General Awareness / Current Affairs
General Awareness / Current Affairs
This section is a six-to-eight month news window filtered through a banking lens: RBI policy and circulars, the Union Budget and Economic Survey, appointments and resignations, schemes and their ministries, summits and host cities, awards, sports, defence exercises, indices and reports, and Chhattisgarh-specific developments.
What to track and how
- Policy numbers: repo rate, CRR, SLR, inflation target, GDP growth and fiscal deficit as a percentage of GDP. Keep them in one dated list and refresh it monthly.
- Schemes: learn name, ministry, launch year and beneficiary in one line - for example, PM-KISAN (Agriculture), PMJDY (Finance), MUDRA (Finance).
- Reports and indices: know who publishes what - CPI by NSO/MoSPI, WPI by the Office of the Economic Adviser (DPIIT), Human Development Report by UNDP, Ease of Doing Business by the World Bank group.
- Static anchor: link each news item to a fact you already know, so a question can be answered from either direction.
Worked example
Which agency releases the Consumer Price Index, and what is the RBI's inflation target? Reasoning: retail inflation is measured by CPI, compiled by the National Statistical Office under MoSPI; the flexible inflation-targeting framework sets 4% CPI inflation with a ±2% band. WPI is a wholesale measure from a different agency, so any option naming RBI as the compiler of CPI is wrong.
Traps
- Similarly named schemes swapped (PM-KISAN vs Kisan Credit Card; PMJDY vs PMJJBY).
- Old figures carried forward after a policy review.
- First in India claims that are actually state-level firsts.
- Guessing on appointment questions - a wrong guess costs the same as a blank, but a blank costs less time.