National Affairs and Government Schemes

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. The Drought-Prone Area Programme, launched in 1973, was administered by the Department of Land Resources in the Ministry of Rural Development, not the Ministry of Agriculture.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. The Desert Development Programme, launched in 1977 for hot and cold desert areas, was likewise a Department of Land Resources programme under the Ministry of Rural Development, not under the Ministry of Environment and Forests; the desert framing misleads candidates towards the environment ministry.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched, and it is the inversion of pair 1. The National Watershed Development Project for Rainfed Areas, launched in 1990-91, was run by the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation in the Ministry of Agriculture, not by the Ministry of Rural Development. All three are wrong, so the official answer is (d). The design of the item is a deliberate crossing: the two rural development programmes have been given to other ministries and the agriculture ministry programme has been given to rural development. A candidate who securely knows that the three watershed programmes of the Department of Land Resources were DPAP, DDP and the Integrated Wastelands Development Programme can reject pairs 1 and 2 at once, which removes (a) and (c), and is then left to decide pair 3 between (b) and (d).

• Option (c) is correct. PMJDY was launched on 28 August 2014 as the National Mission for Financial Inclusion, its stated object being universal access to banking through a basic savings bank deposit account with a RuPay debit card, accident and life cover, and an overdraft facility after satisfactory operation.
• Option (a) is wrong because subsidised housing credit is the province of the housing schemes, later consolidated as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and PMJDY carries no housing component.
• Option (b) is wrong because Self-Help Group promotion runs through the rural livelihoods architecture, SGSY and its successor NRLM, not through a banking access mission.
• Option (d) is the closest distractor and fails on a single word: PMJDY is universal in design, opening accounts for every unbanked household irrespective of category, whereas (d) narrows it to marginalized communities. The governing distinction is between a targeted transfer scheme and a universal access mission. Elimination route: the mission statement and the scheme name itself, jan dhan, both point at bringing people into the formal financial system.

• Statement 1 is incorrect in its beneficiary rather than in its date. The Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme was indeed launched in 1996-97, but the assistance went to State governments, as central loan assistance and later as grant, in order to complete large major and medium irrigation projects that had been left unfinished for want of State resources; it was never a credit line to poor farmers.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Command Area Development Programme was launched in 1974-75 to bridge the persistent gap between irrigation potential created and potential actually utilised, by taking the water the last distance from the outlet to the field through field channels, land levelling, warabandi rotational supply and on farm development, all of which are water use efficiency measures; it was restructured as the Command Area Development and Water Management Programme in 2004. The official answer (b) follows. There is no elimination route: a candidate must judge both statements independently, and statement 1 is dangerous because the date is right and only the beneficiary is wrong, which is the hardest kind of half true statement to catch under time pressure.

UDAY, the Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana, was launched by the Ministry of Power in November 2015 to address the accumulated losses and unsustainable debt of State-owned power distribution companies. Its mechanism was that participating States took over seventy five per cent of discom debt over two years by issuing State bonds, with the balance restructured, coupled with operational commitments on aggregate technical and commercial losses, tariff revision and metering. The object throughout is the financial health of the distribution segment, so (d) is correct.

• Option (a) describes start-up support in renewable energy, which belongs to no part of UDAY.
• Option (b) describes household electrification, which was the object of the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana and later Saubhagya, and is the strongest distractor because it is also a power sector target of the same period; it fails because UDAY addresses the balance sheet of the distributor, not connection of the consumer.
• Option (c) describes fuel substitution in generation, which is generation-side policy and outside a distribution reform scheme altogether. The governing distinction is between generation, transmission and distribution: UDAY operates only on the last of the three.

• Statement 1 is correct and states the whole object of the scheme. Stand Up India requires every scheduled commercial bank branch to facilitate at least one loan between ten lakh and one crore rupees to at least one Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe borrower and at least one woman borrower for setting up a greenfield enterprise in manufacturing, services or trading. The targeting is the design; it is not a general credit scheme with a reservation attached.
• Statement 2 is also correct. The scheme's architecture provided for a refinance window at the Small Industries Development Bank of India with an initial corpus of ten thousand crore rupees, alongside a credit guarantee mechanism, SIDBI being the designated refinancing institution for small enterprise credit. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each require rejecting one or both. There is no elimination route, since the two statements are independent, but statement 1 follows from the name and public framing of the scheme, so the item effectively turns on whether the candidate recalls SIDBI rather than NABARD or MUDRA as the refinancing agency.

Mission Indradhanush was launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in December 2014 to raise full immunisation coverage among children up to two years of age and among pregnant women, targeting districts with the largest numbers of partially immunised and unimmunised children. The name refers to the seven colours of the rainbow, standing for the vaccine-preventable diseases originally covered, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, tuberculosis, measles and hepatitis B, with further antigens added subsequently. Hence (a).

• Option (b) describes the Smart Cities Mission of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, launched in the same period, which is the strongest distractor purely because both are missions of the same government.
• Option (c) is an invention; there is no Indian exoplanet search programme of that name, and India's astronomy satellite of the period was AstroSat, which appears elsewhere in this paper.
• Option (d) refers to education policy, which was under review at the time but bears no such name. The item is easy because the name had been in continuous circulation for eighteen months before the paper.

SWAYAM, Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds, is the Government of India's massive open online course platform, hosting courses from the ninth standard through to post-graduation, prepared by faculty across the country and delivered free of cost, with a nominal fee only for proctored examination and certification. It is complemented by the SWAYAM Prabha direct-to-home educational television channels. The aim as stated in option (d), affordable and quality education to citizens for free, is therefore correct.

• Option (a) describes the self help group and rural livelihoods architecture, which runs through the National Rural Livelihoods Mission.
• Option (b) describes start-up support under Startup India and the Fund of Funds.
• Option (c) describes the adolescent girls programmes, SABLA and later schemes under the umbrella of women and child development. The name itself supplies a partial route for a candidate who recalls the expansion, since the words 'active learning' and 'young aspiring minds' point unmistakably to education, and the acronym is the government's own, which is why the item sits at moderate rather than difficult.

The Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana, launched in April 2015, provides collateral-free institutional credit up to ten lakh rupees to non-farm micro and small enterprises through banks, non-banking finance companies and microfinance institutions, refinanced by the Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency. Its loans are categorised as Shishu, Kishore and Tarun by size. The premise of the scheme is that the very large informal micro-enterprise sector was financed by moneylenders at punitive rates because it lacked collateral and documentation, so the object is to draw those borrowers into formal finance. Hence (a).

• Option (b) describes crop loans, delivered through the Kisan Credit Card and the interest subvention scheme, and is expressly excluded from MUDRA, which is non-farm; this is the strongest distractor.
• Option (c) describes old age pension, provided under the National Social Assistance Programme and the Atal Pension Yojana.
• Option (d) describes skill development funding, which runs through the National Skill Development Corporation. The discriminator is that MUDRA finances enterprises rather than persons or activities.

• Statement 1 is correct. DigiLocker is a cloud-based document repository provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology as one of the flagship components of the Digital India programme, linked to the user's Aadhaar number, in which issuing authorities may place documents directly and requesting agencies may verify them.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the defining benefit of the service: because the documents sit in the cloud rather than in a physical file, they can be accessed from anywhere with a network connection, which is what makes the system useful at all. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one true proposition, and (d) rejects both. There is no trap here and no qualifier doing hidden work, so the item is easy for any candidate who has encountered the service; the wider principle is simply that documents issued into a digital repository under section 9A of the Information Technology Act and the associated rules carry the same legal standing as the original physical documents.

Recognition of Prior Learning is the assessment and certification of competencies a worker already possesses from informal, non-formal or on the job experience, so that an unskilled or informally skilled worker obtains a recognised National Skills Qualification Framework certificate without passing through a formal training course. It was operationalised at scale as a component of the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, with the construction sector, which is overwhelmingly informally trained, as the flagship application.

• Option (a) is therefore correct.
• Option (d) is the designed trap and is the reason this item is not easy: it also speaks of certifying skills, but it certifies the skills of trainees, that is, of people who have passed through formal training under a skill development programme. That is ordinary training certification, and it is the exact opposite of recognition of prior learning, whose entire premise is that no formal training has been undergone.
• Option (b) confuses the scheme with distance education admission, and option (c) with job reservation, neither of which has any connection with skills assessment. Governing principle: prior learning means learning acquired before and outside the formal system, so any option describing certification of formally trained candidates must be rejected.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Smart India Hackathon has no connection with the Smart Cities Mission beyond the shared word 'smart', which is the entire basis of the distractor. It is not a centrally sponsored scheme and it does not develop cities.
• Statement 2 is correct. Smart India Hackathon is a nationwide product development competition in which student teams work on problem statements posted by central ministries, departments and, in later editions, industry, with the object of surfacing digital technology solutions to identified governance problems.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Complete digitisation of financial transactions is the ambition associated with the Digital India programme and with the post demonetisation cashless economy push, not with a hackathon. Both statements 1 and 3 fail on the same defect, that each attaches a large national mission to what is a competition, and both are additionally implausible in claiming to cover 'every city' and 'all financial transactions' within a decade. Rejecting either eliminates three options, leaving (b). Governing principle: absolute quantifiers such as every, all and completely in a scheme description are almost always the mark of a manufactured statement.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and reproduce the Mission's own framing. Its stated objects are the reduction of stunting, undernutrition, low birth weight and anaemia, pursued through convergence, behaviour change communication and the use of technology, with pregnant women, lactating mothers, adolescent girls and children under six as the target groups. Awareness generation on malnutrition and reduction of anaemia therefore both appear as objectives on the face of the Mission documents.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Promotion of millets, coarse cereals and unpolished rice is a food and agriculture policy line pursued through the public distribution system, the Nutri Cereals initiative and later the millet mission; it is not among the Mission's stated objectives, which are framed as outcome targets on stunting, anaemia and birth weight rather than as dietary composition directives.
• Statement 4 is incorrect. Promotion of poultry egg consumption is not a Mission objective, egg provision being a matter for individual State supplementary nutrition and midday meal decisions. Rejecting statement 4 eliminates (c) and (d) at once, which is the elimination route a candidate should find, leaving (a) against (b) to be settled on statement 3 alone. The official answer (a) follows.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The National Career Service is an initiative of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, not of the Department of Personnel and Training. The distinction is not a technicality: the Department of Personnel and Training is the nodal department for recruitment to and administration of the central civil services, whereas the National Career Service is a labour market intermediation platform, transforming the National Employment Service and its employment exchanges into a digital portal matching jobseekers with employers and offering career counselling, vocational guidance and information on training.
• Statement 2 is incorrect on the target group. The service is launched in mission mode, which is the true half of the statement, but it is directed at jobseekers generally, including educated and skilled candidates, and indeed its registration base is dominated by them; it is not confined to uneducated youth. A platform whose function is matching and counselling across the whole labour market cannot be described by reference to one educational category. Both statements failing, the official answer (d) follows. Governing principle: this item is built on the standard pair of devices, a wrong parent ministry and a wrongly narrowed beneficiary group, and both are tested independently with no elimination route between them.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Expanding the area under irrigation is the object of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana and of the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme. A soil health card reports the nutrient status of a soil sample and recommends a fertiliser dose; it neither creates irrigation capacity nor bears on the extent of the cultivable area.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Assessment of the quantum of agricultural credit rests on the scale of finance fixed by the district level technical committee for each crop, on landholding and on the Kisan Credit Card framework, and the soil health card has no role in credit appraisal. The statement is plausible only because a document certifying land quality sounds as if it should be bankable.
• Statement 3 is correct and is the scheme's central purpose. The card reports twelve parameters, the primary nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the secondary nutrient sulphur, the micronutrients zinc, iron, copper, manganese and boron, and the physical parameters pH, electrical conductivity and organic carbon, and issues a crop wise recommended dose. The intended effect is to correct the entrenched imbalance of Indian fertiliser use, in which subsidised urea has produced excessive nitrogen application at the expense of phosphorus, potassium and micronutrients, so that application is matched to measured deficiency rather than to habit or subsidy. Rejecting statement 1 eliminates (a) and (d), leaving (b) against (c), settled by statement 2.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Permitting foreign educational institutions to establish campuses in India is a question of higher education regulation, pursued through successive foreign educational institutions bills and later through the National Education Policy framework. It has no connection with a school volunteer programme.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the purpose accurately: Vidyanjali is a school volunteer programme under which individuals, alumni, retired professionals, corporate employees and non governmental organisations offer their time and skills to government schools in co scholastic activities, reading, arts, sports, language and career counselling, thereby drawing private and community capacity into the government school system.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the discriminating statement, since it is the only one a well prepared candidate is likely to accept wrongly. Vidyanjali as originally conceived sought the contribution of service and time, not money; the programme was expressly not a channel for monetary donations towards infrastructure. Rejecting statement 1 eliminates (c), and rejecting statement 3 then eliminates (b) and (d), leaving (a). Governing principle: read the currency of the contribution a scheme solicits, since a volunteering programme and a donation programme are different instruments even where both invite private participation in public schooling.

• Option (b) is correct. Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, launched by the Ministry of Human Resource Development with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi as national coordinating institute, requires participating higher educational institutions to adopt clusters of villages and to work with them on development challenges through the application of appropriate technology. The characteristic activities are village surveys and needs assessment, followed by interventions in water and sanitation, renewable energy, agricultural implements, artisanal and rural livelihoods and local infrastructure, with the institution supplying technical capacity and the community supplying the problem definition. The organising idea is that the technical expertise concentrated in higher education should be brought to bear on rural development, and that students should be exposed to rural realities in the process.
• Option (a) is wrong because universal literacy is the object of the literacy mission and of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and the Abhiyan is not a literacy programme.
• Option (c) is wrong because strengthening scientific research institutions is the object of departmental research funding, and the Abhiyan concerns the application of existing technology in villages rather than the advancement of research.
• Option (d) is wrong because allocating special funds for health, education and skilling of the poor describes the welfare and skill development schemes generally, and the Abhiyan makes no such allocation and runs no vocational training. Governing principle: the distinguishing feature named in the correct option is the linkage between a higher education institution and a village cluster, which no other option contains.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The National Food Security Act, 2013 abandoned the below poverty line and above poverty line classification as the basis of entitlement. It covers up to 75 per cent of the rural and 50 per cent of the urban population, divided into Antyodaya Anna Yojana households and priority households, with the identification of priority households left to the States within centrally determined coverage ratios. Confining eligibility to below poverty line families would describe the earlier targeted public distribution system, not the Act.
• Statement 2 is correct. Section 13 provides that for the purpose of issue of ration cards the eldest woman in the household, not being less than eighteen years of age, shall be the head of the household, and that where no such woman is available the eldest male member acts until she attains that age.
• Statement 3 is incorrect on the figure. Schedule II prescribes a take home ration of not less than 600 calories per day, with 18 to 20 grammes of protein, for pregnant women and lactating mothers during pregnancy and for six months after childbirth, along with maternity benefit of not less than six thousand rupees. The 1600 figure is roughly the daily requirement of an adult and is far above any supplementary ration, which is the tell. Elimination route: statement 2 is the single most quoted provision of the Act and can be accepted with confidence, which removes (c) and (d); the choice between (a) and (b) then rests on the below poverty line claim in statement 1, and the whole point of the Act was to move away from that classification.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Digital India is built on nine pillars, among them broadband highways, universal access to mobile connectivity, the public internet access programme, e governance, e Kranti, information for all, electronics manufacturing, information technology for jobs and early harvest programmes. Creating domestic substitutes for foreign internet companies on the Chinese model is not among them; the Chinese pattern rests on excluding foreign platforms from the market, which India has never adopted as policy.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Compulsory or encouraged domestic location of data centres, that is data localisation, formed no part of the Digital India design.
• Statement 3 is correct and is the least ambitious sounding of the three, which is the trap: BharatNet aims to connect gram panchayats with optical fibre, and the public internet access programme provides for common service centres and Wi Fi in schools, public places and tourist centres. Elimination route: statement 1 can be rejected on the model it invokes, since Digital India nowhere adopts a Chinese style closed internet, and once (a) and (d) fall the choice reduces to whether data localisation was an aim, which it was not.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect and it is the only statement a candidate needs. Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana is the flagship scheme of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, created in 2014 precisely to consolidate skilling efforts that had until then been scattered across some twenty ministries, and it is implemented through the National Skill Development Corporation. The Ministry of Labour and Employment runs the Industrial Training Institutes and the apprenticeship framework, which is a separate stream. Since statement 1 appears in options (a) and (d), rejecting it eliminates both and leaves (b) against (c).
• Statement 2 is correct. Beyond technical skilling, the scheme provides for training in soft skills, entrepreneurship, financial literacy and digital literacy, on the reasoning that employability in the organised sector depends on workplace behaviour and basic transactional competence as much as on trade skill.
• Statement 3 is correct and states the scheme's central purpose. Recognition of Prior Learning assesses and certifies workers who acquired their skills informally, on the job or through family occupation, and maps those competencies onto the levels of the National Skill Qualification Framework, so that an existing but unrecognised skill becomes a portable and certified one. That component is what distinguishes the scheme from ordinary vocational training.

Hence (c).

• Statement 1 is incorrect and it is the decisive statement. The National Programme for Organic Production is operated under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, not the Ministry of Rural Development, and the reason is structural rather than accidental: the programme exists to provide accreditation and certification standards that are recognised by importing countries, so that Indian organic produce can be exported without recertification abroad. It is therefore an export facilitation instrument and belongs with the trade ministry. Domestic organic promotion runs on a separate track, through the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, which uses the participatory guarantee system rather than third party certification.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, a statutory body under the Ministry of Commerce, functions as the secretariat for the implementation of the programme, accrediting certification bodies and administering the India Organic mark, which follows directly from the export orientation just described.
• Statement 3 is correct. Sikkim was declared India's first fully organic State in January 2016, having phased out chemical fertilisers and pesticides across its cultivated area over roughly a decade; the achievement won the Future Policy Gold Award of the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2018. Elimination route: rejecting statement 1 removes options (a) and (d), and statement 3 is widely known, so the answer rests on APEDA.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is correct. The MPLADS guidelines confine the scheme to works creating durable community assets, with health, education, drinking water and sanitation as priority sectors.
• Statement 2 is correct. Fifteen per cent of the annual entitlement is earmarked for areas with Scheduled Caste population and seven and a half per cent for areas with Scheduled Tribe population.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the key to the question. MPLADS funds are expressly non lapsable, so unspent amounts are carried forward and the entitlement accumulates.
• Statement 4 is correct. The district authority is required to inspect at least ten per cent of the works under implementation each year. Correct combination is 1, 2 and 4, giving (d).
• Options (a) and (b) drop correct statements, and (c) admits the non lapsability error.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Participation in the Mission is voluntary for health facilities and health professionals; hospitals in both the public and private sectors choose whether to register in the Health Facility Registry, and no compulsion to adopt exists.
• Statement 2 is incorrect for the same reason applied to individuals. Creation of an ABHA health account and the linking of records to it rest on the consent of the individual, and the Mission's own design places consent and the right to withdraw at the centre. The universal health coverage objective does not translate into an obligation for every citizen to enrol, and the word should in the statement is what makes it fail.
• Statement 3 is correct. The architecture of federated registries and a consent based health information exchange is built precisely so that a person's records can be accessed by an authorised provider anywhere in the country, which is the portability the Mission claims. Only statement 3 holds, giving (b), and options (a), (c) and (d) each admit a compulsion that the scheme does not impose.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on the funding claim. The India Sanitation Coalition is an industry led platform hosted by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which brings together businesses, non governmental organisations, funders and others to support sustainable sanitation, largely through corporate social responsibility resources. It is not funded by the Government of India and the World Health Organization, and the first half of the statement describing its purpose does not save the second half.
• Statement 2 is treated as incorrect by the key. The National Institute of Urban Affairs is an autonomous research institute registered as a society, functioning as a think tank on urban questions, and on the key's reading it is not an apex body of the Ministry in the sense that term carries for bodies vested with formal authority over a sector. Both statements failing, (d) is correct, and options (a), (b) and (c) each accept one of them.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Janani Suraksha Yojana is a centrally sponsored scheme launched in 2005 under the National Rural Health Mission, now the National Health Mission, and is fully funded by the Centre for cash assistance even though States implement it. Describing it as an intervention of the State Health Departments misplaces its origin.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the scheme targets reduction of maternal and neo natal mortality.
• Statement 3 is correct and states the central mechanism of the scheme, namely conditional cash transfer to promote institutional delivery among poor pregnant women, with differential entitlements for low performing and high performing States and for rural and urban areas.
• Statement 4 is incorrect and is the trap. Free treatment for sick infants up to one year of age belongs to the Janani Shishu Suraksha Karyakram of 2011, a separate initiative that provides free delivery, drugs, diagnostics, diet and transport. Two statements stand, giving (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect and turns on a single word. Anaemia Mukt Bharat provides prophylactic iron and folic acid supplementation, not calcium, across its six target groups. Calcium supplementation exists in maternal health programming but is not the anaemia intervention.
• Statement 2 is correct. Delayed cord clamping, holding the clamp for at least one to three minutes after birth, allows placental transfusion to the newborn and improves infant iron stores, and it is one of the six interventions in the six by six by six strategy.
• Statement 3 is correct, periodic deworming being included because helminth infestation causes chronic blood loss and impairs iron absorption.
• Statement 4 is correct, the strategy explicitly addressing non nutritional causes in endemic pockets with focus on malaria, haemoglobinopathies such as sickle cell disease and thalassaemia, and fluorosis. Three of four gives (c), and (d) requires the calcium error to pass.

• Statement 1 is correct. The CDS is the Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, a post previously rotated among the senior most service chief.
• Statement 3 is correct. The CDS is the Principal Military Advisor to the Defence Minister on all tri service matters, while each Service Chief continues to advise on matters exclusive to his own service.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the discriminator. The CDS explicitly does not exercise military command over the three Service Chiefs or over any military forces, a limitation written into the charter precisely to prevent the concentration of operational command in one officer and to preserve civilian control. The CDS role is coordinating, advisory and administrative, covering jointness in procurement, training and staffing. Hence 1 and 3 only, which is (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) all admit the command claim.

Operation Sadbhavana, meaning goodwill, is the Indian Army's civic action programme in Jammu and Kashmir and the North East, running schools including the Army Goodwill Schools, health camps, vocational training, infrastructure works and national integration tours for young people in remote and disturbed areas. Its purpose is winning local confidence alongside conventional security operations.

• Option (a) is wrong because Operation Sankalp is the Indian Navy's maritime security deployment in the Gulf of Oman and Persian Gulf to protect Indian flagged shipping.
• Option (b) is wrong because Operation Maitri was the disaster relief and rescue mission mounted in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, an external humanitarian deployment rather than a sustained domestic development programme.
• Option (d) is wrong because Operation Madad refers to flood relief assistance, notably in Kerala in 2018, again episodic disaster response rather than continuous civic action.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the single discriminator. Mitra Shakti is the annual India Sri Lanka joint military exercise, not an exercise with Bangladesh. The India Bangladesh equivalent is Sampriti.
• Statement 2 is correct. The 2023 edition was held at the Foreign Training Node at Aundh in Pune.
• Statement 3 is correct. Joint response in counter terrorism and counter insurgency operations under the United Nations mandate was among its stated objectives.
• Statement 4 is correct. The Indian Air Force participated alongside the Army, and the Sri Lanka Air Force likewise, making it more than a purely land exercise. Hence 2, 3 and 4, which is (d).
• Options (a), (b) and (c) all retain the Bangladesh error, so a candidate who knows only the correct partner country can eliminate three options at once.

• Statement 1 is correct. The programme, launched in 2008 as the National Land Records Modernisation Programme and revamped as a central sector scheme from April 2016, is funded entirely by the Central Government, unlike the earlier centrally sponsored arrangement with State cost sharing.
• Statement 2 is correct. Digitisation of cadastral maps, that is the survey maps showing plot boundaries, is a core component alongside computerisation of the Records of Rights and of the registration process.
• Statement 3 is correct. A transliteration initiative has been undertaken to render Records of Rights from the local language into the other languages recognised in the Eighth Schedule, using automated tools, so as to serve citizens across linguistic regions. Since none can be excluded, (d) is correct and options (a), (b) and (c) each drop a true component.
• Statement 3 is the least familiar and is the reason the question is not trivially easy.

• Statement 2 is correct. The scheme rests substantially on voluntarism, inviting private sector obstetricians, gynaecologists and radiologists to donate services one day a month at nearby government facilities, and it recognises such volunteers formally.
• Statement 1 is incorrect. The scheme provides a fixed day assured, comprehensive and quality antenatal check up on the ninth of every month to pregnant women in their second and third trimesters at government health facilities, but it does not extend to six months of post delivery health care. Post natal care is delivered through other components of the reproductive and child health programme, notably Janani Shishu Suraksha Karyakram and the LaQshya and SUMAN initiatives. The addition of the post delivery clause is what makes statement 1 fail. Hence (b).
• Options (a) and (c) accept the false post delivery guarantee, and (d) wrongly rejects the volunteer provision.

• Statement 2 is correct. Contributions are age specific, ranging from about fifty five rupees a month for a subscriber joining at eighteen to about two hundred rupees for one joining at forty, with the Central Government making a matching contribution.
• Statement 3 is correct. Subscribers receive an assured minimum pension of three thousand rupees a month on attaining sixty.
• Statement 1 is incorrect. The entry age band is eighteen to forty years, not twenty one to forty, and the scheme is open to unorganised sector workers with monthly income up to fifteen thousand rupees.
• Statement 4 is incorrect. On the death of the subscriber, the spouse is entitled to a family pension of fifty per cent of the pension. The benefit does not extend to unmarried daughters. Hence 2 and 3 only, which is (b).
• Options (a) and (d) both admit the wrong entry age, and (c) drops the correct pension amount.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces the official rationale of the mission. Indigenous cattle breeds are disproportionately held by small and marginal farmers and landless labourers, and their yields are low relative to crossbred animals, so raising their productivity has a direct and progressive effect on rural incomes. The distributional argument is precisely why the programme is framed as a poverty-linked intervention rather than a purely productivity one.
• Statement II is correct and states the stated objective: the Rashtriya Gokul Mission was launched in 2014 under the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying for the development and conservation of indigenous bovine breeds in a scientific and holistic manner, working through instruments such as Gokul Grams, breed improvement using artificial insemination and sex-sorted semen, and the National Kamdhenu Breeding Centres. Both statements hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one accurate statement, and option (d) rejects both, which no reading of the scheme documents supports.

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.