14 November 2025 · Shift 3

Preamble of the Constitution The Preamble secures to all citizens JUSTICE in three forms — social, economic and political. Of the four options only 'Economic' is one of these three forms, so option (d) is correct. Sovereign, Socialist and Secular are not kinds of justice; they are words that describe the nature of the Indian State — 'Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic'. 'Socialist' and 'Secular' were added to the Preamble by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976.

State administration The Chief Secretary is the senior-most civil servant of a State and the administrative head of the State Secretariat. He or she coordinates the working of all the departments, is the chief adviser to the Chief Minister on administrative matters and acts as the ex-officio secretary to the State Cabinet. The Cabinet Secretary holds the corresponding position at the Centre, the District Collector heads only one district and the Home Secretary heads only one department. Hence option (c) is correct.

PM Surya Ghar Yojana March 2027. Reviewing the scheme in December 2024, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) stated that rooftop solar installations under PM Surya Ghar : Muft Bijli Yojana are to cover 1 crore households by March 2027. The scheme was launched on 13 February 2024 with an outlay of about ₹75,021 crore; it gives a central subsidy on rooftop solar plants and up to 300 units of free electricity a month to a beneficiary household. It is implemented by the MNRE, and the surplus power generated can be sold to the distribution company, so option (c) is correct.

Global Innovation Index 2024 39th. In the Global Innovation Index 2024 India was ranked 39th among 133 economies. The GII is published every year by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations, and scores an economy on innovation inputs (institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market and business sophistication) and innovation outputs (knowledge and technology, creative outputs). India was 40th in 2023 and 81st in 2015, so the 2024 rank continued a long climb; Switzerland topped the 2024 index. Hence option (c) is correct.

RBI Financial Inclusion Index 67. For the year ended March 2025 the Reserve Bank of India's Financial Inclusion Index stood at 67.0, up from 64.2 in March 2024. The index was first released by the RBI in August 2021. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 means complete financial exclusion and 100 means full financial inclusion, and it needs no base year. It is built from three parameters — Access (weight 35%), Usage (45%) and Quality (20%) — and in 2025 all three sub-indices improved, so option (c) is correct.

National parks and wildlife Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary lies just south of Junagadh in Gujarat and is the only natural home of the Asiatic lion. Because the entire wild population of Asiatic lions lives here, Junagadh is the natural site for a centre meant for wildlife health care, disease diagnosis and research. The foundation stone of the National Referral Centre for Wildlife was laid at Junagadh on World Wildlife Day, 3 March 2025. Kaziranga is in Assam, Ranthambore in Rajasthan and Bandipur in Karnataka — none of them lies near Junagadh, so option (b) is correct.

Books and authors "Gandhi in Champaran" was written by D. G. Tendulkar (Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar). The book describes Gandhiji's first satyagraha on Indian soil — the 1917 movement of the indigo cultivators of Champaran in Bihar. Tendulkar is best known for the eight-volume biography "Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi". Hence option (b) is correct.

Folk art traditions Bhopas are the traditional priest-singers of Rajasthan, mainly of the Marwar and Mewar regions. A Bhopa unrolls a long painted cloth scroll called Phad — treated as a portable temple — and sings the heroic legend of the folk deity Pabuji (or Devnarayan) through the night, accompanied by the ravanhatha. This Phad-Bhopa storytelling tradition belongs to Rajasthan, so option (b) is correct.

Books and authors "Mohini: The Enchantress" is a mythological-fiction novel written by Anuja Chandramouli. It retells the story of Mohini, the female avatar of Lord Vishnu who secured the amrita for the gods at the churning of the ocean. Her other titles include "Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince", "Shakti: The Divine Feminine" and "Kamadeva: The God of Desire". Amish Tripathi wrote the Shiva Trilogy, Devdutt Pattanaik wrote "Jaya" and "Myth = Mithya", and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wrote "The Palace of Illusions" — so option (c) is correct.

Folk dances of India Jhijhiya is a folk dance of Bihar, most popular in the Mithila region. Women dance carrying earthen pots pierced with many small holes and a lamp burning inside, during Durga Puja and Dussehra; it is offered to Goddess Durga for protection from evil forces and black magic. Jat-Jatin, Bidesia, Sohar, Kajari and Phagua are the other well-known folk dances of Bihar, so option (b) is correct.

Indian space programme INSAT-1B was launched on 30 August 1983 from the US Space Shuttle Challenger (mission STS-8) and became the first fully operational satellite of the series. INSAT-1A, launched in April 1982, failed within a few months, so the INSAT system effectively began working only with INSAT-1B in 1983. INSAT is a series of multipurpose geostationary satellites used for telecommunication, television broadcasting, meteorology and search-and-rescue services. Hence the programme is dated to 1983, i.e. option (c).

Pressure and its unit Pressure is defined as the force acting normally per unit area of a surface. Formula: $P=\frac{F}{A}$, where F is the force and A the area on which it acts. Its SI unit is the pascal (Pa), where $1\mathrm{Pa}=1N/m^2$. Work $=F\times s$ (joule), power $=\frac{W}{t}$ (watt) and density $=\frac{m}{V}$ — none of these is force per unit area, so option (b) is correct.

Current affairs: missions The National Mission on Sustainable Packaging Solutions was launched in January 2025 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). It is anchored at CSIR-NIIST, Thiruvananthapuram, and develops eco-friendly, recyclable and biodegradable packaging materials as substitutes for single-use plastic. The mission carries laboratory packaging technologies to industry and supports India's circular-economy and net-zero commitments. CSIR is India's largest chain of publicly funded research laboratories, so the research-driven mission belongs to it — option (c).

Public goods A public good has two defining features — non-excludability (nobody can be kept out of using it) and non-rivalry (one person's use does not reduce what is left for others). So the benefits of a public good are generally available to everybody, whether or not a particular person has paid for it, which is what option (c) states. Options (a) and (d) describe excludable private goods and option (b) describes rival goods; national defence, street lighting and public parks are the standard examples of public goods.

Maratha history Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was born on 19 February 1630 at Shivneri Fort near Junnar, in present-day Pune district of Maharashtra. His father Shahaji Bhosale was a Maratha general who served the Ahmadnagar and later the Bijapur sultanate, and his mother Jijabai shaped his character and his ideal of Swaraj. Maloji Bhosale was Shivaji's grandfather and Sambhaji his son, so option (b) is correct.

Economic reforms 1991 The National Renewal Fund was set up in February 1992, soon after the 1991 reforms, as a social safety net for industrial labour. Its primary purpose was to compensate workers who lost their jobs because of modernisation, technological upgrading and restructuring of industry — largely through Voluntary Retirement Schemes — and to retrain and redeploy them. It also financed employment-generating schemes in the organised and unorganised sectors. It had nothing to do with FDI promotion, industrial borrowing or disaster relief, so option (c) is correct.

Revolt of 1857 Nana Saheb, the adopted son of the last Peshwa Baji Rao II, led the Revolt of 1857 at Kanpur. He rose in June 1857 with the help of Tantia Tope and Azimullah Khan after the British refused to continue his father's pension under the Doctrine of Lapse, and he was proclaimed Peshwa there. Meerut is where the sepoy mutiny began on 10 May 1857, Jhansi was Rani Lakshmibai's centre and Lucknow was Begum Hazrat Mahal's, so option (c) is correct.

Agricultural credit The Kisan Credit Card scheme was introduced in 1998–99 on the recommendation of the R. V. Gupta Committee, which the RBI had set up to study the delivery of credit to agriculture. NABARD then framed the model KCC scheme for uniform adoption by commercial banks, regional rural banks and cooperative banks. The card gives a farmer a single hassle-free credit limit, fixed on the basis of his land holding, for seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and other production needs. The Narasimham Committee dealt with banking-sector reforms and the M. S. Swaminathan Committee (2004) with the distress of farmers, so option (b) is correct.

State legislature Under Article 174(2)(b) of the Constitution, the Governor may dissolve the State Legislative Assembly before its normal five-year term is over. Being a nominal executive, the Governor ordinarily exercises this power on the aid and advice of the Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers under Article 163. The Speaker only presides over the House and cannot dissolve it, and the President comes in only when President's rule is imposed under Article 356. So the correct authority is the Governor acting on ministerial advice — option (c).

Iron ore mines of India Sulaipet, Badampahar and Gurumahisani are iron-ore mines of the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha. They lie in the Odisha–Jharkhand belt, the richest iron-ore belt of India, which yields high-grade haematite ore. Kiriburu in Kendujhar and Bonai in Sundargarh are the other important mines of Odisha, while Bailadila and Rajhara are in Chhattisgarh and Ballari-Chitradurga in Karnataka. Hence option (c) is correct.

Trade strategy in planning The inward-looking trade strategy of India's early Five-Year Plans is called import substitution. Goods that were being imported were to be produced within the country instead; imports were curbed by high tariffs and quotas, and domestic industry was protected through the licensing system. The aim was to save foreign exchange and to build a self-reliant industrial base. Export promotion is the outward-looking opposite, and liberalisation and globalisation came with the 1991 reforms, so option (b) is correct.

Census 2011: urbanisation The level of urbanisation is the share of the total population that lives in urban areas. In Census 2011 the total population was about 121.09 crore, of which about 37.71 crore lived in towns and cities. Level of urbanisation $=\frac{37.71}{121.09}\times 100\approx 31.16\%$. It was $27.81\%$ in 2001, so urbanisation rose by roughly 3.35 percentage points in the decade — option (c) is correct.

Excretion and dialysis A dialysis machine, or artificial kidney, does the filtering work of kidneys that have failed. Blood is passed through tubes of a selectively permeable membrane dipped in dialysing fluid; nitrogenous wastes such as urea, uric acid and creatinine, along with excess salts and water, diffuse out and the cleaned blood is returned to the body. The dialysing fluid has the same glucose and salt concentration as normal plasma, so useful substances like glucose are not lost, and no urine is formed by the machine. Its primary function is therefore the removal of nitrogenous wastes and purification of blood — option (c).

Human nervous system The human nervous system has two divisions — the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and the spinal cord; the spinal cord carries impulses to and from the brain and is itself the centre of reflex actions. The heart, lungs and kidney belong to the circulatory, respiratory and excretory systems respectively, so option (c) is correct.

Ancient Indian texts The Arthashastra was written by Kautilya, also known as Chanakya or Vishnugupta, the mentor and chief minister of Chandragupta Maurya. It is a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, economic policy, administration, diplomacy and war, famous for the Saptanga (seven limbs) theory of the state, and is a key source for Mauryan history. Megasthenes wrote Indica, Banabhatta wrote Harshacharita and Kadambari, and Kalidasa wrote Abhijnanashakuntalam and Meghaduta, so option (c) is correct.