13 November 2025 · Shift 1

Bharat Ratna awardees Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1997. The honour recognised his leading role in India's missile and space programmes, which earned him the title 'Missile Man of India'. In the same year the Bharat Ratna also went to Gulzarilal Nanda and to Aruna Asaf Ali (posthumously). Kalam went on to become the 11th President of India, serving from 2002 to 2007. Hence option (b) is correct.

Appointments — NCB Anurag Garg, a 1993-batch IPS officer of the Himachal Pradesh cadre, took charge as Director General of the Narcotics Control Bureau in September 2024. He succeeded S. N. Pradhan, after whose retirement the post had been held as additional charge by the CRPF chief. The NCB, formed in 1986 under the NDPS Act, 1985, is India's apex drug law-enforcement agency and works under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Of the other names, Anish Dayal Singh was DG of the CRPF, B. Srinivasan headed the National Security Guard, and Nalin Prabhat was appointed head of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Hence option (c) is correct.

Kolhapuri chappal row The Italian luxury label Prada showed open-toe leather sandals closely resembling Kolhapuri chappals at its menswear show in Milan in June 2025. The design was presented without any credit to its Indian origin, which drew sharp criticism in India; Prada later acknowledged the Indian inspiration. Kolhapuri chappals are hand-crafted leather footwear from Kolhapur and neighbouring districts of Maharashtra, made without nails and traditionally hand-stitched. They carry a Geographical Indication (GI) tag granted in 2019, covering districts of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Hence option (a) is correct.

PMAY-Urban 2.0 PMAY-Urban 2.0, cleared by the Union Cabinet in August 2024, is meant for the urban poor and the middle class. It covers Economically Weaker Section (EWS), Low Income Group (LIG) and Middle Income Group (MIG) families that do not own a pucca house anywhere in India. The mission targets one crore urban houses through four verticals — Beneficiary-Led Construction, Affordable Housing in Partnership, Affordable Rental Housing and the Interest Subsidy Scheme. Rural households are served by a separate scheme, PMAY-Gramin, so the options about rural labour, government employees and migrant workers do not fit. Hence option (a) is correct.

India Electric Mobility Index Delhi emerged as the top performer in the India Electric Mobility Index (IEMI) 2024. Delhi scored highest on the strength of its EV policy, the density of its charging points and the high share of electric vehicles in new registrations. The index, brought out by NITI Aayog, rates States and Union Territories on 16 indicators grouped under three themes and sorts them into Frontrunners, Performers and Aspirants. Delhi, Maharashtra and Chandigarh were the Frontrunners, while Andhra Pradesh figured among the Aspirants, so the other options do not fit. Hence option (a) is correct.

Grasslands of India Kadbanwadi is a village in Indapur tehsil of Pune district, Maharashtra, and its village commons form one of the best-preserved semi-arid grasslands of the Deccan. The grassland is a stronghold of the Indian grey wolf and also supports the chinkara, blackbuck, striped hyena and Indian fox. Because open habitats like this are officially classed as 'wasteland', Kadbanwadi is repeatedly cited as a model of community-led grassland conservation. Hence option (d) is correct.

Books and authors 'The Namesake' (2003) was written by Jhumpa Lahiri; it follows Gogol Ganguli, son of Bengali immigrants in the United States, and turns on what his borrowed name makes of his identity. Lahiri had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 for her short-story collection 'Interpreter of Maladies', and the novel was filmed by Mira Nair in 2006. Hence option (c) is correct.

Folk musical instruments Bengbung is a Mizo folk instrument made of bamboo or wooden bars of different lengths, laid across the player's outstretched legs and struck with two sticks. The pitch depends on the length of the bar that is struck, so it is a tuned struck idiophone — exactly the working principle of a xylophone. The other options belong to different families: the harmonium is a free-reed wind instrument, the tabla a membranophone (drum) and the veena a chordophone (string). Hence option (d) is correct.

Puppetry traditions Bommalattam is the puppet theatre of Tamil Nadu; large wooden puppets are worked from above by strings tied to a ring on the puppeteer's head, together with rods held in the hands. Its repertoire is drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and shows are traditionally staged at temple festivals through the night. Therukoothu is also from Tamil Nadu but is street theatre performed by live actors; Yakshagana is a dance-drama of Karnataka and Chhau a masked dance of Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Hence option (d) is correct.

Artificial satellites A man-made or artificial satellite is any object deliberately placed by human beings in orbit around the Earth. Aryabhata, launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet cosmodrome, was India's first indigenously built satellite and carried X-ray astronomy, aeronomy and solar physics experiments. INSAT-4A, launched in December 2005, is a geostationary communication satellite of the INSAT series used for television and telecom services. Both are therefore artificial satellites of the Earth, so both statements are correct. Hence option (d) is correct.

Change of state When a liquid is cooled it loses latent heat of fusion; its particles lose kinetic energy, come closer and lock into a fixed lattice, and the liquid turns into a solid. This change is called solidification (freezing) and it takes place at the freezing point — for water at one atmosphere that is $0^{\circ }C$. Hence option (a) is correct.

Conservation of energy The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form into another, the total energy of an isolated system staying constant. Statement I restates exactly this, so it is correct — in a torch the chemical energy of the cell becomes electrical energy and then light and heat. Statement II contradicts the law: energy is never destroyed, it only degrades into less useful forms such as low-grade heat. So only Statement I is correct. Hence option (a) is correct.

Ossification test The ossification test studies X-rays of joints such as the wrist, elbow, shoulder or pelvis to see how far the bones have hardened and how far the epiphyses have fused with the shafts. Ossification and fusion follow a fairly fixed timetable during childhood and adolescence, so the stage reached tells us the person's age. This is why courts fall back on it when there is no birth certificate — for instance to decide whether an accused is a juvenile. Sex is judged from skull and pelvic features and identity from DNA profiling, so those options do not fit. Hence option (a) is correct.

Current affairs — agri technology In August 2025 India announced its first indigenous process for making water-soluble fertilisers — the specialty fertilisers that were till then imported very largely from China. In the process highly soluble raw materials such as urea, MAP (mono ammonium phosphate) and MOP are crushed, precisely proportioned and uniformly blended, so that the product dissolves completely and leaves no residue. Such fertilisers are delivered through fertigation in drip systems or as a foliar spray, which puts the nutrient straight on the plant and raises nutrient-use efficiency. The other three options concern biogas enrichment, irrigation scheduling and soil surveys — useful work, but none of them substitutes an imported fertiliser. Hence option (b) is correct.

Progressive taxation In a progressive tax the rate itself rises as the tax base rises, so a richer person pays not merely more tax but a larger share of income as tax. India's income-tax slabs are the standard illustration: income falling in a higher slab is charged at a higher rate, which is how the system works towards reducing inequality. A tax that takes the same proportion from everyone is proportional, and one whose burden falls in percentage terms as income rises is regressive — so options (b), (c) and (d) describe other systems. Hence option (a) is correct.

Code on Social Security, 2020 The Code on Social Security, 2020 amalgamated nine central labour laws — among them the EPF Act, the ESI Act, the Maternity Benefit Act and the Payment of Gratuity Act — into a single code. Its declared purpose is to extend social security to employees and workers of both the organised and the unorganised sectors, and for the first time it defines gig workers and platform workers and brings them within the net. It thus provides for provident fund, insurance, gratuity and maternity benefit rather than restricting cover to any single group of workers. Hence option (d) is correct.

Shivaji and the Marathas Shivaji built the Maratha state in the western Deccan, a region then shared between the Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur and the Mughal Empire. His early successes were against Bijapur — he took Torna in 1646 and killed Afzal Khan at Pratapgarh in 1659. The struggle then widened to the Mughals: he sacked Surat in 1664, signed the Treaty of Purandar with Raja Jai Singh in 1665 and escaped from Aurangzeb's court at Agra in 1666. He was crowned Chhatrapati at Raigad in 1674, so both the powers named in the question were indeed his adversaries. Hence option (c) is correct.

SEBI regulations SEBI was set up as a non-statutory body in 1988 and was given statutory status by the SEBI Act, 1992. In that same year it framed the SEBI (Insider Trading) Regulations, 1992, which forbade dealing in securities on the basis of unpublished price-sensitive information. The regulations were strengthened by amendment in 2002 and finally replaced by the SEBI (Prohibition of Insider Trading) Regulations, 2015. Hence option (c) is correct.

Removal of the Vice-President The procedure is laid down in Article 67(b) of the Constitution: the Vice-President may be removed by a resolution of the Council of States (Rajya Sabha) passed by a majority of all the then members of that House, which is then agreed to by the House of the People (Lok Sabha). At least 14 days' notice of the intention to move such a resolution is required, and the Constitution prescribes no ground on which removal must be based. The resolution can originate only in the Rajya Sabha, so there is no joint sitting, no order of the President and no role for the Union Cabinet. Note the contrast with the President, who can be removed only by impeachment under Article 61 for violation of the Constitution. Hence option (b) is correct.

Physiography of India By the standard classification of India's relief, mountains cover about 30% of the land area, plateaus about 27% and plains about 43%. The plateau belt — the Deccan Plateau, the Malwa Plateau and the Chotanagpur Plateau — is made of old, hard rock and holds most of India's minerals, coal and forest wealth. So roughly $27\%$ of the country's area is plateau. Hence option (c) is correct.

Land reforms in India Land reform after 1947 rested on three planks — abolition of intermediaries such as zamindars, tenancy reform, and ceilings on holdings — but the states carried them out very unevenly. Kerala went furthest: the Kerala Land Reforms Act, 1963 (enforced from 1970) abolished landlordism and conferred ownership on the tenants who actually tilled the land. West Bengal's success came through Operation Barga (1978), which registered the bargadars, or sharecroppers, and secured their right to cultivate and to a fair share of the produce. Both states are therefore cited in the NCERT text as the successful cases of land reform. Hence option (c) is correct.

Planned development — industry When planning began in 1950-51 India was overwhelmingly agrarian: agriculture contributed a little over half of GDP while industry accounted for only about 13%. That is why the Second Five Year Plan (1956) and the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 made heavy industry the priority, pursued through import substitution behind high tariffs and import quotas. The strategy did raise the industrial share, which had roughly doubled to about 25% by 1990-91. Hence option (c) is correct.

Population change Natural growth rate of population = birth rate − death rate (migration being set aside). If the birth rate is greater than the death rate this difference is positive, so more people are added each year than are lost, and the population grows. It would fall only if deaths exceeded births, and stay constant only if the two rates were equal. Hence option (a) is correct.

Human blood pressure Blood pressure is written as systolic over diastolic: systolic is the arterial pressure while the ventricles contract, diastolic the pressure while the heart relaxes and refills. For a healthy adult these are taken as 120 mm Hg and 80 mm Hg, i.e. a reading of 120/80 mm Hg, measured with a sphygmomanometer. A sustained reading of 140/90 mm Hg or more is called hypertension, while readings persistently around 90/60 mm Hg indicate hypotension. Hence option (d) is correct.

Mahajanapadas and capitals Anga was one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas of the sixth century BCE, and its capital Champa stood where the Champa river joins the Ganga, in the present Bhagalpur district of Bihar. Buddhist texts count Champa among the six great cities of India and describe it as a busy river port trading as far as Suvarnabhumi; Anga was later annexed by Bimbisara of Magadha. Rajgir (Rajagriha) was the early capital of Magadha and Pataliputra its later capital, while Sarnath near Varanasi is where the Buddha preached his first sermon. Hence option (b) is correct.