7 February 2025 · Shift 1

Festivals of India Halda is celebrated in Himachal Pradesh, in the Lahaul valley of Lahaul-Spiti district. In the month of Magha (January) every family lights a torch of dry cedar wood and all the torches are carried to one spot and burnt together, which is why Halda is called the festival of lights of Lahaul; it is dedicated to Shiskar Apa, the goddess of wealth. Arunachal Pradesh is the tempting choice because its tribal calendar also carries winter festivals such as Losar and Solung, but Halda belongs only to the Lahauli Buddhist calendar of Himachal Pradesh.

Balancing chemical equations An equation is balanced only when every element has the same number of atoms on both sides. Option (d) is $2C_4{H}_{10}\left(l\right)+13O_2\left(g\right)\to 8C{O}_2\left(g\right)+10H_{2}O$. Carbon: $2\times 4=8$ on the left and 8 on the right. Hydrogen: $2\times 10=20$ and $10\times 2=20$. Oxygen: $13\times 2=26$ and $8\times 2+10=26$. This is the complete combustion of butane. Options (a) and (c) balance carbon and hydrogen but leave oxygen short on the left (24 and 20 against 26), and (b) was never doubled, so its hydrogen and oxygen both fail.

Directive Principles Article 40 is the Directive Principle that asks the State to organise village panchayats and to give them the powers they need to work as units of self-government. It carries the Gandhian idea of gram swaraj, and the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 turned it into enforceable law by adding Part IX, Articles 243 to 243-O, and the Eleventh Schedule listing 29 subjects for panchayats. Article 44 is the one candidates confuse it with, but that Article deals with a uniform civil code, not with local self-government.

Oceanic crust The oceanic crust extends 5 to 10 km beneath the ocean floor. It is made mainly of basalt, rich in silica and magnesium, so it is called sima; new crust is formed continuously at the mid-ocean ridges and grows older, colder and denser as it moves away from them. 2-5 km is the tempting figure because it is roughly the average depth of the ocean water lying above the crust, which is not what the question asks.

National sports championships Tamil Nadu beat Punjab in the final to win the men's title of the 71st Senior National Basketball Championship, 2022. The final was played at the Jawaharlal Nehru Indoor Stadium, Chennai in April 2022, where hosts Tamil Nadu beat the defending champions Punjab 87-69; Indian Railways took the women's title. Punjab is the answer precisely because it went into the final as the holder of the trophy, while West Bengal and Gujarat did not reach the men's final at all.

Bills and ministries The Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Amendment Bill, 2024 was introduced by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Minister Hardeep Singh Puri introduced it in the Rajya Sabha on 5 August 2024 to modernise the Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Act, 1948; it widens 'mineral oils' to cover coal bed methane and shale gas or oil, and replaces the old mining lease with a petroleum lease. The Ministry of Coal is the trap, because the Bill does name coal - but only to say that coal, lignite and helium are NOT mineral oils under this law.

Five-Year Plans Agriculture was given the highest priority in the First Five-Year Plan (1951-56). India was importing food grain after Partition, so the plan put its money into farming, irrigation and multipurpose river valley projects such as Bhakra Nangal, following the Harrod-Domar model that stresses saving and investment. Heavy industries is the tempting answer, but that was the thrust of the Second Plan (1956-61), which was built on the Mahalanobis model.

Iron Age pottery Painted Grey Ware (PGW) is the pottery that marks the early Iron Age settlements of northern India. It is a fine, wheel-made grey pottery painted with black geometric designs, dated to about 1200-600 BCE in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, and it is found together with the earliest iron tools of the later Vedic people. Northern Black Polished Ware is the trap: it is also a northern ware, but it belongs to the later phase of about 600-200 BCE, the age of the Mahajanapadas and the Mauryas.

Census 2011 Of the four states given, Mizoram had the smallest population in the Census of India 2011, about 10.97 lakh. Manipur had about 28.56 lakh, Tripura about 36.74 lakh and Assam about 3.12 crore, so Mizoram is smaller than every other option. Read the words 'of the following' carefully: India's least populous state overall is Sikkim, with about 6.11 lakh people, but Sikkim is not offered as an option.

Population growth models When natural resources are unlimited the population grows faster and faster, and this pattern is called exponential growth. The per capita growth rate stays constant, $\frac{dN}{dt}=rN$, so the larger the population becomes the more individuals it adds in the same time, and the graph is a J-shaped curve. Logistic growth is the tempting option, but that is what happens when resources are limited: growth slows as the population nears the carrying capacity and the curve becomes S-shaped.

Khilafat Movement The Khilafat Committee was formed in 1919 to defend the Ottoman Caliph and to bring Hindus and Muslims onto one political platform. The All India Khilafat Committee was set up at Bombay by the Ali brothers Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali along with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Hasrat Mohani, after the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey; Gandhiji joined it and merged the Khilafat cause with the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920. The All India Muslim League is the tempting name, but it had been founded far earlier, at Dhaka in 1906, and was not created for the Khilafat cause.

Indian music Jagjit Singh belonged to the world of the ghazal. Born in 1941 at Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, he was called the Ghazal King, recorded albums such as 'The Unforgettable' with his wife Chitra Singh, and received the Padma Bhushan in 2003. Classical is the tempting option because he was trained in Hindustani classical music, but his fame rests on carrying the ghazal, an Arabic-Persian form of rhyming couplets, to the ordinary listener.

Classical dances Bharatanatyam originated in Tamil Nadu. It grew in the temples of Tamil Nadu as Sadir or Dasiattam, danced by devadasis, and follows Bharata's Natya Shastra; it was renamed and revived in the twentieth century by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale. Kerala is the tempting neighbour, but its classical forms are Mohiniyattam and Kathakali, not Bharatanatyam.

State executive The Chief Justice of a High Court is NOT part of the state executive. Under Articles 153 to 167 the state executive consists of the Governor, the Chief Minister, the Council of Ministers and the Advocate-General of the state; the Governor is the nominal head and the Chief Minister the real head. The Chief Justice heads the state judiciary under Articles 214 to 231, a separate organ of the state, and it is exactly this separation of powers that the question is testing.

Asian Para Games 2023 India finished 5th at the Asian Para Games held in 2023. The Games took place at Hangzhou in China in October 2023, where India won a record 111 medals - 29 gold, 31 silver and 51 bronze - and stood fifth on the table behind China, Japan, South Korea and Iran. 9th is the trap: that was India's position at the previous edition, Jakarta 2018, where the tally was 72 medals.

Sangeet Natak Akademi Award Tapan Kumar Pattanayak won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Chhau dance in 2018. Chhau is the masked, martial folk dance of Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, performed around the spring sun festival and inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. The other three were also honoured in 2018, but each for a different form - Surupa Sen for Odissi, Radha Sridhar for Bharatanatyam and Pasumarthy Ramalinga Sastry for Kuchipudi.

UPSC appointments Preeti Sudan took charge as Chairperson of the Union Public Service Commission on 1 August 2024. A 1983-batch IAS officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre and a former Union Health Secretary who led the country's COVID-19 response, she succeeded Manoj Soni, who had resigned before completing his term. The UPSC Chairman is appointed by the President under Article 316 and holds office for six years or until the age of 65, whichever is earlier, so the office changes hands more often than candidates expect.

Five-Year Plans Seven five-year plans were covered between 1951 and 1990. The gap after the Third Plan is the whole point of the question: the wars of 1962 and 1965 and the drought forced a plan holiday from 1966 to 1969, which was filled by three annual plans, and annual plans are not counted as five-year plans. 8 is the trap, because the Eighth Plan began only in 1992 after another two-year break, well outside the period asked about.

Government schemes The PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan was launched in 2021. The Prime Minister announced it from the Red Fort on 15 August 2021 and formally launched it on 13 October 2021 as a ₹100 lakh crore National Master Plan for multi-modal connectivity. It is a GIS-based digital platform that puts the plans of the central ministries and the states on one map so that roads, railways, ports and airports are planned together, and it pulls in schemes such as Bharatmala, Sagarmala and UDAN. 2022 is the tempting year because the National Logistics Policy, the companion reform to Gati Shakti, was released in September 2022.

Union Budget 2023-24 The Union Budget for 2023-24 adopted seven priorities. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented it on 1 February 2023 and called the seven priorities the 'Saptarishi', saying they would guide the country through the Amrit Kaal. 9 is the trap: nine priorities were announced in the next Budget, the one for 2024-25.