2026

• Statement 1 is incorrect, because the Malegitti Shivalaya at Badami carries an early Dravida vimana with a storeyed tapering superstructure and a square griva and shikhara at the top, not a curvilinear Nagara tower.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the Huchimalligudi at Aihole is one of the early Chalukyan experiments that carries a rekha Nagara superstructure over the sanctum.
• Statement 3 is correct, and the Dashavatara Temple at Deogarh is the standard textbook example of the earliest surviving Nagara shikhara, dated to the Gupta period.
• Statement 4 is incorrect, because the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal is a fully developed Dravida temple modelled on the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram. Only 2 and 3 qualify, so (b) is correct. (a) and (d) each include a Dravida temple, and (c) drops the valid Aihole example.

• Statement 1 is correct, since the copper plate grant of the Gurjara ruler Dadda III issued from the Sankheda or Mankani area of Gujarat and dated to the Chedi year corresponding to AD 595 to 596 carries a date written in decimal place-value notation and is conventionally cited as the earliest epigraphic instance in India.
• Statement 2 is correct, because from the ninth century onward place-value dating with the decimal figures becomes routine in inscriptions across northern, western and southern India rather than exceptional.
• Statement 3 is correct, since Sanskrit and old Khmer inscriptions from Cambodia, Sumatra and neighbouring regions carry place-value numerals from the later seventh century, the Cambodian inscription of the year corresponding to AD 683 with a symbol for zero being the standard example. All three are therefore correct and (d) follows. (a), (b) and (c) each discard one statement that the epigraphic record supports.

• Item 1 supports both statements directly, because a stone pulley wheel and strapped pails are the physical apparatus of well lifting, which is the technology that makes cultivation away from the river margin possible and which also needs a source of pulling power.
• Item 3 supports statement II, since the established use of the ox for ploughing and for drawing carts before and during the Rigvedic period is exactly the draught-animal power that could be transferred to lifting water from a well.
• Item 2 supports neither statement and is the eliminator. An axe is a tool for clearing forest and a sickle is a harvesting implement, so both relate to the land use cycle but tell us nothing about wells or about animal power applied to water lifting. Hence 1 and 3 support the statements and (c) is correct. (a) and (b) admit the irrelevant implements item, and (d) discards the pulley and pail evidence, which is the single most direct piece of support in the set.

Only item 3 can serve as a basis, so (d) is correct. Freshwater river dolphins of the genus Platanista occur as closely related populations in both the Indus system and the Ganga system, and since these animals cannot cross salt water or watersheds, a shared ancestry implies that the two systems were once physically connected. That biogeographic argument is precisely the kind of independent evidence a Pleistocene drainage rearrangement requires.

• Item 1 fails on chronology, because the Nadi Sukta is a Rigvedic hymn of the second millennium BCE that lists rivers of the period and can bear on Holocene channel changes such as the Sarasvati question, but it cannot testify to the Pleistocene, which ended more than ten thousand years earlier.
• Item 2 fails on fact, since Robert Bruce Foote's field work is associated with prehistoric stone tool discoveries in peninsular India, notably at Pallavaram, rather than with a survey of Sutlej and Yamuna palaeochannels. (a), (b) and (c) all rest on one or both of these unsound items.

• Pair 1 is wrong, since Vitasta is the Jhelum and not the Chenab.
• Pair 2 is wrong, since Asikni, meaning the dark one, is the Chenab and not the Jhelum. The two names have simply been swapped, which is the trap the question is built on, and noticing the swap already eliminates (a).
• Pair 3 is correct, since Parushni is the Ravi, the river on whose bank the Battle of the Ten Kings was fought.
• Pair 4 is wrong, since the Beas is Vipasha in the Vedic lists, while Yavyavati is a minor stream mentioned in the Dasarajna context and is not identified with the Beas. Only pair 3 survives, so (c) is correct, and (b) and (d) both depend on accepting the Yavyavati identification.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Amaravati stands on the right bank of the Krishna in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, in the lower reaches of that valley, an area that also holds Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta and Ghantasala.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The Amaravati mahachaitya was the largest stupa in India, with a drum diameter of roughly fifty metres against about thirty six metres for the Great Stupa at Sanchi, so ranking it second to Sanchi reverses the position.
• Statement 3 is correct, because the Amaravati idiom of slender, animated figures in crowded narrative panels shaped later Andhra and Pallava work, and Amaravati limestone slabs and the style derived from them travelled to Sri Lanka and to sites in Southeast Asia along the maritime routes. Hence 1 and 3 hold and (b) is correct. (a) drops the well attested statement on artistic influence, while (c) and (d) accept the false size comparison.

The question asks which pairs are wrongly matched, so the correct answer names the mismatches.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched, since Senguttuvan, celebrated in the Silappadikaram and associated with the Pattini cult, was a Chera.
• Pair 2 is wrongly matched, since Udiyanjeral, also known as Perunjottu Udiyan Cheralatan and remembered for feeding both armies at the Kurukshetra war in bardic tradition, was a Chera and not a Chola, and the very element Cheral in the name carries the dynastic label.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched, since Nedunjeliyan of Madurai, victor of Talaiyalanganam, was a Pandya. Only pair 2 is a mismatch, so (b) is correct. (a) and (c) wrongly treat the Chera identification of Senguttuvan as an error, and (d) wrongly rejects the Pandya identification of Nedunjeliyan.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator. Disarmament was central to the policy, and the taluqdars lost not only their estates but also their armed retainers and their forts, which were dismantled, a humiliation that is standard textbook explanation for why they joined the revolt in 1857 with such force.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the Summary Settlement of 1856 proceeded on the assumption that the taluqdars were interlopers with no permanent stake in the soil who had usurped rights over village communities, and it therefore settled directly wherever it could.
• Statement 3 is correct and is the reasoning behind statement 2, because the Company preferred the Mahalwari and ryotwari logic of dealing directly with cultivators or village bodies, expecting both higher revenue and a stable peasant base.

Hence 2 and 3 are correct and (a) follows, while (b) and (c) admit the false claim about arms and forts, and (d) drops the accurate statement of British intent.

All three support the assertion, so (d) is correct.

• Statement 1 is factually right and is the core of the argument, since the Government of India Act 1919 not only continued the Muslim separate electorates conceded in 1909 but extended the device to Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans, so that the electoral system itself was organised around community.
• Statement 2 supplies the motive, because a franchise divided by community made a united nationalist demand harder to express and gave the administration counterweights to the Congress, which is the classic account of the intent behind the device.
• Statement 3 supplies the consequence, since once representation was distributed as a communal entitlement, other groups including the depressed classes had every incentive to press for the same treatment, and by 1932 that logic reached the Communal Award.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each drop one of these three links, but the assertion is about genesis, motive and effect together, so nothing in the set can be discarded.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Hoollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in Jorhat district of Assam is named for and dedicated to this species, and the Western Hoolock Gibbon is assessed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
• Statement 2 is correct, since gibbons are the specialists of brachiation among primates, with elongated forelimbs, a ball and socket wrist that allows the body to rotate beneath the grip, and a hook shaped hand that lets them swing hand over hand at speed through the canopy.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator. Gibbons are lesser apes weighing roughly six to eight kilograms, built light precisely because brachiation demands low mass and long arms, and the comparison with the heavy bodied, largely terrestrial and knuckle walking gorilla inverts their anatomy.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (a) discards a straightforward fact of locomotion and (c) and (d) accept the gorilla comparison.

Only statement 3 states a genuine rationale, so (d) is correct. Mangroves dissipate wave and surge energy through their dense aerial root systems, which is the bio-shield function demonstrated along the Odisha and Sundarbans coasts, and they supply fuelwood, fodder, honey and nursery grounds for fisheries, which is the livelihood function. Both are reasons to protect the ecosystem.

• Statement 1 is wrong twice over, because mangroves do not store freshwater and, more importantly, the sentence ends by proposing their conversion to paddy fields, which is a driver of mangrove loss rather than a reason to protect them.
• Statement 2 is wrong on the physiology and on the conclusion, since mangrove roots are the roots of halophytes and are salt tolerant rather than salt sensitive, excluding or excreting salt rather than filtering seawater into fresh, and conversion to aquaculture ponds is historically the single largest cause of mangrove destruction in South and Southeast Asia.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each admit at least one statement that argues for destroying the ecosystem in a question about protecting it.

Only statement 3 is correct, so (d) is the answer. Vizhinjam has a natural draft of about eighteen to twenty metres within a very short distance of the shore and lies roughly ten nautical miles from the main east west shipping lane, which together allow it to receive the largest container vessels without heavy dredging. Its purpose is to capture the Indian transshipment cargo that has historically been handled at Colombo, Singapore and Jebel Ali, which is what is meant by reducing dependence on foreign transshipment ports and retaining the associated revenue.

• Statement 1 is wrong on both limbs, because the port is designed as an international transshipment hub rather than an exclusively domestic one, and it was built under a public private partnership with foreign supplied equipment, so it neither eliminates nor was intended to eliminate foreign collaboration.
• Statement 2 is wrong because cruise and heritage tourism is at most an incidental function, and the port's design, cranes and yard capacity are container oriented.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each rest on one of these mischaracterisations.

The question asks which statements are not correct, so the answer names the errors.

• Statement 1 is correct and is therefore not part of the answer, since Uttar Pradesh touches eight States, namely Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, besides the National Capital Territory, which is more than any other State, Assam coming next with seven.
• Statement 2 is not correct, because the longest international boundary of any Indian State belongs to West Bengal, which faces Bangladesh over roughly two thousand two hundred kilometres besides short stretches with Nepal and Bhutan, while Rajasthan's boundary with Pakistan is only about one thousand and seventy kilometres.
• Statement 3 is not correct, because Sikkim touches only West Bengal but is not unique in that respect, since Meghalaya touches only Assam. Hence 2 and 3 are the incorrect statements and (c) is right. (a) and (b) wrongly treat the accurate Uttar Pradesh claim as an error, and (d) misses the Rajasthan error.

Only statement 1 is correct, so (a) is the answer. Doyang is the classic Indian example of a community turning from hunting to protection, the villages around Pangti in Wokha district having given up large scale netting of the roosting flocks after 2012 and taken up guarding and ecotourism instead, which is exactly sustained local conservation effort translating into safe passage for an international migrant.

• Statement 2 misstates what tracking does, since satellite tagging of individual falcons records and reveals the route, it does not guide the birds, whose navigation is innate and independent of human technology.
• Statement 3 is false on the biology, because Amur Falcons are passage migrants that halt at Doyang for a few weeks in October and November to feed and build fat reserves before continuing across the Arabian Sea to southern Africa, and no resident Indian population has established itself. (b), (c) and (d) each accept one of these two misconceptions.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Madhav in Shivpuri district was notified in 2025 as India's fifty eighth tiger reserve and the ninth in Madhya Pradesh.
• Statement 2 is correct, since Sakhya Sagar, an artificial lake created on the Manier river in the early twentieth century, lies within the park and was designated a Ramsar site in 2022 along with several other Indian wetlands.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because Madhav National Park lies wholly within Shivpuri district of Madhya Pradesh and shares no area with Rajasthan, although Shivpuri is not far from the interstate boundary, which is what makes the distractor plausible. Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct. (a) drops the Ramsar link, and (c) and (d) accept the false interstate claim.

• Statement 1 is correct, since the islands lie between about six and fourteen degrees north in the Bay of Bengal, with a small land area surrounded by warm sea, giving high humidity, a very small annual range of temperature and heavy rainfall, which is the definition of a humid tropical coastal or equatorial maritime climate.
• Statement 2 is correct, and it follows from position rather than memory. The islands lie in the path of the Bay of Bengal branch of the southwest monsoon from May onward and again in the path of the retreating northeast monsoon from October to December, when those winds pick up moisture crossing the Bay.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because it inverts the wet season. The islands are wet from roughly May to December and comparatively dry from January to April, so a December to May maximum is wrong at both ends.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (c) and (d) accept the inverted rainfall regime and (a) discards a statement that follows directly from the islands' latitude and position.

• Statement 1 is correct, since the western coast of the Peninsula is a faulted and submerged coast produced when a block west of the Western Ghats foundered along the Western Ghat fault, which is why that coast is narrow, has drowned river mouths and lacks a wide depositional plain, unlike the emergent eastern coast.
• Statement 2 is correct, because the Veliconda and Mahendragiri hills are discontinuous residual ranges of the Eastern Ghats, the worn down stumps of a very old orogeny, and residual relief is a defining mark of a stable ancient block.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, since deep V shaped gorges cut by swift rivers are the signature of the young, still rising Himalaya, whose rivers have high vertical erosive power. Peninsular rivers flow over a block that has been stable for a very long time, have graded profiles close to base level and occupy broad shallow mature valleys, the Narmada and Tapi rift valleys being structural rather than erosional exceptions.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (c) and (d) transfer a Himalayan characteristic to the Peninsula.

Relationship 1 is correct.

• Statement I sets out an aim, port led growth through coastal infrastructure, and statement II reports measurable outcomes in coastal shipping, inland waterway traffic and port performance rankings, and outcomes of that kind are exactly what would validate the strategy. Relationship 2 is correct, since a successor phase that carries the same port led logic forward into shipbuilding, technology and innovation is an extension of the original objectives into a forward looking frame, not a departure from them. Relationship 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, and it fails on the reading of the statements rather than on any fact about the programme.
• Statement I speaks of cost effective and sustainable infrastructure and says nothing that excludes innovation, so it cannot contradict statement III, and a relationship of extension and a relationship of contradiction cannot both hold between the same pair.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (a) drops a sound relationship and (c) and (d) rest on the contradiction that the text does not support.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Rhynchostylis retusa grows on the trunks and branches of trees, drawing moisture and nutrients from the air and from accumulated debris through thick aerial roots covered in velamen, without parasitising the host, which is the definition of an epiphyte.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because the species is widely distributed across tropical Asia, occurring in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, southern China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines besides India, so it cannot be called endemic to the Northeast even though it is culturally identified with that region.
• Statement 3 is correct, since the foxtail orchid, known in Assam as kopou phul and associated with the Bihu festival, is the State flower of Assam and is also the State flower of Arunachal Pradesh.

Hence 1 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (c) and (d) accept the false endemism claim and (a) drops the State flower fact.

Only statement 3 is correct, so (c) is the answer. Moidams are the burial mounds of the Ahom royalty and nobility, concentrated at Charaideo in Sivasagar district of Assam, each consisting of a vaulted brick or stone chamber holding the body together with grave goods, covered by an earth mound and enclosed by a wall, and the site became India's first cultural World Heritage inscription from the Northeast in 2024.

• Statements 1, 2 and 4 are all wrong because they assign a military or recreational function to what is a funerary complex. The Ahom kingdom did build fortifications and earthworks, the ramparts and ditches associated with the Battle of Saraighat being the well known example, but those are separate structures and are not moidams.
• Options (a), (b) and (d) therefore all rest on transferring functions from other Ahom remains to the burial mounds.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Lake Turkana is the largest permanent desert lake and the largest alkaline lake in the world, fed mainly by the Omo river and having no outlet, so that it loses water only by evaporation.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminator on two separate counts. The lake lies in northern Kenya with its northern tip extending into Ethiopia, not in South Sudan, and it occupies a basin of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, which is thousands of kilometres from the Sahara.
• Statement 3 is correct, since the Lake Turkana National Parks are inscribed on the World Heritage List, partly for the hominin fossil record of Koobi Fora, and the lake is popularly called the Jade Sea from the blue green colour imparted by algae.

Hence 1 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (c) and (d) accept the misplacement of the lake and (a) drops the World Heritage and Jade Sea facts.

• Statement 1 is correct and is the definition of the field, since gene therapy either supplies a working copy of a defective gene, silences a harmful one, or edits the sequence at a specific site so that the underlying genetic cause rather than the symptom is addressed.
• Statement 2 is correct, since delivery is the central engineering problem and the two dominant answers are viral vectors, chiefly adeno associated virus and lentivirus stripped of their capacity to replicate, and lipid nanoparticles, which encapsulate nucleic acid in an ionisable lipid shell and are the technology familiar from messenger RNA vaccines.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The whole point of the technology is that intervention is targeted, at one gene or one locus, and altering an entire genome of three billion base pairs is neither the aim nor within reach, and would be catastrophic if attempted. Hence 1 and 2 and (c) is correct. (a) drops the well established delivery methods, and (b) and (d) accept a claim that contradicts the targeted nature of the therapy.

• Statement 1 is treated as correct. A language model computes a probability distribution over the next token given everything before it, and selecting the highest probability candidate, known as greedy decoding, is the textbook description of how text is then produced.
• Statement 2 is correct and describes training rather than generation, since the parameters are fitted by gradient descent on a loss function that measures how far the predicted distribution sits from the observed next token, so the entire training process is mathematical optimisation to reduce prediction error.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator. A model learns the statistical regularities of its training corpus, and any imbalance, stereotype or skew in that corpus is learned along with everything else, so bias is an expected property rather than an aberration.

Hence 1 and 2 and (b) is correct, while (a) drops the accurate account of training and (c) and (d) accept the claim of unbiased output.

• Statement 1 is correct and states the two pillars of the technology. Shaping deflects incident energy away from the transmitter so that little returns to the receiver, which reduces the radar cross section, and radar absorbing material converts a further part of the incident energy into heat within a lossy ferrite or carbon loaded coating.
• Statement 2 is correct and follows from the physics of the first. Shaping and absorbing coatings are optimised for the centimetric wavelengths of fire control radars, so when the wavelength becomes comparable to major structural features of the airframe, as with metre wave VHF and UHF radars, the scattering regime changes and returns rise sharply, which is why low frequency surveillance radars are the standard counter stealth measure.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, since the objective is always to reduce the energy returned to the receiver, and a coating designed to increase scattering would defeat the entire purpose. Metamaterials are studied in this field precisely for the opposite reason, to guide waves around a body or absorb them over a wide band.

Hence 1 and 2 and (c) is correct, while (b) and (d) accept a statement whose verb points the wrong way.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The underwater locator beacon attached to a flight recorder is acoustic, not optical, emitting an ultrasonic pulse at about thirty seven and a half kilohertz once a second for around thirty days once immersed. The reason is physical rather than incidental, since sea water attenuates visible light within tens of metres while sound at that frequency propagates over kilometres, so a light beacon would be useless at ocean depths.
• Statement 2 is correct, because a modern installation captures cockpit audio through the cockpit voice recorder and hundreds to over a thousand flight parameters through the flight data recorder, and current combined units house both functions.
• Statement 3 is correct, since the crash survivable memory unit is the armoured core of the device, its stack of solid state memory boards wrapped in thermal insulation and sealed inside a shell of stainless steel or titanium to survive impact, a fire of about eleven hundred degrees Celsius for an hour and prolonged deep water pressure.

Hence 2 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (a), (c) and (d) all admit the light beacon claim.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because hydrogen produced by steam methane reforming with the resulting carbon dioxide captured and stored is blue hydrogen. The feedstock remains a fossil fuel and the emission reduction depends on the capture rate, so it is not green by definition. Green hydrogen is defined by the origin of the energy, not by the treatment of the exhaust.
• Statement 2 is correct and is that definition, namely electrolysis of water driven by renewable electricity, which yields hydrogen and oxygen with no carbon in the process chain at all.
• Statement 3 is correct, since the National Green Hydrogen Mission approved in January 2023 carries the stated targets of about five million tonnes of annual production capacity by 2030 together with abatement of nearly fifty million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

Hence 2 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (a) and (d) accept the blue hydrogen description and (c) drops the mission target.

• Statement 1 is correct, since IN-SPACe was created in 2020 as a single window autonomous body under the Department of Space to authorise, promote and hand hold private activity in launch, satellites and ground segment, distinct from ISRO as operator and from NewSpace India Limited as the commercial arm.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the Agnibaan sub orbital technology demonstrator flown from Sriharikota in 2024 used the Agnilet engine, a single piece additively manufactured semi cryogenic engine, and that flight is credited as the first by a rocket powered by a single piece three dimensionally printed engine.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, because Skyroot is an independent launch vehicle developer whose Vikram series it builds and flies itself, the Vikram S sub orbital flight of 2022 being India's first privately built rocket, and it neither develops nor supplies propellant for the GSLV, which is an ISRO vehicle using its own indigenous cryogenic stage.

Hence 1 and 2 and (c) is correct, while (b) and (d) accept the false Skyroot claim and (a) drops the Agnikul achievement.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator. Command and control links for drones operate in conventional radio bands, typically the very and ultra high frequency ranges and the industrial bands around two point four and five point eight gigahertz, with satellite links for long endurance platforms. Terahertz radiation is strongly absorbed by atmospheric water vapour and is limited to very short line of sight distances, which makes it unsuitable for a link to a command centre.
• Statement 2 is correct and is the defining feature of a swarm as opposed to a formation of individually piloted drones, since the drones share position and target information over a mesh network and reallocate tasks among themselves, so that the loss of one does not break the group.
• Statement 3 is correct, since spoofing, that is transmitting counterfeit satellite navigation signals stronger than the genuine ones so that the receiver computes a false position, is a standard soft kill counter unmanned aerial system technique alongside jamming, and it is attractive because it can redirect or land a drone without kinetic engagement.

Hence 2 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (a), (c) and (d) admit the terahertz claim.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator on chronology alone. The Human Genome Project was an international effort that ran from 1990 and was declared complete in 2003, producing a single composite reference sequence, whereas GenomeIndia was launched in 2020 as an independent Indian initiative, so a project begun seventeen years after another ended cannot be a part of it.
• Statement 2 is correct, since GenomeIndia is funded and coordinated by the Department of Biotechnology and executed through a consortium of about twenty Indian institutions led by the Indian Institute of Science.
• Statement 3 is correct, and it is also the reason the project exists. A single reference genome cannot represent a population of the size and endogamous structure of India's, so the aim is a catalogue of variation across diverse population groups, ten thousand whole genomes having been sequenced in the first phase, to support disease association studies and precision medicine for Indian populations.

Hence 2 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (a), (c) and (d) admit the false link to the Human Genome Project.

Both statements are correct, so (c) is the answer.

• Statement 1 reproduces the mission's own headline target, namely intermediate scale quantum computers in the range of fifty to one thousand physical qubits over eight years across several platforms including superconducting and photonic technologies. The wording physical qubits matters, since these are the raw hardware qubits before error correction rather than the far smaller number of logical qubits they would yield.
• Statement 2 is also correct, since the mission is organised around four thematic hubs distributed among academic and national research institutions, covering quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology, and quantum materials and devices, each acting as a consortium lead rather than a single laboratory. With both statements sound, (a) and (b) each discard a correct one and (d) discards both.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The Deep Ocean Mission is a Ministry of Earth Sciences programme, implemented chiefly through the National Institute of Ocean Technology at Chennai, and the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways deals with ports, shipping and inland waterways rather than ocean science.
• Statement 2 is correct, since Matsya 6000 is a crewed submersible designed to carry three persons in a titanium alloy personnel sphere of about two point one metres internal diameter to a depth of six thousand metres, with an endurance of roughly twelve hours and seventy two hours of emergency reserve.
• Statement 3 is correct, since Samudrayaan is precisely the crewed submersible component of the Deep Ocean Mission and Matsya 6000 is the vehicle built for it, the mission's other components covering deep sea mineral exploration, ocean climate advisory services, marine biodiversity and an offshore energy and desalination demonstration.

Hence 2 and 3 and (b) is correct, while (a), (c) and (d) admit the wrong ministry.

• Statements 1, 3 and 4 all contribute, so (a) is correct.
• Statement 1 reflects the settled principle that a party which feels its identity is disregarded will not engage with technical argument, so recognition must precede negotiation.
• Statement 3 is the institutional expression of the same principle, since a standing platform that brings tribal leaders, technical experts and the municipality into the same room converts a street confrontation into a negotiation and lowers the temperature.
• Statement 4 supplies the neutral evidence base, and the word independent matters, because an assessment shared transparently with both sides removes the suspicion of a predetermined outcome that drives escalation.
• Statement 2 is the eliminator and is disqualified twice over. It presumes the conclusion of the very process the official has been asked to mediate, and it dismisses a constitutionally protected community as a small group whose sentiments may be outweighed, which is the attitude that produced the flashpoint. (b) drops the acknowledgement step, (c) admits the dismissive option, and (d) admits it while claiming everything contributes.

Each of the three statements asserts that a particular Article does not exist, and in every case such an Article does exist, so none of the statements is correct and (b) follows.

• Statement 1 fails against Article 393, the short title, which provides that the Constitution may be called the Constitution of India.
• Statement 2 fails against Article 395, the repeals, which repeals the Indian Independence Act 1947 and the Government of India Act 1935 together with all enactments amending or supplementing them.
• Statement 3 fails against Article 394, commencement, under which the articles dealing with citizenship, elections, provisional Parliament and a few others came into force on 26 November 1949 while the remaining provisions came into force on 26 January 1950, so that date appears in the text. The three Articles are consecutive and sit at the very end of Part XXII, which is what makes the question fair. (a) treats all three denials as sound, (c) and (d) treat some of them as sound, and each fails against the same three Articles.

Only statement 2 is correct, so (b) is the answer. The Accessible India Campaign or Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2015, is built on exactly three verticals, the built environment, the transport system and the information and communication technology ecosystem, with measurable audit and retrofitting targets under each.

• Statement 1 fails on the year alone, since the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act was passed in 2016 and brought into force in April 2017, replacing the 1995 Act and raising the recognised conditions from seven to twenty one, with four per cent reservation in government employment and five per cent in higher education. Everything else in that statement is accurate, which is what makes the date the sole discriminator and the trap.
• Statement 3 fails on the ministry, since the National Divyangjan Finance and Development Corporation works under the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, not the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the latter being named only because the body is registered as a not for profit company. (a), (c) and (d) each admit at least one of these two errors.

• Statement 1 is incorrect, since the administration of the Tribal Areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram falls under the Sixth Schedule with its autonomous district and regional councils, while the Fifth Schedule governs the Scheduled Areas of the other States through Tribes Advisory Councils and the Governor's regulation making power.
• Statement 2 is correct, since Section 10(26) of the Income Tax Act exempts members of Scheduled Tribes residing in specified areas of the North East and in Ladakh from tax on income arising there or from dividends and securities interest.
• Statement 3 is correct, since Article 243D reserves seats in every Panchayat for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population, and requires that not less than one third of those reserved seats be further reserved for women of those communities. So exactly two statements are correct and they are 2 and 3, which is what (a) describes. (b) names the wrong pair by including the Fifth Schedule error, (c) undercounts and (d) overcounts.

• Statements 1 and 2 have been swapped, which is the entire construction of the question. A starred question is one for which the member desires an oral answer, is distinguished by an asterisk, and permits supplementary questions once the Minister has replied. An unstarred question is one for which a written answer is desired, and the answer is deemed laid on the table of the House. So statement 1 is wrong and statement 2 is wrong.
• Statement 3 is correct and follows directly, since an unstarred question is never actually called and answered orally, so there is no reply on the floor on which a supplementary could be founded. Exactly one statement is therefore correct and (c) is right. (a) accepts the inversion, (b) treats the wrong statement as one of two correct ones, and (d) overlooks the sound statement on supplementaries. A candidate who spots the swap can answer without recalling anything about supplementaries at all, since only statement 3 remains available.

Every statement fails, so (d) is correct.

• Statement 1 is wrong because the Chairperson of this Committee is appointed by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Committee being serviced by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha appoints chairpersons only of committees within that House's charge.
• Statement 2 is wrong because the numbers are reversed, the Committee having thirty members of whom twenty are elected by the Lok Sabha and ten by the Rajya Sabha, which is the standard ratio for a joint committee of this kind.
• Statement 3 is wrong because the disqualification of Ministers is absolute, with no exception for the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, and the reason is structural, since a committee that scrutinises executive action on behalf of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes cannot include the very Minister whose department it examines.
• Statement 4 is wrong because the term is one year, not two. (a), (b) and (c) each accept at least one of these four errors.

The official key treats all three statements as correct, giving (a).

• Statement 1 is sound, since the mission as announced is an integrated shield combining air defence, ballistic missile defence and an offensive counter strike element rather than a purely defensive layer, which is what distinguishes it from an air defence programme alone.
• Statement 2 is sound and is essentially the stated rationale, that indigenous capability across detection, interception and response reduces dependence on external suppliers and therefore reinforces strategic autonomy.
• Statement 3 reflects the announced horizon of 2035 and the intention to extend protection beyond purely military assets to civilian and religious sites and centres of population. There is no option offering 1 and 2 while excluding 3 in a way that would be preferable, since (b) would require statement 3 to be false in substance and not merely loose in wording.

Only statement 3 is correct, so (d) is the answer. The Mechi bridge over the Mechi river links the Panitanki bypass on the Indian side in West Bengal with Kakarvitta in Nepal, and it lies on the Asian Highway corridor.

• Statement 1 reverses the two ends. Maitri Setu does span the Feni river, but Sabroom is the Indian town in South Tripura and Ramgarh is on the Bangladesh side in Chittagong division, so the statement has placed each town in the wrong country.
• Statement 2 misidentifies the neighbour, since the Jhulaghat suspension bridge crosses the Kali or Mahakali river and connects Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand with the Baitadi district of Nepal, and India shares no bridge of that name with Myanmar. (a) and (c) accept the reversed Maitri Setu description and (a) and (b) accept the Myanmar error.

Only statement 2 is correct, so (d) is the answer. Section 173 of the BNSS permits the officer in charge, for offences punishable with three years or more but less than seven years, to conduct a preliminary enquiry within fourteen days with the prior permission of an officer not below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police, in order to establish whether a prima facie case exists.

• Statement 1 is incorrect because of the phrase cognizable slash non-cognizable. The statutory provision extends to information relating to a cognizable offence irrespective of the area where it was committed, and the non-cognizable category follows a different route requiring a magistrate's order, so extending the Zero FIR to it misstates the law.
• Statement 3 is incorrect because electronic furnishing of information is an option offered by the statute and not an obligation, and where it is used the informant must sign the record within three days. (a) and (c) accept the jurisdictional overreach and (a) and (b) accept the electronic compulsion.

This question was dropped in the official key, and the reason is apparent on analysis, since no option matches the correct set. Taking the conventions in turn, item 1, the Employment Policy Convention of 1964, has been ratified by India.

• Item 2, the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention of 1957, was ratified by India in 2000, and India has now ratified all eight of the fundamental conventions of the International Labour Organization.
• Item 3, the Migrant Workers Convention of 1990, has not been ratified by India, and indeed has been ratified by almost no major destination country.
• Item 4, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the protection of civilians in time of war, was ratified by India in 1950.
• Item 5, the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness of 1961, has not been ratified by India, which is not a party to the statelessness or refugee instruments. The correct set is therefore items 3 and 5, and that combination is not offered. (a), (b), (c) and (d) each include at least one convention that India has in fact ratified.

Only statement 3 is correct, so (d) is the answer. The New Delhi Declaration was organised around seven chakras or pillars, among them access for social empowerment, artificial intelligence for science, and secure and trusted artificial intelligence.

• Statement 1 substitutes one word in a three word formula, since the three sutras were People, Planet and Progress, and Planning replaces Planet.
• Statement 2 fails on the word binding, since summit declarations and accompanying charters of this kind are political commitments rather than legally binding instruments, and describing any such charter as binding contradicts the qualifier in the same sentence about respecting national laws, which is the language of voluntary alignment. A candidate can therefore eliminate statement 2 on internal logic alone without recalling the document, and statement 1 on the familiarity of the Planet formulation, leaving statement 3 standing.

• Item 1 is correct, since the Su-30 MKI is built under licence by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited at Nashik from Russian design with progressively increasing indigenous content, and further batches have been ordered from the same line.
• Item 2 is correct, since the T-90 series is produced under licence at the Heavy Vehicles Factory at Avadi, and the T-90 Mk-III variant with an improved engine, thermal imaging and an automatic target tracker was sanctioned for manufacture there.
• Item 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator, since Akula class nuclear powered attack submarines are Russian built and have been operated by India only on lease, the INS Chakra arrangements being the examples, whereas India's own nuclear submarine construction is the indigenous Arihant class of ballistic missile submarines at Visakhapatnam. Hence 1 and 2 and (a) is correct. (b) admits the Akula, (c) drops the Avadi tank line, and (d) drops the Nashik aircraft line.

• Statements 2 and 3 are correct and statement 1 is the eliminator, so (c) is the answer. The Colombo Process, established in 2003, is a regional consultative process of Asian countries of origin for overseas employment, and like every regional consultative process on migration it is explicitly non-binding, producing recommendations rather than obligations. The word binding is therefore the single defect in statement 1.
• Statement 2 is accurate, since the Abu Dhabi Dialogue of 2008 widened the Colombo Process by bringing in the Gulf countries of destination alongside the Asian countries of origin, and it is voluntary and consultative on contractual labour mobility.
• Statement 3 is accurate, since the Global Forum on Migration and Development was set up in 2007 following a proposal by Kofi Annan after the first High Level Dialogue on migration, and it is state led, informal, voluntary and outside the United Nations system, with non-binding outcomes. (a) and (b) accept the binding characterisation, and (d) rejects the well documented account of the Global Forum.

Only statement 2 is correct, so (b) is the answer. The Revamped Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan is a capacity building scheme whose stated purpose is to strengthen Panchayati Raj Institutions so that they can deliver on the localised Sustainable Development Goals, the nine themes of localisation being the operational form this takes.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on the start date, since the revamped scheme was approved in April 2022 and runs from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2026, coterminous with the Fifteenth Finance Commission cycle, so shifting the start to 2021 is wrong even though the closing date is right.
• Statement 3 is incorrect, since the scheme follows the standard centrally sponsored funding pattern of sixty to forty between the Centre and the States, with ninety to ten for the North Eastern and Himalayan States, and full central funding only for Union Territories, so a uniform hundred per cent share for all States and Union Territories is wrong. (a) and (c) accept the wrong start date and (c) and (d) accept the uniform funding claim.

• Statements 1 and 3 are correct and statement 2 is the eliminator, giving (b).
• Statement 1 is consistent with mandate, since the Botanical Survey of India is the national body for floristic survey and inventory and is the natural lead for a vertical on ecosystem survey and analysis, alongside the Zoological Survey of India on the faunal side.
• Statement 3 is likewise consistent, since the Indian Institute of Forest Management at Bhopal exists to train and build capacity in forest and environment management and is the obvious lead for a capacity development vertical.
• Statement 2 fails on mandate, because the Central Zoo Authority is a statutory body under the Wild Life Protection Act whose function is the recognition, regulation and standard setting for zoos, which has nothing to do with research on ecosystem services. That vertical belongs with a forestry research or ecological research body rather than a zoo regulator. (a) and (c) accept the Central Zoo Authority attribution, and (d) discards the well founded Botanical Survey placement.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and statement 3 is the eliminator, so (c) is the answer.
• Statement 2 is the substantive point and can be reasoned rather than recalled, since the purpose of a national standard is precisely to fix common test methods and performance thresholds so that equipment bought by different agencies, the police, the paramilitary forces and the armed forces, meets a comparable specification and can be used and serviced across them.
• Statement 1 records the designation of that standard.
• Statement 3 fails on the attribution, since a national standard issued by the Bureau of Indian Standards is developed through its own sectional committees drawing on domestic technical expertise, in this case the Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation at Chandigarh, and the addition of a named foreign research institute is the inserted error. A standard intended to secure indigenous procurement autonomy would not be co-developed with a foreign defence research body. (a) and (b) accept that attribution and (d) discards the interoperability rationale.

The provisional official key gives (a), 1 and 2 only. On analysis the correct answer is (c), 1 only, because statement 2 and statement 3 both fail.

• Statement 1 is correct. The four majors are jointly governed through the Grand Slam Board, which administers the Grand Slam Rule Book, the Grand Slam Development Fund and common disciplinary and anti-corruption arrangements, so a shared governance structure does establish the partnership among them.
• Statement 2 is incorrect, and this is where the official key errs. A Grand Slam is not open for entry to all internationally ranked players. The singles field is fixed, and a place in it is obtained only by direct acceptance within the ranking cut-off for the entry list, by coming through the qualifying event, or by a wild card. A ranked player outside those routes has no entitlement to enter. The age limb of the statement is wrong as well, since the International Tennis Federation age eligibility rule does not set a simple threshold above which a player is free to compete. It imposes a graduated restriction on the number of professional events a player under eighteen may enter, tightening as age falls, so a player just above fourteen is among the most restricted rather than among the eligible.
• Statement 3 is also incorrect, and the defect is a shift in the subject of the limitation. The Grand Slam Rule Book limits the number of wild cards a tournament may award, eight in the singles main draw, and a further allocation in qualifying. It does not limit the number of wild cards an individual player may receive, and nothing prevents one player from accepting a wild card at all four majors in the same season. The limit attaches to the tournament's allocation, not to the player's receipt, so the statement as phrased has no basis. Only statement 1 survives, which gives (c).
• Option (a) fails because it accepts statement 2, option (b) fails because it discards the sound governance statement while accepting both defective ones, and option (d) accepts all three.

• Statement 1 is correct and statement 2 is the eliminator, so (a) is the answer. The Bharat Forecast System is a high resolution numerical weather prediction model working on a grid of about six kilometres against the roughly twelve kilometre grid of the system it replaces, and that refinement is precisely what allows forecasts to be issued for panchayat clusters rather than for districts, which is the operational point for agriculture and for local disaster response.
• Statement 2 misattributes the development. The model was built by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune, an institution of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, and it runs on the Arka high performance computing system, with the India Meteorological Department operationalising the forecasts. The Indian Institutes of Technology contribute to atmospheric research but are not the developers of this model. (b) and (c) accept the misattribution and (d) discards the accurate statement of purpose.

• Statements 1, 2 and 4 are correct, giving (c).
• Statement 1 describes transparency with integrity, since permissioned visibility to stakeholders is combined with tamper evidence because each block carries the hash of its predecessor.
• Statement 2 describes the distributed ledger itself, in which every participating node holds a full copy and the copies are reconciled continuously by the consensus mechanism.
• Statement 4 describes immutability, which follows from statement 2, because altering a past record would require recomputing every subsequent hash and imposing that revised chain on a majority of independent nodes.
• Statement 3 is the eliminator, and the error is a swapped definition. A consortium or federated blockchain is a permissioned chain governed jointly by a group of organisations rather than by one, and it is a variety of private blockchain. The description offered, a blend of public and private allowing selective data access, is the definition of a hybrid blockchain. (a), (b) and (d) each either admit that swapped definition or discard one of the three sound features.

All three statements are correct, so (a) is the answer.

• Statement 1 is the definition, namely the representation of a claim on a physical or financial asset such as real estate, bullion, a bond or an invoice as a cryptographic token on a distributed ledger, so that ownership and transfer are recorded on that ledger.
• Statement 2 follows from the settlement properties of such a ledger, which operates continuously rather than on exchange hours and settlement cycles, so that access is not confined to market timings, and small ticket participation becomes viable because the cost of recording a transfer does not scale with its size.
• Statement 3 follows from fractionalisation, since a token can represent a small share of an asset whose whole unit would be far beyond the reach of a retail investor, commercial real estate being the standard illustration, which opens asset classes previously confined to institutions.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each discard one of these three, but the three are in fact a single chain, from the technical definition to continuous access to fractional participation.

Only statement 2 is correct, so (b) is the answer. M1xchange is one of the platforms licensed by the Reserve Bank under the Trade Receivables Discounting System, and its function is to let a micro, small or medium supplier auction an accepted invoice or bill of exchange drawn on a large buyer, with financiers bidding to purchase the receivable, so that the supplier is paid at once rather than after the credit period.

• Statement 1 is wrong, and it is wrong precisely because it inverts the purpose of such a platform. The whole design addresses the inability of small suppliers to offer collateral, by shifting the credit assessment onto the buyer whose obligation is being discounted, so the financing is without recourse to the seller and without collateral.
• Statement 3 is wrong because a receivables exchange is a transaction platform and not a rating agency, and credit rating is a separately registered activity under the securities regulator. (a) and (d) accept the collateral claim and (a) and (c) accept the rating claim.

• Statements 1 and 3 are correct, giving (a).
• Statement 1 is sound, since neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium go into the high strength permanent magnets that drive robotic actuators, hard disk assemblies, satellite reaction wheels and electric traction motors, while other lanthanides serve in phosphors, lasers and catalysts.
• Statement 3 is sound, since the National Critical Mineral Mission was approved in January 2025 covering exploration, domestic and overseas acquisition, recycling and stockpiling.
• Statement 2 is wrong on the second name, because although China dominates mining with a large majority of world output, the countries following it are the United States, Myanmar and Australia, while India holds substantial monazite reserves but a very small share of actual mined production, and confusing reserves with output is the trap.
• Statement 4 is wrong on the count, because rare earth elements number seventeen, the fifteen lanthanides together with scandium and yttrium, which are grouped with them because they share ionic radius and chemical behaviour and occur in the same ores. (b) discards the applications statement, and (c) and (d) accept the count of thirteen.

Both statements are correct, so (c) is the answer.

• Statement 1 uses hull in its marine derived sense, the physical asset itself, so aviation hull insurance indemnifies loss of or damage to the airframe, engines and installed equipment, and it is written separately from liability cover for passengers and third parties and from hull war cover.
• Statement 2 states the first tier of the Montreal Convention regime accurately. For death or bodily injury the carrier is strictly liable up to a limit expressed in Special Drawing Rights and revised periodically, and within that tier the claimant need prove only that the death occurred in an accident on board or in embarking or disembarking, not that the carrier was at fault. Above that limit the carrier may escape liability by proving that it was not negligent, but that qualification governs the second tier and does not disturb the statement as made. (a) and (b) each discard a sound statement and (d) discards both.

Both statements are correct, so (c) is the answer.

• Statement 1 reproduces the standard regulatory description, in which the defining features are a large number of contributors, small individual amounts, an online platform as the channel and a specified project or venture as the object.
• Statement 2 states the attraction for smaller enterprises accurately, since the alternative routes, a public issue or bank credit, carry disclosure, listing, underwriting or collateral requirements that a small enterprise finds costly or cannot meet, whereas raising directly from many small contributors avoids much of that apparatus and lowers the effective cost of capital. That the statement is true is also the reason crowdfunding attracts regulatory concern, since the absence of rigorous procedure means the absence of the investor protection those procedures exist to provide. (a) and (b) each discard a sound statement and (d) discards both.

• Statements 1 and 4 are correct, giving (a).
• Statement 1 is correct and is one of the three standard distinctions between a non-banking financial company and a bank, since such a company may accept term deposits if authorised but cannot accept deposits repayable on demand.
• Statement 4 is correct and is the third of those distinctions, since deposit insurance covers bank deposits and does not extend to deposits with these companies, which is precisely why the restriction in statement 1 exists.
• Statement 2 is incorrect, because although registration with the Reserve Bank is the general rule, several categories are exempted on the basis that they are regulated by another authority, among them insurance companies under the insurance regulator, merchant banking, venture capital and stock broking entities under the securities regulator, nidhi companies under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and chit fund companies under State legislation.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the second of the three standard distinctions, since these companies are not part of the payment and settlement system and cannot issue cheques drawn on themselves. (b) and (d) accept the cheque issuing claim and (b) and (d) accept the universal registration claim, while (c) discards the accurate statement on demand deposits.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and statement 3 is the eliminator, giving (a).
• Statement 1 is correct, since the Alkire and Foster counting method underlies both the global and the national index, identifying a household as multidimensionally poor when its weighted deprivation score crosses a cut-off, and then reporting the headcount ratio and the intensity of deprivation together as the adjusted headcount.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the National Multidimensional Poverty Index uses three dimensions, health, education and standard of living, disaggregated into twelve indicators.
• Statement 3 is incorrect, and it inverts the significant fact. The global index of the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative uses ten indicators, and maternal health and bank account are precisely the two indicators added in the Indian index to reflect national priorities, so they are the points of difference rather than common ground. (b) and (c) accept that inversion and (d) discards the methodology statement.