Constitutional provisions, institutions and processes the news keeps testing. 579 concepts, each with its definition, key details and a timeline of every news story that touched it.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is the constitutional body that runs elections to Parliament, the state legislatures, and the offices of the...
An electoral roll is the official list of voters for a constituency. Only people whose names are on this list can vote. A Special Intensive Revision, or...
The Forest Rights Act, 2006 is a law that gives legal ownership and use rights over forest land and forest resources to the tribal people and other...
Left Wing Extremism (LWE), also called Naxalism or the Maoist insurgency, is an armed movement that wanted to overthrow the Indian state by violence and set...
The Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RPA 1950) is the law passed by Parliament that decides who can be a voter, how voter lists are made and...
Input Tax Credit (ITC) is the heart of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). When a business buys raw materials or services, it pays GST on them. When it later...
The Foreign Exchange Management Act, or FEMA, is the main law that controls how money moves between India and other countries. Any time an Indian buys...
The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 is the official list that decides which castes count as Scheduled Castes (SCs) in each state. Only people...
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016 is India's main law protecting the rights of disabled people. It says persons with disabilities...
Article 32 gives every person the right to go directly to the Supreme Court if their Fundamental Rights are violated. The Supreme Court can then issue...
The National Family Health Survey, or NFHS, is India's biggest household survey on health, population and family welfare. It asks lakhs of households and...
Article 15 and Article 16 are part of the Right to Equality in Part III of the Constitution (the Fundamental Rights). Article 15 stops the State from...
The Gram Sabha is the assembly of all adult voters of a village. Every person whose name is on the electoral roll (voter list) of the village panchayat area...
The Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) is the central government's main programme to help poor rural families earn a...
In India, the power to make laws is divided between the Centre and the states. Education is in the Concurrent List, which means both Parliament and state...
In India, some groups get reservation (reserved seats in jobs, colleges and legislatures) because they faced deep social disadvantage. The three main groups...
The University Grants Commission (UGC) is the main body that looks after university education in India. It decides the minimum standards that universities...
ECINET is the Election Commission of India's single digital platform that joins together more than 40 of its separate mobile apps and websites. Voters...
Tamil Nadu reserves 69% of seats in state government jobs and state educational institutions for backward groups. This is much higher than the general 50%...
These are the rules made by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that allow good foreign universities to open their own campuses in India. A foreign...
The Constitution fixes how long the Lok Sabha and each state's Legislative Assembly can last. Under Article 83(2) (Lok Sabha) and Article 172(1) (state...
The Election Commission of India (ECI) runs elections to Parliament, state assemblies and the offices of President and Vice-President. It is led by a Chief...
India's Three-Stage Nuclear Power Programme is a long-term plan to make India self-reliant in nuclear power. India has very little uranium, the usual...
NITI Aayog is the Union government's main policy think tank. Its full name is the National Institution for Transforming India. It advises the Centre and the...
The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 is the law passed by Parliament that divided the former state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories...
Article 22 of the Constitution gives every person who is arrested a set of basic protections. They must be told why they are arrested, can talk to and be...
T.N. Seshan v. Union of India is a 1995 Supreme Court judgment that settled how a multi-member Election Commission should work. The court upheld the law...
The Sendai Framework is a global plan, agreed by United Nations member countries, to reduce the damage that disasters cause. It was adopted on 18 March 2015...
A data centre is a large, secure building full of computers called servers, along with storage machines and network equipment. These machines store and...
A Development Financial Institution, or DFI, is a special kind of lender that gives long-term loans for big projects like factories, highways, power plants...
Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023 lets a magistrate pass an urgent order to stop a possible danger to public peace. Such an...
The National Security Act (NSA), 1980 is a central law that allows the government to detain a person without trial for up to 12 months, to stop that person...
India pays for disaster work through four special funds created under the Disaster Management Act, 2005. Two are for response (helping people after a...
When a river flows through two or more states, those states often fight over how much water each one should get. Article 262 of the Indian Constitution...
The GST law has two kinds of punishment for people who break it. The first kind is money punishment: tax demand, interest and penalty, decided by tax...
Indra Sawhney v. Union of India is the most important Supreme Court case on reservation in India. Decided in 1992, it upheld 27% reservation for Other...
The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 gives every citizen of India the right to ask for information from a public authority and get an answer within a...
The Ninth Schedule is a list of laws attached to the Constitution. Laws placed in it are protected by Article 31B from being struck down on the ground that...
Natural justice means a set of basic rules of fairness that every authority must follow when it takes a decision that hurts a person. The two main rules...
FDI in banking means a foreign company or person putting money into an Indian bank to own a lasting share in it. Banking is not like an ordinary business...
Flexible Inflation Targeting (FIT) is the system under which the RBI's main job is to keep retail inflation close to a number fixed by the government. In...
The Essential Religious Practices (ERP) doctrine is a test that Indian courts use to decide which religious practices get the full protection of the...
The National Testing Agency, or NTA, is the body that conducts India's biggest national entrance exams, such as NEET-UG (for medical colleges), JEE Main...
A Union Territory (UT) is an area of India that is governed directly by the Central Government, not by its own state government. The President runs each UT...
India's Constitution gives every person the freedom to believe in any religion, to follow it, and to spread its ideas. This set of rights is found in...
India controls the prices of many medicines so that ordinary people can afford them. The main rulebook for this is the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013...
Green crackers are firecrackers made with a changed chemical recipe so that they release less smoke, dust and harmful gases than normal crackers. They were...
Trade Margin Rationalisation, or TMR, is a way of making medicines cheaper by limiting how much money the middlemen in the supply chain can add to the...
An Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) is a body set up by a state government to run a regulated market, called a mandi, for farm produce. Farmers...
The right to a clean and healthy environment is a Fundamental Right in India, even though the Constitution does not use these exact words. The Supreme Court...
A GST refund is money the government pays back to a business when the business has paid more tax than it owed, or has collected tax credit that it cannot...
Information commissions are the bodies that make sure the Right to Information (RTI) law actually works. When a government office refuses to give you...
The Invoice Management System, or IMS, is a facility on the GST portal where a business can see every bill (invoice) that its suppliers have uploaded...
The Prime Minister Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (PMDDKY) is a central government programme to lift farming in 100 districts where agriculture is doing poorly....
ULLAS is the Government of India's programme to teach adults who never learnt to read, write or do basic arithmetic. It covers people aged 15 years and...
The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024 is India's first central law against paper leaks and cheating rackets in major government...
The IndiaAI Mission is the Government of India's main programme to build a complete AI system inside the country: computing power, data, home-grown AI...
The Constitution of India can be changed, but not as easily as an ordinary law. Article 368, in Part XX of the Constitution, gives Parliament the power to...
An Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) is a piece of land that the Central Government marks out as very fragile and very valuable for nature. Inside it...
Contempt of court means disobeying a court's order or disrespecting a court in a way that harms the justice system. The power to punish for contempt lets...