Infrastructure and Urban Missions

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 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.

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.