13 November 2025 · Shift 2

Archaeological Survey of India Debala Mitra became the first woman Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, holding the post from 1981 to 1983. She was a leading archaeologist and art historian, best remembered for her work on Buddhist sites and for her book 'Buddhist Monuments'. The ASI itself was set up in 1861 under Alexander Cunningham, called the father of Indian archaeology; it works under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters in New Delhi. Leela Samson is a Bharatanatyam dancer who headed the Kalakshetra Foundation and the CBFC, not the ASI. Hence option (b) is correct.

Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh N. Chandrababu Naidu was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh on 12 June 2024. His Telugu Desam Party, allied with the BJP and the Jana Sena Party, swept the 2024 Assembly election and ended the YSRCP government of Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy. It was Naidu's fourth term as Chief Minister; Pawan Kalyan of the Jana Sena Party became the Deputy Chief Minister. K. Chandrasekhar Rao belongs to Telangana, the state carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, so he is out of place here. Hence option (b) is correct.

NITI Aayog policy report The policy report 'Expanding Quality Higher Education through States and State Public Universities' was released by NITI Aayog in February 2025. It is NITI Aayog's first comprehensive study of State Public Universities, which teach the large majority of India's higher-education students. The report examines funding, governance, faculty shortages, research capacity and autonomy, and ties its recommendations to the goals of NEP 2020. The UGC frames norms and releases grants, while AICTE looks after technical education — neither of them brought out this report. Hence option (b) is correct.

Swavalambini initiative Swavalambini was launched in March 2025 by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in collaboration with NITI Aayog. It was flagged off at Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, as a Women Entrepreneurship Programme for students of higher education institutions. The programme gives young women entrepreneurship awareness sessions, training and mentorship so that they can start their own ventures and scale them up. MSDE is also the ministry behind Skill India, PMKVY and the network of Industrial Training Institutes, which is why entrepreneurship drives sit with it. Hence option (c) is correct.

MoSPI publications Statement I is correct: the Periodic Labour Force Survey is conducted and released by the National Statistical Office (NSO), which is a part of MoSPI, and it supplies India's regular employment and unemployment data. Statement II is also correct: the Infrastructure and Project Monitoring Division of MoSPI brings out the Monthly Infrastructure Performance Review Report on large central sector projects, tracking their cost and time overruns. Both publications therefore come from the same ministry, so neither statement can be dropped. Hence option (a), Both I and II, is correct.

Wildlife conservation centres The Sudasari breeding centre for the Great Indian Bustard lies inside the Desert National Park near Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan. It is a conservation-breeding facility run by the Wildlife Institute of India with the state forest department, where eggs are collected from the wild and the chicks are reared in a protected enclosure. The grasslands of Rajasthan's Thar desert hold by far the largest surviving wild population of the Great Indian Bustard, which the IUCN lists as Critically Endangered, which is why the centre was set up there. Hence option (b) is correct.

Authors and their books "From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet" is Vikram Seth's account of the overland journey he made in 1981 from Nanjing through Xinjiang (Sinkiang) and Tibet to Nepal and home to Delhi. The book won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1983, the prize that first established him as a writer. He went on to write the verse-novel "The Golden Gate", the novels "A Suitable Boy" and "An Equal Music", and the memoir "Two Lives". Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh and William Dalrymple are travel writers too, but this book is not by any of them, so option (b) is correct.

Classification of instruments Vamsi takes its name from the Sanskrit vamsa, meaning bamboo; it is a side-blown bamboo flute, that is, a wind instrument of the flute family. In the classical fourfold division of Indian instruments it is a sushira vadya (aerophone), the group that also holds the venu, the nadaswaram and the shehnai. String instruments are tata vadya (veena, violin), percussion instruments are avanaddha vadya (mridangam, thavil), and cymbals such as the jalra are ghana vadya. So the Vamsi belongs to the flute category and option (c) is correct.

Folk theatre forms Swang is an operatic folk theatre in which the story moves almost entirely through sung dialogue, the performers doing the acting, the singing and the mimicry themselves. Its two famous schools are the Rohtak school in Haryanvi and the Hathras school of western Uttar Pradesh, and of the four options only Uttar Pradesh lies in that belt. The word swang means 'disguise'; the actors take on mythological and social roles with very simple costume and a dholak-harmonium accompaniment. Andhra Pradesh has Burrakatha, Assam has Ankiya Nat (Bhaona) and Bihar has Bidesia, so option (b) is correct.

INSAT satellite system The INSAT (Indian National Satellite) system is a fleet of multipurpose geostationary satellites begun in 1983, and is one of the largest domestic communication systems in the Asia-Pacific region. Its C-band and S-band transponders carry telephony, television and radio broadcasting, so statement I is correct. Several INSAT spacecraft also carry the Very High Resolution Radiometer and sounder payloads that feed cloud, temperature and cyclone data to the IMD, so statement II on meteorological observation and forecasting is correct as well. Both functions are therefore served by the series, and option (c) is correct.

Newton's laws of motion Newton's third law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: if body A pushes body B, then B pushes A back with a force of the same size in exactly the opposite direction. In symbols $F_{AB}=-F_{BA}$, so the two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. The pair acts on two different bodies, which is why the forces never cancel out — a swimmer pushes the water backward and the water pushes the swimmer forward. Option (a) states the first law and option (b) the second law, while option (d) is simply untrue, so option (c) is correct.

Definition of pressure Pressure is defined as the thrust, that is the force acting normally on a surface, divided by the area of that surface: $P=\frac{F}{A}$. Its SI unit is the pascal, and $1\mathrm{Pa}=1{N/m}^2$. Because the area A sits in the denominator, the same force produces more pressure on a smaller area — a sharp knife or a thin nail cuts easily, while a camel's broad foot does not sink into sand. Only option (c) matches $P=\frac{F}{A}$, so option (c) is correct.

Gaganyaan mission The robot is Vyommitra, a name made from vyoma (sky or space) and mitra (friend). It was built at ISRO's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and is a female-appearing half-humanoid: it has a head, two arms and a torso but no legs, since it will travel strapped into the crew seat. On the uncrewed Gaganyaan-G1 flight it will watch the environmental control and life-support system, operate panel switches and report readings, so that the cabin is proved safe before astronauts fly. Aditi, Shakti and Antrika are not ISRO robots, so option (b) is correct.

Defence procurement 2025 The order for 97 Tejas LCA Mk-1A fighters, worth about ₹62,000 crore, went to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bengaluru. It is the largest indigenous defence order of its kind and follows the earlier contract for 83 Mk-1A aircraft, taking the Indian Air Force's Mk-1A order book to 180 jets. The Tejas is designed by the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) and produced by HAL, so HAL is the contracting organisation. Bharat Dynamics makes missiles, Mazagon Dock builds warships and submarines, and L&T Defence is a private shipbuilding and systems firm, so option (b) is correct.

Sawai Jai Singh II Sawai Jai Singh II, the Kachhwaha ruler of Amber, was given the subahdari (governorship) of Agra in 1722 by the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah. This was the high point of his standing in Mughal service; in the same phase he laid out his new capital Jaipur in 1727 and moved his seat there from Amber. Malwa is the tempting option because he held its governorship on several occasions between 1714 and 1737, but the appointment made in 1722 was to Agra. Hence option (b) is correct.

Indirect taxes in India A tax charged on goods when they cross the national frontier — entering India or leaving it — is customs duty, levied under the Customs Act, 1962. It is an indirect tax: the importer or exporter pays it, but the burden is passed on in the price of the goods. An export subsidy is a payment made to exporters and not a tax at all; service tax was charged on services and has been merged into GST; VAT was charged on the value added at each stage of a domestic sale. Hence option (b) is correct.

National Logistics Policy The National Logistics Policy, launched in September 2022 by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, fixes all its targets for the year 2030. Its three declared aims are to bring logistics cost as a share of GDP down to global levels, to be among the top 25 countries in the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index by 2030, and to build a data-driven decision support system. India stood at rank 38 in the LPI of 2023, so the top-25 target measures the improvement being aimed at. Hence option (b) is correct.

Special Economic Zones India's Special Economic Zone policy was announced in the Export-Import (EXIM) Policy of 2000, to create export hubs with world-class infrastructure and simplified procedures. The policy received statutory backing only later, through the SEZ Act, 2005, which came into force with the SEZ Rules in February 2006. India's first export processing zone, at Kandla in Gujarat, dates from 1965 and was Asia's first, but the SEZ policy framework itself begins in 2000. So option (c) is correct.

Article 3 of Constitution Article 3 of the Constitution empowers Parliament, by law, to form a new state, to increase or diminish the area of any state, to alter its boundaries and to alter its name. Such a bill can be introduced in either House only on the recommendation of the President, who first refers it to the legislature of the affected state for its views. That state legislature's opinion is not binding on Parliament, and the law is passed by a simple majority — it is not treated as a constitutional amendment under Article 368. The Governor, the Prime Minister and the Election Commission have no such power, so option (b) is correct.

Ports and hinterlands Marmagao (Mormugao) port stands at the mouth of the Zuari estuary in Goa and is India's premier iron-ore exporting port. Its hinterland is the Konkan-Deccan belt that it can reach by rail and road: Goa itself, Karnataka with the Bellary-Hospet ore fields, and southern Maharashtra. Himachal Pradesh is a landlocked Himalayan state in the far north, well over a thousand kilometres away, and its trade moves through northern gateways, not through Marmagao. So option (d) names the region that is not part of the port's hinterland.

Capital goods industry Capital goods are goods used to produce other goods instead of being consumed directly, so a capital goods industry is one that manufactures machinery, plant, equipment and tools. Machine tools, heavy electrical equipment, textile machinery and earth-moving equipment are the standard examples. Consumer electronics and processed agricultural produce are bought for final use, so they are consumer goods, while external commercial borrowing is a way of raising finance and not an industry at all. Hence option (d) is correct.

Tariff and non-tariff measures A tariff measure is simply a tax, or duty, levied on goods crossing a national border, whether they are entering the country or leaving it. Import taxes such as basic customs duty, anti-dumping duty and safeguard duty are tariffs, and export taxes or export duties — like the duty India charges on certain grades of iron ore — are tariffs as well. Quotas, licensing, embargoes and technical standards are the non-tariff measures, because none of them is a tax. Since both I and II are tariff measures, option (c) is correct.

Scheduled Tribe population The figure still officially in use is the one from Census 2011: Scheduled Tribes form 8.6% of India's population, that is about 10.43 crore people. In the same census Scheduled Castes form 16.6%, so the two groups together make up roughly a quarter of the country. Madhya Pradesh has the largest tribal population in absolute numbers, while Lakshadweep and Mizoram have the highest tribal share within their own population. Hence option (a) is correct.

Respiration in organisms Taking in oxygen from the surroundings, using it to break down food and releasing the energy locked in that food is respiration. The overall reaction of aerobic respiration is $C_6{H}_{12}{O}_6+6O_2\to 6C{O}_2+6H_{2}O+\mathrm{energy}$, and the energy is stored as ATP. Most of it takes place in the mitochondria, which are therefore called the powerhouse of the cell. Digestion only breaks food into absorbable units, fermentation is anaerobic and needs no oxygen, and photosynthesis makes food from carbon dioxide instead of breaking it down, so option (c) is correct.

Ancient Indian texts The Charaka Samhita is the foundational Ayurvedic text on kayachikitsa, that is, internal medicine. It deals with diagnosis, treatment, drugs, diet and the ethics expected of a physician, and is traditionally ascribed to Charaka, who is placed at the court of the Kushana king Kanishka. With the Sushruta Samhita, which deals with surgery, and Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya, it forms the Brihat-trayi or great triad of Ayurveda. Hence option (c) is correct.