of the troops getting in, General Dyer gave orders to fire, and the crowd of people, estimated at anything from 5,000 to 20,000, who were sitting on the ground peacefully listening to the mob oratory, were fired on. The result of the troops’ fire into the mass of people we do not know. But we do know that Dyer’s own estimate of the casualties resulting from ten minutes continual individual firing, was 400 to 500 killed and 1,500 wounded. The people were not able to escape. They were people who had not offered any violence and who had not been warned. These people were shot down. After ten minutes, the ammunition was exhausted and the troops marched off, and they left 1,500 wounded there. There were men lying there for two days, dying of thirst, eating the ground, bleeding to death and nobody to look after them. Those who lived nearby came and carried away some of the wounded from the heap of dead and dying, but the unfortunate country people died there miserably of their wounds. This is what is done in 1919 in British India…
Centuries hence you will find Indian children brought up to this spot, just as they visit now the Cawnpore Well, and you can imagine the feelings of these Indians for generations over this terrible business.
[Col. Wedgwood, MP, speaking in the British Parliament, 22 December 1919]

There is really nothing new, not already anticipated in a distressed planet since the emergence of human species life nearly two million years ago. So, a long prehistory of inter-faith dialogue entailing the reciprocal relation between religious traditions and the robustness of the very idea of being human and having rights, precedes the recent UN movement of faith for rights (F4R). The F4R framework has finally been affirmed by the United Nations system. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR) promoted the Rabat plan of action in 2012. Note that this happened after the end of the Cold War, during globalisation, and soon after 9/11. The plan was a result of a series of expert workshops on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred, underlying “legislative patterns, judicial practices and policies”. The UN Human Rights Council is shortly going to discuss further the prohibition of the advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to “discrimination, hostility or violence”.

One thing struck us as a major difference between the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and its predecessor. The earlier national policies on education (NPE) from 1986 and 1992 presented themselves as attempts to consolidate and build on earlier efforts, particularly the NPE, 1968. The new NEP 2020 policy, on the other hand, is very keen to establish that it is different from everything in the past, including in its name. Nowhere does this attitude come across as starkly as it does in the section on higher education.
It comes across fairly clearly on how the higher education ecosystem will be by 2040. By this time — if the policy has its way — the Indian higher education ecosystem will be populated with higher education institutions (HEI). These will comprise Universities and Colleges and the public and private sectors, all of which will be 'multi-disciplinary‘, with each populated by more than 3,000 students, with at least one “in or near every district”. Universities will conduct research and post-graduate and under-graduate teaching, some research-intensive and others teaching-intensive. Colleges will largely teach at the under-graduate level, with a number of them having their medium of instruction in either bilingual or local / Indian languages. The colleges can manifest in clusters around universities as constituent colleges or may be standalone autonomous ones. Ideally, all HEIs will eventually become “independent self-governing institutions” with considerable “faculty and institutional autonomy”. They will have complied with a series of regulatory exercises that are “light-but-tight” and will be operated by a large number of private accreditors, overseen by a new set of regulatory institutions at the national level.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said major global firms are looking at India as a major investment destination, which is reflected by a robust inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) last financial year, and through ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan‘ (Self Reliant India initiative) the country is shifting its focus from ’Make in India‘ to ‗Make for world‘. He said Independent India should be "vocal for local" and asked citizens to glorify Indian products to promote 'Atmanirbhar Bharat‘. Unveiling his vision of a Self-Reliant India, the Prime Minister said that the government has unveiled over Rs 110 lakh crore National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) to boost the economy and create jobs. “In order to rapidly modernise India, there is a need to give a new direction to overall infrastructure development,” he said, adding that over 7,000 projects under NIP have been already identified. “This will be, in a way, a new revolution in the field of infrastructure. This is the time to end silos in infrastructure. There is a plan to connect the entire country with multi model connectivity infrastructure,” he said. NIP will play a crucial role in overcoming the adverse impact of Covid-19 on the economy and catapult the economy in a higher growth trajectory, he said. The government on December 31 last year unveiled the NIP with an aim to make India a $5 trillion economy by 2024-25. The focus of the infrastructure pipeline is to accelerate growth and create employment in both urban and rural areas.

In a major relief to micro, small and medium enterprises, the GST Council has recently increased the tax exemption limit per annum to: