24 November 2025 · Shift 2

Ancient royal titles The title joins two Sanskrit words - 'tribhuvana', the three worlds, and 'chakravartin', a universal sovereign. The three worlds are the earth, the sky or atmosphere, and the heavens, so the title literally means 'Lord of the Three Worlds'. It appears in inscriptions of imperial dynasties such as the Cholas and the Chalukyas, where a king who claimed paramountcy styled himself Tribhuvana-chakravartin. The other three options are invented, book-like phrases with no such Sanskrit basis, so option (b) is correct.

61st Constitutional Amendment The Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988 amended Article 326 and lowered the voting age in Lok Sabha and Legislative Assembly elections from 21 years to 18 years. It came into force on 28 March 1989, and the 1989 general election was the first in which 18-year-olds voted. The amendment was piloted by the Rajiv Gandhi government to bring the country's large young population into electoral politics. Hence option (c) is correct.

101st Amendment and GST The Constitution (One Hundred and First Amendment) Act, 2016 created the constitutional basis for the Goods and Services Tax, which took effect on 1 July 2017. It inserted Article 246A giving the Union and the States concurrent power to tax goods and services, Article 269A for inter-State supply, and Article 279A creating the GST Council. GST subsumed the older levies, so Service Tax, Value Added Tax and Central Sales Tax are taxes that GST replaced, not the reform itself. Hence option (c) is correct.

Awards and honours In March 2025 Barbados conferred the 'Honorary Order of Freedom of Barbados', its highest national honour for a non-citizen, on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Shri Pabitra Margherita, Minister of State for External Affairs and Textiles, received it on his behalf at the ceremony in Bridgetown from President Dame Sandra Mason. The honour recognised Mr Modi's leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, when India supplied vaccines to Barbados under the Vaccine Maitri initiative. Mr Modi dedicated the award to the 1.4 billion people of India, so option (c) is correct.

TB elimination in India Statement I is right: routing TB testing, drugs, nutrition support and follow-up through ordinary health facilities takes the service to every patient, which is precisely the aim of equitable and universal health coverage. Statement II is right: the National Strategic Plan for TB Elimination (2017-2025) set the goal of ending TB as a public health problem by 2025, five years ahead of the global SDG target of 2030, and integration is the main route to it. Statement III is wrong: malaria is tackled by a separate programme under the National Framework for Malaria Elimination and has nothing to do with TB services. So only I and II follow, and option (a) is correct.

JalVahak Scheme The JalVahak Scheme was launched in December 2024 by the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways to pull long-haul cargo off road and rail and on to the inland waterways. It offers a reimbursement of up to 35% of the operating expenditure to cargo owners who move goods by river over distances beyond 300 km, which makes water transport cost-competitive. A fixed-schedule cargo service was started on National Waterway 1 (Ganga), National Waterway 2 (Brahmaputra) and National Waterway 16 (Barak), including the Indo-Bangladesh Protocol Route. The purpose is therefore to incentivise cargo movement through inland waterways, not tourism, drinking water or naval defence. Hence option (b) is correct.

SDG India Index The SDG India Index is prepared by NITI Aayog to score every State and Union Territory on how far it has moved towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. First released in 2018, it was the world's first government-led sub-national measurement of SDG progress. Each State is scored from 0 to 100 across goals such as health, education, gender equality, clean water, poverty reduction and climate action, and is then placed in a performance band. Farmers, students and private companies are not the units the Index measures; it ranks governments, that is States and Union Territories. Hence option (c) is correct.

Asian Games 2023 shooting At the 19th Asian Games held in Hangzhou in 2023, Palak Gulia won India's gold medal in the Women's 10 m Air Pistol individual event. She was 17 at the time and finished the final with 242.1 points, a Games record. India took both the top places in that final, as Esha Singh won the silver, and Palak also shared the team silver in the same event with Esha Singh and Divya T. S. The rifle and trap events listed in the other options were not hers, so they can be ruled out. Hence option (c) is correct.

Paris Olympics 2024 India finished 71st on the medal table of the Paris Olympics 2024. The tally was six medals — one silver and five bronze — and because an Olympic medal table is ranked first by the number of gold medals, having no gold pushed India down to 71st place. Neeraj Chopra's silver in the men's javelin throw was the best of these results, while Manu Bhaker became the first Indian to win two medals at a single Olympic Games since independence. Hence option (c) is correct.

Phases of track events A track sprint is analysed in four phases: the start, acceleration, maximum velocity and the closing deceleration or speed-maintenance phase. The question asks which of the four options is NOT one of these, so the three genuine phases — start, acceleration and maximum velocity — are all eliminated. 'Recovery' is not a phase of the race at all. Within a stride it is the moment when the leg swings forward after leaving the ground, and outside the race it means the rest taken after training or competition. Hence option (d) is correct.

AroTrack biosensor AroTrack, unveiled by IIT Bombay in December 2024, is a portable low-cost biosensor that detects aromatic pollutants such as phenol, benzene and xylenol in water. Its name comes from 'aromatic tracking', and it works on the bacterial protein MopR, which binds these aromatic molecules and produces a signal that the device reads within minutes. Because it is hand-held and needs no laboratory, it can be taken to a lake, river or well and used on the spot even in remote areas. Its purpose is therefore to identify contamination in surface water bodies; railway surveillance, seismic sensing and humidity measurement are unrelated to it. Hence option (d) is correct.

Indian English literature Ruskin Bond wrote 'The Room on the Roof' at the age of 17; it was published in 1956 and won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The novel is semi-autobiographical and follows Rusty, an Anglo-Indian boy who runs away from his guardian in Dehradun — the same hill-town setting that runs through most of Bond's writing. His other well-known books include 'The Blue Umbrella', 'A Flight of Pigeons' and 'Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra', for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992. Hence option (b) is correct.

Konark Sun Temple European sailors called the Sun Temple at Konark the 'Black Pagoda' because its dark stone tower stood out against the Odisha coast and served them as a navigation landmark. The whitewashed Jagannath Temple at Puri, visible from the same stretch of sea, was correspondingly called the 'White Pagoda'. The Konark temple was built about 1250 CE by Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty and is shaped as the chariot of Surya, with 24 carved stone wheels drawn by seven horses. It is a masterpiece of Kalinga architecture and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. Hence option (b) is correct.

Fairs of Punjab The Chhappar Mela is held at Chhappar village in the Ludhiana district of Punjab and is dedicated to Gugga Pir, also called Gugga Jaharpir or Goga Ji. Gugga Pir was a Chauhan Rajput warrior-hero who is venerated in north India as the deity of snakes, and devotees come to his shrine to seek protection from snakebite. The fair falls in the month of Bhadon, that is in September, and lasts for about three days. Baba Farid is remembered by the Baba Sheikh Farid Agman Purb Mela at Faridkot, so option (a) belongs to a different fair. Hence option (c) is correct.

Mauryan art and architecture Large-scale stone architecture in India begins in the reign of Ashoka (c. 268–232 BCE), the third Mauryan emperor. He set up monolithic sandstone pillars carrying his edicts, finished with the famous high-gloss 'Mauryan polish' and crowned with animal capitals; the Lion Capital from the Sarnath pillar is today India's State Emblem. He is credited with raising stupas across the empire to enshrine the Buddha's relics, including the original brick core of the Sanchi Stupa. He also began rock-cut architecture by excavating the Barabar caves in Bihar and granting them to the Ajivika sect. Bimbisara and Ajatashatru belonged to the earlier Haryanka dynasty of Magadha and were not Mauryas at all, while Bindusara left behind no such building programme. Hence option (c) is correct.

Kandali Festival The Kandali Festival is celebrated by the Rung or Shauka tribe of the Chaudans valley in Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand. It is held only once in twelve years, because that is how long the Kandali shrub (Strobilanthes) takes to flower. When the plant blooms, the community ceremonially cuts it down with swords, re-enacting a local legend in which enemy raiders had once hidden themselves in the Kandali bushes. Other well-known festivals of Uttarakhand are Phool Dei, Harela and the Nanda Devi Raj Jat Yatra, the last of which is also a twelve-yearly event. Hence option (b) is correct.

Folk dances of Mizoram Sarlamkai, also called Solakia, is the warrior dance of the Pawi and Mara communities of southern Mizoram. It was danced after a victory in battle, in the belief that the spirit of the enemy killed in the fight would then serve the victor in the next world. The dancers move in a slow, measured step to gongs and drums, without any singing, which is what distinguishes it from other Mizo dances. Hence option (b) is correct.

Anglo-Mysore Wars Hyder Ali died of cancer in December 1782 while the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780–1784) was still being fought, and his son Tipu Sultan succeeded him as ruler of Mysore. Tipu carried on the campaign against the English East India Company and forced it to negotiate. The war ended with the Treaty of Mangalore in March 1784, under which both sides returned the territories they had captured. The First war ended in 1769, well before Tipu's accession, while the Third and Fourth wars came in 1790–92 and 1799, after he was already on the throne. Hence option (b) is correct.

Malhotra Committee The Malhotra Committee, formally the Committee on Reforms in the Insurance Sector, was set up in 1993 under the chairmanship of R. N. Malhotra, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Its report of 1994 recommended ending the state monopoly of LIC and GIC by letting private and foreign companies enter through joint ventures, and setting up an independent regulator for the industry. Those recommendations led to the IRDA Act of 1999 and to the actual opening of the insurance sector in the year 2000. The banking reforms of the same decade were the work of the Narasimham Committee, which is the usual point of confusion here. Hence option (c) is correct.

Question Hour in Parliament The first hour of a sitting of the Lok Sabha, from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, is the Question Hour, in which members put questions to ministers and the government is bound to answer. Questions are of three kinds: starred, answered orally and followed by supplementary questions; unstarred, answered in writing; and short-notice questions on urgent matters. Zero Hour is not the first hour at all — it is the informal period that begins right after Question Hour, at 12 noon, when members raise urgent matters without prior notice. Question Hour is the sharpest instrument of parliamentary accountability, since it lets the House examine the working of every ministry. Hence option (b) is correct.

Conditions for wheat Wheat is the main rabi crop of India and it does best in a temperate to subtropical climate, where the winter is cool and moist and the harvest season is warm and dry. It needs about 10–15°C while the crop is growing and about 20–25°C at the time of ripening, with 50–75 cm of rainfall well spread over the growing period. Bright, dry weather at harvest is essential, since rain at that stage spoils the grain. A hot and humid tropical climate suits rice and jute rather than wheat, so options (a), (b) and (d) do not fit the crop. Hence option (c) is correct.

Census 2011 growth rate In Census 2011 Nagaland was the only State in the country to record a negative decadal population growth rate, $-0.58\%$ for the decade 2001–2011. The fall is explained by the previous count: in 2001 Nagaland had reported an abnormally high growth of $64.53\%$, and when the 2011 enumeration corrected that inflated figure the decade showed a decline. All the other options grew during the same decade, so none of them can be the answer. Hence option (b) is correct.

Fourth Five-Year Plan The Fourth Five-Year Plan ran from 1969 to 1974 and was implemented under Indira Gandhi, who as Prime Minister was the ex-officio Chairperson of the Planning Commission. It followed the three-year 'Plan Holiday' of 1966–69, which had been forced by the wars, the droughts and the failure of the Third Plan. Its two slogans were 'growth with stability' and 'progressive achievement of self-reliance', and central assistance to States was distributed by the Gadgil Formula. The nationalisation of 14 major banks in 1969, the war of 1971 and the 1974 nuclear test all fall within this plan period, and the heavy war and refugee expenditure kept its targets from being met. Hence option (c) is correct.

Rural settlement patterns The pattern of a rural settlement is decided by where people can live, how they organise themselves socially and what they do for a living, so all three determinants listed are at work. Physical features — relief, drainage, water supply and soil — fix the site: compact villages grow on the fertile plains, while hills and forests force a dispersed or hamleted pattern. Social structure, that is caste, kinship and community grouping, often splits one village into separate clusters lying a little apart from each other. Economic activities such as farming, fishing, mining and trade decide the size and the shape, which is why a fishing village strings out along the shore and a market village clusters at a crossing. Since I, II and III all apply, the answer must include every one of them. Hence option (d) is correct.

Chalcolithic Age The name Chalcolithic itself gives the answer: it comes from the Greek khalkos, meaning copper, and lithos, meaning stone, that is the age in which copper tools were used alongside stone ones. Copper was the first metal that early societies used systematically, because it occurs in a nearly pure native form and is soft enough to be hammered and melted at a low temperature. In India this stage runs roughly from 3000 BCE to 700 BCE and is seen in the Ahar-Banas, Kayatha, Malwa and Jorwe cultures, whose people made copper axes, chisels and ornaments while still using stone microliths. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin and so must come after copper; iron appears only around 1000 BCE; and gold was worked for ornament, never for everyday tools. Hence option (d) is correct.