General Awareness: Current Affairs Plus Banking and NABARD Specifics
General Awareness in Phase I is 20 questions covering current affairs of roughly the six to eight months before the exam, banking and financial awareness, static general knowledge, and a small but reliable set of questions on NABARD itself and on rural development institutions.
Core rules
- Banking awareness is the most predictable slice: the RBI's liquidity corridor (repo at the top, the Standing Deposit Facility as the floor since April 2022, MSF and Bank Rate above repo), CRR and SLR, NBFC versus bank regulation, payment systems, and financial inclusion architecture.
- NABARD facts worth memorising: set up on the recommendation of the Sivaraman Committee, statutory under the NABARD Act 1981, operations from 12 July 1982, headquarters in Mumbai, apex role in rural credit refinance, RIDF, and SHG-Bank linkage.
- Build a one-page rolling list each month: schemes launched, index rankings, appointments, summits and their venues, awards, and sports winners.
- Static GK should be tied to the syllabus, not learnt at random: banking history, currencies, institutions and their headquarters.
Worked example
Question: Which rate now forms the floor of the RBI's liquidity adjustment corridor? Reasoning: the reverse repo rate held that role until April 2022, when the Standing Deposit Facility, set 25 basis points below the repo rate, was introduced as the floor. Choosing reverse repo is the common error because older material still says so.
Traps
- Guessing under one-fourth negative marking; a wild guess costs more than a blank.
- Mixing up repo, reverse repo and SDF after policy changes.
- Quoting a superseded figure (an old repo rate, an old CRR) because the source was not current.
- Confusing similarly named schemes, which is the standard distractor design.