22 November 2025 · Shift 2

Gurjara-Pratihara inscriptions The inscription of the Pratihara ruler Nagabhata was found at Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. Known as the Gwalior Prashasti, this Sanskrit record was engraved in the reign of Mihira Bhoja and gives the genealogy of the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty. Its most famous claim is that Nagabhata I crushed the Arab (called Mlechchha) armies advancing from Sindh in the 8th century CE, which is why he is treated as the real founder of Pratihara power. Kannauj was the later imperial capital of the dynasty, not the find-spot of this record, while Hyderabad and Kabul lay well outside Pratihara territory. Hence, option (a) is the correct answer.

SCO - RATS The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) is a permanent organ of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). It began work in 2004 and its Executive Committee sits at Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Its mandate is the SCO's fight against the 'three evils' - terrorism, separatism and extremism - through shared intelligence, a common database of wanted persons and joint drills such as 'Peaceful Mission'. India, a full SCO member since 2017, takes part in RATS meetings and exercises; ASEAN, NATO and the CIS run their own security mechanisms, but RATS is not one of them. Hence, option (b) is the correct answer.

SCO official languages The SCO recognises only two official working languages - Chinese and Russian. The choice reflects the founders: the grouping grew out of the 'Shanghai Five' and was formally created at Shanghai in 2001 with China and Russia as its anchors. Its Secretariat is at Beijing and the RATS Executive Committee at Tashkent; membership stood at 10 states in July 2025 after Iran joined in 2023 and Belarus in 2024. Arabic, German and Japanese have no official status in the organisation, as none of their home states is an SCO member. Hence, option (b) is the correct answer.

Dadasaheb Phalke Award The Dadasaheb Phalke Lifetime Achievement Award for 2022 - the 54th in the series - went to Mithun Chakraborty. It was announced in September 2024 and presented at the 70th National Film Awards ceremony in October 2024. He won a National Award for Best Actor with his very first film Mrigayaa (1976) and became a nationwide craze as the 'Disco Dancer' of the 1982 hit of that name; the Padma Bhushan followed in 2024. Rajinikanth had already received the award for 2019, so he cannot be the answer for 2022. Hence, option (d) is the correct answer.

Chief Ministers - Haryana Nayab Singh Saini took oath as Chief Minister of Haryana on 17 October 2024 at Panchkula. The oath followed the BJP's win in the Haryana assembly election of October 2024, its third straight term in the state. He had first become Chief Minister in March 2024, succeeding Manohar Lal Khattar, and he won the 2024 election from the Ladwa seat in Kurukshetra district. Hence, option (c) is the correct answer.

Ambassadorial appointment In October 2024 the Ministry of External Affairs announced Sanjeev Kumar Singla, an Indian Foreign Service officer of the 1997 batch, as India's next Ambassador to France. He moved to Paris from Tel Aviv, where he had been India's Ambassador to Israel since 2019, and before that he was Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 2014 to 2019. The posting matters because France is one of the very few countries with which India has a strategic partnership covering defence, civil nuclear energy and space at the same time. The other three names are senior diplomats, but none of them held the Paris assignment. So the correct option is (b).

High Court on media violence Justice C. S. Sudha was a judge of the Kerala High Court, and in March 2025 the specially constituted division bench she sat on asked how far the State may go in regulating the portrayal of violence in visual media. The bench was hearing petitions that grew out of the Justice Hema Committee report on working conditions in the Malayalam film industry, and it spoke of the "undesirable effect" of films that glorify violence. The difficulty is constitutional: any such regulation is a restriction on the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) and must fit within the reasonable restrictions of Article 19(2). Films are already certified by the Central Board of Film Certification under the Cinematograph Act, 1952, so the real question before the Court was whether further State intervention is permissible at all. So the correct option is (c).

PMJDY implementing ministry Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana is a banking scheme, so it is run by the Department of Financial Services under the Ministry of Finance. It was launched on 28 August 2014 and completed ten years in August 2024, by which time more than 53 crore accounts had been opened, over half of them by women. Each account carries a RuPay debit card with an accidental insurance cover of ₹2 lakh, needs no minimum balance, and allows an overdraft of up to ₹10,000. Its real importance is as the first leg of the JAM trinity - Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile - through which Direct Benefit Transfer reaches beneficiaries without leakage. So the correct option is (c).

RBI publications The Financial Stability Report is brought out by the RBI twice a year, usually in June and December; it reviews the risks to financial stability and reports the stress-test results and the gross NPA projections of banks. The Handbook of Statistics on the Indian Economy is also an RBI publication - an annual compendium of long time-series data on money, banking, prices, output, trade and the external sector. Both statements therefore name genuine RBI publications. So the correct option is (a).

Kabaddi federation The All-India Kabaddi Federation was founded in 1950 to frame a single set of rules for a game that until then was played with different rules in different regions, and to conduct national championships. It organised the first national championship for men in 1952; in 1972 it was reorganised as the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India, which governs the sport in the country today. Kabaddi was demonstrated at the 1951 Asian Games in New Delhi and became a full medal event at the 1990 Beijing Asian Games, which India won. So the correct option is (a).

Sports autobiography "Faster Than Lightning: My Story", published in 2013, is the autobiography of the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, and the title itself points to his nickname, Lightning Bolt. Bolt still holds the world records of 9.58 seconds in the 100 m and 19.19 seconds in the 200 m, both set at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. He won eight Olympic gold medals and is the only sprinter to take both the 100 m and the 200 m title at three successive Olympics - 2008, 2012 and 2016. Michael Johnson's book is "Slaying the Dragon", so option (a) is the tempting but wrong choice. So the correct option is (b).

Dravida temple architecture A Dravida temple stands inside a walled compound, and the huge sculpted gateway placed in the middle of the front wall of that compound is the gopuram. The other three words name different parts, which is what makes the question a test of vocabulary rather than of memory. Under the Vijayanagara and later the Nayaka rulers the gopurams were built taller and taller until they dwarfed the vimana itself, as in the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. So the correct option is (a).

Tribal festival Nazu is a ten-day pre-sowing festival of the Pochury tribe of Nagaland, celebrated in February in the Phek district. It marks the turn of the agricultural cycle: the fields have been prepared and the sowing is about to begin, so the days are given over to feasting, song and community bonding rather than elaborate ritual. Its best-known element is the Khupielilie dance performed by the women of the village in traditional dress. Almost every Naga tribe has its own such festival - Sekrenyi of the Angami, Moatsu of the Ao, Tuluni of the Sumi - and all of them are showcased together at the Hornbill Festival held every December at Kisama. So the correct option is (c).

Folk dance of a state Tlanglam is a folk dance of Mizoram, danced by men and women together to the beat of the khuang, the Mizo drum, with the dancers wearing the traditional puan. It is one of the main attractions of Chapchar Kut, the spring festival celebrated after the jhum patches have been cleared and left to dry. The dance to remember it against is Cheraw, the Mizo bamboo dance; Cheraw uses clapping bamboo staves, while Tlanglam depends entirely on graceful hand and upper-body movement. So the correct option is (a).

Effects of friction Friction is the force that opposes relative motion between two surfaces in contact, so the surfaces rub against each other, heat up and are slowly worn away. This wear and tear of moving parts - tyres, shoe soles, gears, bearings - is the chief disadvantage of friction, since worn parts must be replaced and machines have to be shut down. The energy used against friction is converted into heat and sound, so it is lost as far as useful work is concerned; that is why friction lowers efficiency instead of raising output. Options (a), (b) and (c) describe the opposite of what friction does, and (b) and (c) are simply false for that reason. Lubrication, ball bearings and streamlining are the standard ways of reducing friction, which is why it is called a necessary evil. So the correct option is (d).

Solar mission The Parker Solar Probe was launched by NASA in August 2018 and in 2021 became the first spacecraft to fly through the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona. It is the fastest human-made object, touching about $6.9\times {10}^5$ km/h near perihelion, and survives the heat behind a carbon-composite shield about 11.5 cm thick. It is also the first NASA mission named after a living person - the astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the solar wind in 1958. The comparison worth remembering is that ESA's own Sun mission is Solar Orbiter and India's is Aditya-L1, parked at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L1. So the correct option is (c).

National Supercomputing Mission As of March 2025, 34 supercomputers had been installed at academic and research institutions across India under the National Supercomputing Mission. The mission was approved in 2015 with an outlay of about ₹4,500 crore and is run jointly by MeitY and the Department of Science and Technology, with C-DAC Pune and IISc Bengaluru as the implementing agencies. It moves in three phases - assembling imported systems, then building systems partly in India, and finally designing and manufacturing them wholly in India. PARAM Shivay at IIT (BHU) was the first machine deployed, and three PARAM Rudra systems were dedicated to the nation in September 2024. So the correct option is (b).

Income concepts National income is national product at factor cost, and it is classified by who receives it: the part accruing to the private sector is private income, and the part earned from government property and public enterprises is public income. Statement II is therefore correct. Private income is not all received by households, because corporations retain a part as undistributed profits and pay corporate tax out of it. What is left and actually reaches households is personal income, so statement I is correct as well. Subtracting direct taxes from personal income gives personal disposable income, which is what households can actually spend or save. So the correct option is (c).

National Logistics Policy The National Logistics Policy was launched on 17 September 2022 by the Prime Minister. Its declared aim is to bring logistics cost down from roughly 13-14 per cent of GDP to a single digit by 2030 and to improve India's rank on the Logistics Performance Index. Its main instruments are the Unified Logistics Interface Platform for data exchange across transport modes, the Ease of Logistics Services portal for grievance redress, and the Comprehensive Logistics Action Plan. It is the software companion of the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan of 2021, which builds the physical multimodal infrastructure. So the correct option is (c).

Maratha administration Chhatrapati Shivaji ran his kingdom through a council of eight ministers, the Ashta Pradhan, and the head of that council was the Peshwa, the chief executive minister in charge of general administration. He was first called Mukhya Pradhan; his seal was affixed to every royal document after the king's own. Under Chhatrapati Shahu the office became hereditary in the family of Balaji Vishwanath, and the Peshwas became the real rulers of the Maratha empire with Pune as their seat. Wazir and Amir are Sultanate and Mughal titles and a mansabdar was a Mughal rank-holder, so none of them fits a Maratha office. So the correct option is (b).

Nawabs of Bengal Alivardi Khan ruled Bengal from 1740 and on his death in April 1756 his grandson Sirajuddaulah succeeded him as Nawab. Sirajuddaulah seized Calcutta the same year, and the alleged Black Hole episode that followed gave the English East India Company its pretext for war. At the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757 his commander Mir Jafar deserted him, Robert Clive won without a real fight, and Sirajuddaulah became the last independent Nawab of Bengal. Mir Qasim came only after Mir Jafar, while Saadat Khan founded the Awadh line and Shuja-ud-Daula was its Nawab, not Bengal's. So the correct option is (d).

Road network of India India has the second largest road network in the world, of the order of 63 lakh km, and about 80 per cent of that length is rural roads - village roads and other district roads. The contrast worth remembering is that National Highways form barely 2 per cent of the length but carry roughly 40 per cent of the road traffic. Rural roads are built mainly under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, launched in 2000 to give every eligible habitation an all-weather road. So the correct option is (a).

Architect of Indian planning Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis is called the chief architect of India's planning system because the Mahalanobis two-sector model became the analytical framework of the Second Five Year Plan (1956-61). That plan turned the country towards heavy and basic industries in the public sector, on the argument that a large capital-goods sector today makes faster growth of consumer goods possible tomorrow. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931 and pioneered large-scale sample surveys, out of which the National Sample Survey grew; his birthday, 29 June, is observed as National Statistics Day. Nehru chaired the Planning Commission as Prime Minister and gave planning its political direction, but the technical design was Mahalanobis's, which is why option (a) is the tempting wrong choice. So the correct option is (b).

Factors of migration The factors that influence migration are broadly put into two categories - push factors, which operate at the place of origin, and pull factors, which operate at the place of destination. Push factors drive people out: unemployment, poverty, low farm productivity, drought or flood, and social or political unrest. Pull factors draw people in: better jobs and wages, education and health facilities, security and a higher standard of living. In India this single pair explains most of the rural-to-urban stream, which is the largest migration stream for males. So the correct option is (a).

Rig Veda The Rig Veda is a collection of 1,028 hymns or suktas, arranged in 10 mandalas and containing roughly 10,600 verses. Mandalas II to VII are the oldest and are called the family books, each ascribed to one priestly family; Mandalas I, VIII, IX and X were added later. Mandala IX is devoted wholly to Soma, and Mandala X contains the Purusha Sukta, the first mention of the four varnas, as well as the Nasadiya Sukta on creation. It is the oldest of the four Vedas, is dated to about 1500-1000 BCE, and is inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. So the correct option is (c).