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Sources of General Awareness for IAS Prelims – Offline and Online

Current affairs plays a vital part in determining your success in the IAS prelims. Each year about 30-40 current event based questions, directly and indirectly, are asked in the IAS prelims. Many candidates adopt a current affairs plus approach where they include polity, maps and mental ability to see them through. While the strategy for Prelims has been discussed earlier, in this post I will be listing useful sources of current awareness that you can use to quickly build up or refresh your knowledge of general awareness and score easy marks in the IAS prelims.

Offline Sources of General Awareness – Books, Newspapers and Magazines

Prior to the internet boom these three were the only important sources of general awareness for IAS aspirants. Even today they are the most important sources of current events and general knowledge.

Under books I will list the Manorama Year Book, TMH General Studies Manual and the India Year Book. If you can somehow get hold of New Vishal’s Year Book it would be better as it is quite concise and quite a few questions appear from it.

Manorama Year Book is a good source of current affairs as well as GK. The first section itself deals with Current Affairs that happened in the recent past in the World as well as India. And as you might know in the Inverse pyramid article I stated that more and more questions are being asked from events that took place 2-3 years earlier. For this reason Manorama Year Book is quite useful. It also contains a diary of domestic and international events in snippet form that you can quickly go through. Another useful feature. Then there are the Sports, Awards and Honours, Science and Technology Developments that you must go through to be up to date with the recent happenings in these important fields. After you’ve done this I suggest you attempt the Quiz containing about a 1000 questions. I’ve noticed 3 to 4 questions were asked in the Prelims from the Manorama Year Book quiz section itself.

The TMH General Studies Manual is usually considered useful for conventional subjects like History, Polity, Science etc. only. But did you know it has a very good section on GK as well? I suggest you spend a few minutes every day going through it to increase your general awareness level. It also contains a diary of important events in the year gone by. If we take the 2012 TMH GS Manual for example it will contains events from 2010 onwards which is quite useful as I said earlier UPSC is asking questions about events that took place a few years back.

The India Year Book is obviously a very popular source of authentic information regarding latest developments in Indian economy, science, agriculture, commerce, etc. But taking it all at once can be quite intimidating since it is packed with so much information in somewhat disorganized manner. I suggest you pick one chapter at a time and focus on two aspects – the important information and the latest developments. For instance you pick nuclear technology. First know about the agreements India has agreed with various countries, the location of various nuclear plants and the new nuclear plants that are coming up as well as their power generation capacity.

If you don’t want to go through the India Year Book due to lack of time, I suggest you grab a copy of New Vishal’s Year Book as it is quite concise, well organised and contains very useful information from the Prelims perspective.

Newspapers and Magazines for IAS Prelims

Newspapers and magazines are a very valuable source of current events and you must make it a point to read the newspaper daily for at least 30 minutes. The newspaper I recommend for IAS prelims is The Hindu and if it is unavailable, then Indian Express. I suggest you go through this video on How to the Read the Newspaper so you know which things to focus on and which things to skip. If you haven’t already downloaded the free eBook do so as it contains an entire chapter on how to read the newspaper. Remember, you can go with any newspaper that is available but you should focus on the important aspects and skip the fluff. Also make it a point to read the editorials and also make micro notes from the newspaper.

Even one good current affairs magazine is adequate. I suggest the Civil Services Chronicle or Pratiyogita Darpan as the information and data given in these magazines is quite accurate and only important events are mentioned in these magazines. Students residing in Delhi can get hold of many local publications focused solely on current affairs that usually contain snippets from The Hindu and other national newspapers.

Online Sources of General Awareness

If you want to make productive use of your time online I suggest the following sources. The Hindu’s portal for daily events in case the newspaper is not available in your area. GKToday.in is a good online portal dedicated to competitive exam preparation and contains current affairs snippets and quizzes that you can attempt online. JagranJosh.com also has useful resources for civil services aspirants including practice tests and current events updates. You can also check out civil services chronicle’s initiative IAS100.in where they have a section called Daily Dose containing snippets of daily events.

I hope this small guide was useful to help you prepare for Prelims 2012 and beyond. If you have more sources of current affairs to share with us please do so in the comments below.