20 November 2025 · Shift 2

Sports administration Devendra Jhajharia was elected unopposed as President of the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) in March 2024. He is India's first para-athlete to win two Paralympic golds in javelin - Athens 2004 and Rio 2016 - and added a silver at Tokyo 2020. He received the Khel Ratna in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2022. Deepa Malik was the outgoing PCI president, while Abhinav Bindra and Neeraj Chopra are Olympic (not Paralympic) champions. Hence option (a) is correct.

State chief ministers Hemant Soren took oath as Chief Minister of Jharkhand on 28 November 2024 at Morabadi Ground, Ranchi. It was his fourth term; the JMM-led INDIA bloc had won 56 of the 81 assembly seats in the 2024 election. The oath was administered by Governor Santosh Kumar Gangwar. Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in November 2000 and Hemant Soren leads the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. Hence option (c) is correct.

Defence appointments Lt Gen Dinesh Singh Rana assumed charge as the 18th Commander-in-Chief of the Andaman and Nicobar Command (CINCAN) on 1 June 2025. He succeeded Air Marshal Saju Balakrishnan and had earlier served as Director General of the Defence Intelligence Agency. The Andaman and Nicobar Command, raised in 2001 with headquarters at Port Blair, is India's only integrated tri-services theatre command. It guards the eastern approaches of the Indian Ocean Region, including the Strait of Malacca. Hence option (c) is correct.

Swachhata Hi Seva 2024 Swachhata Hi Seva 2024 ran from 17 September to 2 October 2024 and drew the participation of more than 30 crore people. Its theme was 'Swabhav Swachhata, Sanskaar Swachhata', and the fortnight marked ten years of the Swachh Bharat Mission. The drive stood on three pillars - Jan Bhagidari (public participation), cleaning up neglected Cleanliness Target Units (CTUs), and Safai Mitra Suraksha Shivirs for sanitation workers. It closed on 2 October, observed every year as Swachh Bharat Diwas. Hence option (c) is correct.

Union Budget 2025-26 The Union Budget 2025-26, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, announced a Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for education with an outlay of Rs 500 crore. Three AI Centres of Excellence - for agriculture, health and sustainable cities - had already been announced in the 2023-24 Budget with a combined Rs 990 crore. The new centre is meant to personalise learning, help teachers and close the skill gap for a future-ready workforce. Hence option (c) is correct.

PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana The Prime Minister Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (PMDDKY) was announced in the Union Budget 2025-26 and approved by the Union Cabinet on 16 July 2025. It is to be taken up in 100 districts that lag behind in productivity, cropping intensity and credit availability, and is designed to benefit about 1.7 crore farmers to begin with. The scheme runs for six years from 2025-26 with an annual outlay of ₹24,000 crore, and works by converging 36 existing schemes of 11 ministries instead of creating fresh ones. Its model is the Aspirational Districts Programme, so progress in each district is tracked on a monthly dashboard of key indicators. Hence option (a) is correct.

Namo Drone Didi scheme Namo Drone Didi is a Central Sector Scheme of the Ministry of Rural Development that gives drones to women-led Self-Help Groups formed under DAY-NRLM. The plan is to equip 15,000 selected women SHGs with drones, which they hire out to farmers for spraying liquid fertiliser and pesticide and for crop monitoring. One woman from each SHG is trained as a drone pilot, so the group earns a rental income and the SHG becomes an agri-service enterprise. The other options are ruled out at once: the scheme is not meant for youth groups, government cooperatives or private technology firms. Hence option (a) is correct.

RBI Financial Inclusion Index The RBI's Financial Inclusion Index (FI-Index) is published every July on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 means complete exclusion and 100 complete inclusion. The index stood at 64.2 for the year ended March 2024 and at 67.0 for the year ended March 2025, so the improvement is 67.0-64.2=2.8. The gain was broad-based: all three sub-indices — Access (35% weight), Usage (45%) and Quality (20%) — improved, with Usage and Quality contributing the most. Hence option (b) is correct.

NITI Aayog District Hospital Index The District Hospital Index comes from the NITI Aayog report 'Best Practices in the Performance of District Hospitals', prepared with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and WHO India. Every district hospital in the country is scored on 10 Key Performance Indicators, which are grouped under two heads — Structure (inputs) and Output (services actually delivered). The indicators include beds per one lakh population, doctors, nurses and paramedics per bed, availability of core health-care services, diagnostic tests offered, bed occupancy rate and surgeries per surgeon. The index is meant to be used for peer comparison, so that a weak hospital can be matched against the best performer of its own bed-size category. Hence option (c) is correct.

7th NBWL meeting The seventh meeting of the National Board for Wildlife was held on 3 March 2025 — World Wildlife Day — at Sasan Gir in Gujarat, and was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The NBWL is the apex statutory body under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972; the Prime Minister is its Chairperson and it clears projects inside protected areas and eco-sensitive zones. At this meeting India's first riverine dolphin estimation report was released, putting the population at 6,327, and the foundation stone of the National Referral Centre for Wildlife at Junagadh was laid. Gir was chosen because it is the only natural home of the Asiatic lion, and the meeting also reviewed Project Lion and the Asiatic lion census. Hence option (c) is correct.

Indian English novels 'The Shadow Lines' (1988) was written by Amitav Ghosh and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989. The novel moves between Calcutta, Dhaka and London and argues that the lines drawn on maps at Partition are 'shadow lines' — the 1964 communal riots erupt on both sides of the border at once. Ghosh also wrote 'The Circle of Reason', 'The Glass Palace', the Ibis trilogy and 'Gun Island', and in 2018 became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award. Hence option (c) is correct.

Premchand's novels 'Godan' (1936), Premchand's last completed novel, is the realistic account of the Indian peasant and is called the epic of Indian peasantry. Its hero Hori Mahato spends his life longing for a cow of his own, and is destroyed by debt, the moneylender, the landlord's agent and caste custom; the 'gift of a cow' is finally made at his death. The other novels of Premchand deal with different themes, so they do not answer the question: Sevasadan with the plight of women, Nirmala with the ill-matched marriage and dowry, Rangbhoomi with the blind beggar Surdas and industrialisation. Hence option (b) is correct.

Jagannath Temple, Puri The Jagannath Temple stands at Puri in Odisha, on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. It was begun in the 12th century by Anantavarman Chodaganga Deva of the Eastern Ganga dynasty and completed by his successors; it is a classic example of the Kalinga style, with a deul about 65 m high. The deities Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra are made of neem wood and are replaced in the Nabakalebara ceremony; Puri is one of the four Char Dham. Its annual Rath Yatra, in which the three deities travel to the Gundicha temple, is the festival that gave the English language the word 'juggernaut'. Hence option (c) is correct.

Fairs of India The Nagaur Fair is held every year at Nagaur in Rajasthan, in the month of Magha (January-February). It is the second largest cattle fair of India after the Sonepur fair of Bihar; bullocks, camels and the Nagauri breed of cattle are traded here in tens of thousands. Alongside the trading there are camel races, tug-of-war, cock fights and a large Mirchi Bazaar, which is why it is also called the Ramdeoji Cattle Fair. Rajasthan also hosts the Pushkar camel fair, so cattle fairs of this kind are typical of the state's pastoral economy. Hence option (c) is correct.

Hawa Mahal, Jaipur The Hawa Mahal, the 'Palace of Winds', stands on the edge of the City Palace complex in Jaipur, Rajasthan. It was built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh and designed by Lal Chand Ustad; its five-storey pyramidal facade of red and pink sandstone is shaped like the crown of Lord Krishna. The 953 small jharokhas let cool air blow through the building and allowed the royal women, who observed purdah, to watch processions in the street without being seen. Jodhpur is known for Mehrangarh, Udaipur for the City Palace on Lake Pichola and Bikaner for Junagarh Fort, so none of them fits. Hence option (c) is correct.

Durga Puja rituals In West Bengal the Durga Puja celebration traditionally begins with Mahalaya, the new-moon day that closes Pitru Paksha and opens Devi Paksha, a week before the main puja. On Mahalaya the Goddess is invited to descend from Kailash to her father's house; Bengalis rise before dawn to hear the Mahishasura Mardini chant made famous by Birendra Krishna Bhadra on All India Radio. The same morning image-makers of Kumartuli perform Chokkhu Daan, painting the eyes of the idol, which is the moment the image is said to come alive. The formal worship in the pandal starts later, with Bodhon on Sasthi, and Ashtami and Navami fall still later, so none of those days marks the commencement. Hence option (d) is correct.

Folk dances of Uttarakhand Pandav Nritya, also called Pandav Lila, belongs to the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. It is a ritual dance-drama in which villagers enact episodes of the Mahabharata over several nights, the performers often going into a trance in which they are believed to be possessed by the Pandavas. It is staged after the harvest, around Dussehra and Diwali, to the beat of the dhol-damau and the note of the ransingha, and the weapons of the Pandavas kept in the village temple are worshipped. Uttarakhand's other folk dances — Chholiya, Jhora, Langvir and Barada Nati — belong to the same tradition, which places the form firmly in that state. Hence option (b) is correct.

Folk dances of the North-East Monyoasho is the dance of the Phom Naga tribe of Nagaland, performed at the Monyu festival held in the first week of April. Monyu marks the end of winter and the start of the sowing season; men in full warrior dress dance in rows to log-drum beats and the women serve rice beer and meat to visiting kinsmen. The clue is the tribe: Phom is one of the recognised Naga tribes of Longleng district, which fixes the dance in Nagaland rather than Manipur, Mizoram or Tripura. Hence option (b) is correct.

Cryogenic rocket fuel A rocket has to carry its own fuel, so the fuel that releases the most energy per kilogram gives the most velocity for the least lift-off mass. Hydrogen has by far the highest calorific value of any chemical fuel, about 120 MJ per kg — roughly three times that of kerosene — and burning it with liquid oxygen gives a specific impulse of about 450 s. Its exhaust is only water vapour, whose low molecular mass means a high exhaust velocity, which is exactly what the rocket equation rewards. The other options are false: hydrogen is a gas at ordinary conditions and must be kept liquid at about $-{253}^{\circ }$C, its combustion is strongly exothermic, and liquefying it is difficult and costly. Hence option (c) is correct.

Chandrayaan-1 mission Chandrayaan-1 was launched on 22 October 2008 by PSLV-C11 from Sriharikota and entered lunar orbit on 8 November 2008, so it was indeed India's first mission to the Moon — Statement I is correct. It carried 11 payloads, five Indian and six foreign, and dropped the Moon Impact Probe near the lunar south pole on 14 November 2008, making India the fourth nation to place its flag on the Moon. The NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper on board found the spectral signature of water and hydroxyl molecules in the lunar soil, announced in 2009 — Statement II is correct as well. Hence option (c) is correct.

Fluid friction (drag) The force that a liquid or a gas exerts against a body moving through it is called fluid friction, and its everyday name is drag — Statement I is correct. Drag is not a constant: for a body moving through air the drag force rises roughly as the square of the relative speed, $F\propto v^2$, so it certainly varies with the relative speed — Statement II is correct. Drag also depends on the viscosity of the fluid and on the shape and area presented to the flow, which is why aircraft, ships and cars are given streamlined bodies. Hence option (c) is correct.

Digital forensics research grant In 2025 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology sanctioned a grant of ₹4.2 crore jointly to IIIT Pune and NIT Raipur for next-generation digital forensic technology. The project is to build indigenous tools that can recover evidence from encrypted, damaged, cloned or counterfeit storage media, an area where Indian agencies now depend on costly foreign software. It also provides for a national repository of forensic disk images on which investigators and researchers can train and validate their tools. The work is led by Dr Bhupendra Singh at IIIT Pune with Dr Nitesh Bharadwaj at NIT Raipur, and is aimed at supporting law-enforcement agencies against cybercrime. Hence option (b) is correct.

Sectors of the economy The primary sector takes produce directly from nature, the secondary sector converts that produce into goods, and the tertiary sector provides services that support the first two. Growing groundnuts is a primary activity, but crushing them in a mill to extract oil changes the raw material into a new manufactured product, which is exactly what the secondary sector does. Since a natural product is being processed into a finished good, the activity belongs to the secondary or industrial sector, not to the primary sector. Hence option (b) is correct.

East-West Corridor, NHDP The East-West Corridor is part of Phase II of the National Highways Development Project and runs about 3,640 km from Silchar in Assam to Porbandar in Gujarat. It follows mainly National Highway 27 and passes through Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It crosses the North-South Corridor, which runs from Srinagar to Kanyakumari, at Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh; both corridors are executed by the NHAI as four-lane or more highways. Hence option (b) is correct.

Human heart chambers The human heart has four chambers — two atria above and two ventricles below — separated by the inter-atrial and inter-ventricular septa. The right side handles only deoxygenated blood coming from the body and sends it to the lungs; the left side handles only oxygenated blood returning from the lungs and pumps it to the body. The septa therefore keep the two kinds of blood completely separate, so tissues always receive fully oxygenated blood — the arrangement called double circulation. This efficiency is what allows warm-blooded animals to maintain a constant body temperature, whereas the three-chambered heart of an amphibian allows some mixing. Hence option (c) is correct.