Flagship Central Schemes

• 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 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.

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.

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. 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 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 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.