29 November 2025 · Shift 2

Bhakti movement saints The Nayanars were the 63 Tamil poet-saints of South India who sang in devotion to Lord Shiva. They flourished roughly between the 6th and 9th centuries and led the Bhakti movement in the Tamil country; their hymns are collected in the Tevaram, which forms part of the Tirumurai. An easy way to remember: Nayanars go with Shiva, Alvars go with Vishnu, and the two groups were contemporaries. That contrast rules out option (a), while Surya and Agni are Vedic deities with no Nayanar tradition attached to them. Hence option (c) is correct.

Constitutional offices Article 148 of the Constitution creates the independent office of the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. The CAG is appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal and can be removed only in the same manner as a judge of the Supreme Court, which is what secures the independence of the office. Called the guardian of the public purse, the CAG audits the accounts of both the Union and the States. The other options belong elsewhere: Article 151 covers the submission of the CAG's audit reports, Article 76 the Attorney-General of India and Article 145 the rules of the Supreme Court. Hence option (b) is correct.

Directive Principles Part IV of the Constitution, Articles 36 to 51, contains the Directive Principles of State Policy. They direct the State towards a welfare state: socio-economic justice, reduction of inequalities and an equitable distribution of material resources. They are non-justiciable, yet Article 37 declares them fundamental in the governance of the country, so no government can ignore them in policy. The other parts do different work: Part III holds the Fundamental Rights, Part II citizenship and Part V the Union government. Hence option (c) is correct.

BRICS summit 2025 The 17th BRICS Leaders' Summit was held on 6-7 July 2025 at Rio de Janeiro under the chairmanship of Brazil. Brazil held the BRICS presidency for 2025 with the theme of strengthening Global South cooperation for more inclusive and sustainable governance. The summit adopted the Rio de Janeiro Declaration and pressed for reform of global governance, action on climate change and greater use of local currencies in trade. It was also the first leaders' summit attended by Indonesia as a full member of the grouping. Hence option (b) is correct.

International organisations The Asian Development Bank was formally established on 19 December 1966. It is headquartered in Manila, Philippines, and started with 31 member countries under its first President, Takeshi Watanabe. Modelled on the World Bank, it gives loans, grants and technical assistance to its developing member countries in Asia and the Pacific, with poverty reduction and infrastructure as its focus. India is a founding member and one of the ADB's largest borrowers. Hence option (c) is correct.

Women's education reform Savitribai Phule (1831-1897) is recognised as India's first woman teacher; in 1848 she and her husband Jyotirao Phule opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada in Pune, the first girls' school in the country run by Indians themselves. Jyotirao trained her to teach, and she walked to the school through open hostility - dung and stones were thrown at her - carrying a spare sari to change into; within a few years the couple were running a chain of schools for girls and for Dalit children. She also founded, with Jyotirao, the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and a shelter for widows and their children, and she died in 1897 while nursing patients during the plague epidemic in Pune. The other three worked in different fields or later times, so none of them is called India's first woman teacher. Hence option (b) is correct.

Indians in world bodies In October 2017 Dr. Soumya Swaminathan became the first Indian to be appointed Deputy Director-General (Programmes) of the World Health Organization. A paediatrician and clinical scientist known for her work on tuberculosis and HIV, she had headed the Indian Council of Medical Research and served as Secretary, Department of Health Research, before moving to Geneva. In 2019 WHO created the post of Chief Scientist for her, and in that role she led the organisation's science and evidence work through the COVID-19 pandemic; she is the daughter of the agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan. The other three are distinguished Indian scientists but held Indian posts - Chandrima Shaha was the first woman President of the Indian National Science Academy and Renu Swarup a Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology. Hence option (c) is correct.

CBDT leadership In mid-2025 the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet re-appointed Ravi Agrawal, a 1988-batch Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax) officer, as Chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes on contract for one more year, from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026. He had taken charge of the post on 1 July 2024, so the re-appointment kept the same head in place while the Income-tax Bill, 2025 - the rewrite of the 1961 Act - was under consideration and faceless assessment and e-filing services were being widened. The CBDT is the apex policy-making body for direct taxes; it works under the Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, was given statutory backing by the Central Boards of Revenue Act, 1963, and consists of a Chairman and six Members. Hence option (b) is correct.

Cooperative bank loan case In mid-2025 the Crime Investigation Department of the Andaman and Nicobar Police arrested Kuldeep Rai Sharma, former Lok Sabha member from the islands and former chairman of the Andaman & Nicobar State Cooperative Bank Ltd (ANSCBL), on 18 July 2025. The case rests on an FIR of May 2025 alleging that the bank's managing committee sanctioned loans while overriding its own loan-screening committee and ignoring CIBIL reports and the mandatory documents. The Enforcement Directorate then took up the money-laundering side of the case and carried out its first-ever search operation in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands at premises linked to him on 31 July and 1 August 2025. A State Cooperative Bank sits at the apex of the three-tier short-term cooperative credit structure of a State or Union Territory and is regulated jointly by the Reserve Bank of India and the Registrar of Cooperative Societies. Hence option (c) is correct.

Fund of Funds for Startups The Union Budget 2025-26 announced a second Fund of Funds for Startups with a fresh contribution of ₹10,000 crore. The first Fund of Funds for Startups, announced in 2016 under the Startup India initiative, also carried a corpus of ₹10,000 crore, so the second fund doubles the government's commitment to this route. The fund is operated by SIDBI, which does not invest in a startup directly; it puts money into SEBI-registered Alternative Investment Funds, and each such fund must invest at least twice the amount drawn in eligible startups. The second fund is aimed at deep-tech, early-stage and long-gestation ventures, and was announced together with a proposed ₹20,000 crore outlay for research, development and innovation. Hence option (b) is correct.

Union Budget 2025-26 health The Union Budget 2025-26 proposed 200 Day Care Cancer Centres in district hospitals during 2025-26, with the stated aim of covering every district hospital within three years. A day-care centre lets a patient come in for chemotherapy or a follow-up and go home the same day, so treatment moves closer to the patient's home and the load on tertiary cancer institutes falls. The same budget added 36 life-saving drugs, many of them for cancer and rare diseases, to the list fully exempted from basic customs duty, and put 6 more in the concessional $5\%$ slab. Hence option (a) is correct.

Infrastructure readiness index The National Infrastructure Readiness Index (NIRI) was introduced by the Government of India in September 2024, through the Ministry of Finance. It scores States, Union Territories and infrastructure ministries on how ready they are to plan, finance and deliver infrastructure - policy framework, institutional capacity, project preparation and use of available funding routes. The declared purpose is competitive and cooperative federalism: a ranking exposes where the gaps lie and pushes States to improve the climate for infrastructure investment. It sits alongside the earlier instruments of infrastructure policy - the National Infrastructure Pipeline of 2019 and the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan of 2021 - rather than replacing them. Hence option (b) is correct.

Asian Games history The first Asian Games were held at New Delhi from 4 to 11 March 1951, at the National Stadium - today the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium - and were opened by President Rajendra Prasad. Eleven countries took part in six sports; Japan headed the medal table and India finished second. The Games grew out of the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 and the efforts of Guru Dutt Sondhi; their motto is "Ever Onward" and they are now held every four years under the Olympic Council of Asia. New Delhi hosted them a second time in 1982, with Appu the elephant as mascot; Manila, Bangkok and Seoul hosted later editions, not the first. Hence option (c) is correct.

Sports bodies in India The National Swimming Association of India was established in 1949 as a national body to organise and regulate competitive swimming in the country. Organised swimming in India is older than the association - clubs in Calcutta and Bombay had been holding meets since the early twentieth century - but a single national body was needed to hold national championships and to select teams for international events. The timing mattered: swimming was one of the six sports at the first Asian Games, held at New Delhi only two years later in 1951. Aquatic sports in India - swimming, diving, water polo and artistic swimming - are today governed by the Swimming Federation of India, which is affiliated to World Aquatics, the international federation. Hence option (b) is correct.

National Green Tribunal In mid-2025 the National Green Tribunal imposed environmental compensation of ₹23.7 crore on government authorities in Uttar Pradesh for letting untreated sewage and solid waste damage a notified green belt. Such a levy is not an ordinary fine: under the "polluter pays" principle the money is recovered from the defaulting authority itself and is earmarked for restoring the damaged site. The Tribunal was set up by the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 to decide cases on environmental protection, forests and other natural resources; India was the third country in the world, after Australia and New Zealand, to create such a body. Its principal bench sits at New Delhi with zonal benches at Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai, it is not bound by the Code of Civil Procedure, and it is expected to dispose of an application within six months. Hence option (b) is correct.

Sports federations The Gymnastics Federation of India was formally set up on 17 February 1951 and is registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. It is the national governing body for gymnastics in India - artistic, rhythmic, trampoline and aerobic - and is affiliated to the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) and the Asian Gymnastics Union, besides being recognised by the Indian Olympic Association. Its best known gymnast is Dipa Karmakar, who finished fourth in the vault at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016 using the Produnova, and who in 2024 won India's first gold at the Asian Gymnastics Championships. Hence option (b) is correct.

Fossil park location Salkhan Fossil Park, also called the Sonbhadra Fossil Park, lies at Salkhan village in Sonbhadra district, in the south-eastern corner of Uttar Pradesh, on the Kaimur range. It preserves stromatolites - layered mounds built up by colonies of cyanobacteria - that are about 1.4 billion years old and belong to the Mesoproterozoic era, making them among the oldest records of life on Earth. The park lies within the Kaimur Wildlife Sanctuary and has been placed on India's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status. Sonbhadra is the only district in India that touches four States - Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar. Hence option (b) is correct.

Athletics championships host The World Athletics Cross Country Championships 2026 are to be hosted by the United States of America, on 10 January 2026 at Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee, Florida. This is the 46th edition and the first held in the United States since Boston in 1992; the previous edition was staged at Belgrade, Serbia, in 2024. The championships are held every two years by World Athletics - the body renamed from the IAAF in 2019 - and the programme has senior men's, senior women's, under-20 men's and under-20 women's races along with a mixed relay. Hence option (b) is correct.

Baisakhi and the Khalsa Baisakhi commemorates the founding of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, at Anandpur Sahib on Baisakhi day in 1699. The Guru asked the gathering for volunteers ready to give their heads, initiated the five who came forward as the Panj Pyare with amrit stirred with a khanda, and then took amrit from them himself; initiated men took the name Singh and women Kaur, and the five Ks became the mark of the order. Baisakhi is at the same time the spring-harvest festival of Punjab, and it is on Baisakhi day in 1919 that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place at Amritsar. The other options belong to other occasions: the Adi Granth was compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604, Guru Tegh Bahadur was martyred in 1675, and Harmandir Sahib was built in Guru Arjan's time. Hence option (d) is correct.

1991 economic reforms The 1991 reforms rest on liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, and their basic aim was to dismantle the "Licence-Permit Raj" - that is, to cut regulation and let the private sector take a larger part in production. The New Industrial Policy of 24 July 1991 abolished industrial licensing for all but a short list of industries, cut the industries reserved for the public sector from 17 to 8, dropped the MRTP ceiling on the size of firms and allowed foreign direct investment up to $51\%$ automatically in 34 industries. The trigger was the balance-of-payments crisis: foreign exchange reserves had fallen to about two weeks of imports, and the reform budget was presented by Finance Minister Manmohan Singh in the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao. The other three options describe exactly what the reforms moved away from - more state control, more protection and tighter limits on foreign capital. Hence option (c) is correct.

Battle of Plassey The Battle of Plassey, fought on 23 June 1757 on the bank of the Bhagirathi, was the East India Company's first decisive political breakthrough in India. Robert Clive, with about 3,000 men, beat Siraj-ud-Daulah's far larger army because Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander, held his troops out of the fight after a secret understanding with the Company; Mir Jafar was then installed as Nawab of Bengal. The victory handed the Company control of the revenues of the richest province in India and turned a trading body into a political power - which is why Plassey, not a bigger battle, is called the turning point. The Battle of Buxar in 1764 came later and only confirmed that power; it led to the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765, by which the Company obtained the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. Hence option (b) is correct.

Ilbert Bill The Ilbert Bill was drafted in 1883 by Sir Courtenay Ilbert, the Law Member of the Viceroy's Council, during the viceroyalty of Lord Ripon. It proposed to let Indian district magistrates and sessions judges try Europeans in criminal cases; until then a European accused could be tried only by a European judge, which was a plain racial privilege. The European community in India ran a furious agitation against it - remembered as the "White Mutiny" - and the bill was so amended in 1884 that a European could claim a jury at least half of whose members were Europeans. The episode showed educated Indians both the depth of racial prejudice and the power of organised agitation, and is counted among the immediate causes of the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Hence option (a) is correct.

Rupee devaluation, 1991 Faced with a balance-of-payments crisis, the Reserve Bank of India devalued the rupee in two steps in the first week of July 1991. The first step, on 1 July 1991, was about $9\%$ and the second, on 3 July 1991, about $11\%$. Taken together the two steps came to roughly $18\%$ to $19\%$ against the US dollar, which is the "around 18%" of option (a). The exercise, carried out by Governor S. Venkitaramanan under Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and nicknamed the "hop, skip and jump" devaluation, was meant to make exports competitive and stop the drain on reserves. It was followed by the dual exchange rate under LERMS in 1992 and by full convertibility on the current account in 1994. Hence option (a) is correct.

State legislatures Rajasthan has a unicameral legislature: only a Legislative Assembly (Vidhan Sabha) and no Legislative Council. At present only six States have a Legislative Council - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh - and the three other options are all in that list. Article 169 allows Parliament to create or abolish a Council, but only after the Assembly of the State passes a resolution by a majority of its total membership and by two-thirds of the members present and voting. A Council may not be larger than one-third of the Assembly and never smaller than 40 members; it is a continuing house, one-third of whose members retire every two years. Hence option (c) is correct.

Article 253 Statement 1 is correct. Article 253 lets Parliament make any law for the whole or any part of India to implement a treaty, agreement or convention with another country, or a decision taken at an international conference or body. This power overrides the ordinary division of subjects, so Parliament may legislate under Article 253 even on a State List entry when the law is needed to honour an international obligation. Statement 2 is also correct. Article 253 stands in Part XI of the Constitution, "Relations between the Union and the States", Chapter I, which deals with legislative relations and runs from Article 245 to Article 255. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, enacted to give effect to the decisions of the Stockholm Conference of 1972, is the standard example of a law made under this Article. Both statements being correct, option (c) is correct.