13 February 2025 · Shift 3

Sports personalities Anmol Kharb is a badminton player from Faridabad in the state of Haryana. She came into national notice in 2024, when she won the deciding singles match against Thailand and sealed India's first-ever gold at the Badminton Asia Team Championships. Haryana sends a very large share of India's medallists in badminton, wrestling, boxing and athletics, so it is worth remembering as the default sporting state in such questions. So option (a) is correct.

Census 2011 religion data Census 2011 gives the religious composition of India as follows. Of the four communities offered, the Jains have the smallest share of the population, only 0.4%. Buddhists at 0.7% are the nearest distractor, but that is still almost twice the Jain share; Sikhs (1.7%) and Christians (2.3%) are larger still. So option (b) is correct.

Arjuna Award The Arjuna Award was instituted in 1961 and named after the Mahabharata archer Arjuna, to honour outstanding performance in sport sustained over the preceding four years. Twenty sportspersons were honoured in that first edition of 1961, the awards being spread across disciplines rather than given to a single sport. Footballer PK Banerjee and chess player Manuel Aaron were among that first group of twenty. Each awardee receives a bronze statuette of Arjuna, a certificate and a cash prize, ₹15 lakh at present. So option (b) is correct.

UN International Years The United Nations General Assembly declared 2023 the International Year of Millets, adopting a resolution that India moved and more than seventy countries supported. The purpose was to bring millets - bajra, jowar, ragi and the small millets - back into the food basket, because they are rich in protein, iron and fibre and survive on poor soil and little water. So option (c) is correct.

Periodic table history The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his expanded periodic table in the German journal Annalen der Chemie in 1872. He arranged the elements in order of increasing atomic mass and put elements of similar properties in the same vertical group, giving a table of eight groups. He deliberately left gaps for elements not yet discovered and predicted their properties - eka-aluminium and eka-silicon turned out to be gallium and germanium - which is why his table, and not the others, survived. Lothar Meyer was German, not Russian; Henry Moseley was English and later reordered the table by atomic number; Dobereiner was German and only gave the law of triads. So option (c) is correct.

Indian winter climate The northern plains lie immediately south of the Himalayas, which run as an unbroken high wall along India's northern border. In winter, bitterly cold and dry air masses build up over Siberia and Central Asia and move southward; the Himalayan wall blocks them, so the plains stay a few degrees above the freezing point of water. The sea (option b) moderates only the peninsular coasts, and the northern plains are far inland; western disturbances (option d) actually bring winter rain and a cold spell, so they cannot be the reason the temperature stays high. So option (c) is correct.

Basal body vs centriole Both organelles are built on the same plan - nine triplets of microtubules in a cylinder with no central pair, the 9 + 0 arrangement - so the difference has to lie in the accessory structures attached to the cylinder, not in the cylinder itself. The centriole carries distal appendages on its wall; the basal body sitting at the base of a cilium or flagellum does not carry such appendages, and that is the feature which separates the two. Option (b) fails because neither structure makes protein - protein synthesis is the work of ribosomes. Option (c) fails because both are made of the protein tubulin, and option (d) fails because neither is bounded by a membrane; both are non-membranous organelles. So option (a) is correct.

Indian classical dance T Balasaraswati (1918-1984) was born into a Thanjavur family of hereditary temple musicians and dancers, and she performed Bharatanatyam, the classical dance of Tamil Nadu. She carried Bharatanatyam from the temple to the concert stage in India and abroad, and in 1977 she became the first dancer to be awarded the Padma Vibhushan. So option (a) is correct.

MGNREGA provisions MGNREGA, passed on 23 August 2005, guarantees at least 100 days of unskilled manual wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer for such work. The Act came into force on 2 February 2006, converts employment into a legal 'right to work', and is carried out mainly by the Gram Panchayats under the Ministry of Rural Development. The guarantee is per household and not per person, and if work is not given within 15 days of the demand the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance. In a drought-notified or disaster-hit area the Centre may sanction extra days on top of this, but the statutory guarantee itself remains 100 days. So option (a) is correct.

Article 165 Article 165 provides that the Governor of a State shall appoint a person qualified to be a judge of a High Court to be the Advocate General for that State. The Advocate General is the highest law officer of a State - the State's counterpart of the Attorney General of India - and holds office during the pleasure of the Governor, the Constitution fixing neither a term nor an age limit. The table also disposes of the distractors: the Chief Minister is appointed under Article 164 and High Court judges, including the Chief Justice, under Article 217. So option (c) is correct.

Directive Principles Article 44, one of the Directive Principles of State Policy, says that the State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. A uniform civil code would replace the separate personal laws on marriage, divorce, succession, maintenance and adoption with one common law; Goa has had such a code since Portuguese times and Uttarakhand enacted one in 2024. Being a Directive Principle it is not enforceable in a court - it only directs the State - which is what distinguishes it from a Fundamental Right. So option (d) is correct.

Union Council of Ministers Kiren Rijiju, the Member of Parliament from Arunachal West, was given the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs when the Modi 3.0 Council of Ministers was sworn in in June 2024, and he still held it in September 2024. He holds the Ministry of Minority Affairs as well; earlier he was Union Law and Justice Minister and, before that, Minister of State for Youth Affairs and Sports. The Minister of Parliamentary Affairs is the government's link with Parliament - he arranges the legislative business of both Houses and coordinates with the parties in them. So option (b) is correct.

Hindustani music titles Begum Akhtar, born Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, was given the title Mallika-e-Ghazal, which means the Queen of Ghazals. She sang ghazal, dadra and thumri in the Hindustani tradition and gave the ghazal the standing of a concert form rather than a light entertainment. She received the Padma Shri in 1968, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1972, and the Padma Bhushan posthumously in 1975. Thumri is the tempting wrong option, because she sang it beautifully; but the title actually conferred on her names the ghazal, not the thumri. So option (a) is correct.

Haryanka dynasty Ajatashatru, son of Bimbisara, was the Haryanka ruler of Magadha who annexed Kosala, Kashi and the Vajji confederacy and turned Magadha into the strongest power of the Ganga valley. He came to the throne by imprisoning his own father, and he was a contemporary of both the Buddha and Mahavira. The long war against the Vajjis of Vaishali was won with two new war engines, the rathamusala (a chariot with swinging maces) and the mahashilakantaka (a stone-throwing catapult). Of the other options, Udayabhadra was his son and only shifted the capital to Pataliputra, Nagadasaka was the last and weakest Haryanka king, and Shishunaga founded the dynasty that replaced the Haryankas. So option (d) is correct.

Benefits of e-commerce E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services over the internet, so the seller's catalogue is open to a buyer anywhere in the country, or the world, at any hour. Removing the limit that distance and shop timings place on a business is exactly what is meant by a wider market reach, and that is its central benefit. The other three options state the opposite of what e-commerce does: an online catalogue widens choice instead of limiting it, operating costs fall because no showroom or large sales staff is needed, and customer service improves with round-the-clock chat and tracking. So option (c) is correct.

Five Year Plans The First Five Year Plan (1951-56), drawn up under Jawaharlal Nehru, was based on the Harrod-Domar model. That model makes the rate of growth depend on how much a country saves and how efficiently it uses that capital: growth rate $g=\frac{s}{v}$, where s is the savings rate and v the capital-output ratio - so the plan concentrated on raising investment in agriculture, irrigation and power. It targeted a growth rate of 2.1% and actually achieved 3.6%, making it one of the few plans to exceed its target. The Mahalanobis model, with its stress on heavy industry, guided the Second Plan and not the First - that is the distractor to watch. So option (a) is correct.

Constitutional reforms 1930s Lord Zetland - Lawrence Dundas, earlier the Earl of Ronaldshay and Governor of Bengal - took part in the Round Table Conferences held in London to frame constitutional reforms for India. The three conferences ran from November 1930 to December 1932, and their recommendations became the basis of the Government of India Act, 1935; Zetland became Secretary of State for India in 1935 and oversaw the working of that Act. The date in the question is the quickest filter: only the Round Table Conferences fall in the 1930s and deal with constitutional reform. The Simon Commission was appointed in 1927 and had no Indian member, the Quit India Movement belongs to 1942, and the Cabinet Mission came in 1946 - all outside the 1930s reform process. So option (c) is correct.

Harvest festivals Pongal, or Thai Pongal, is the four-day harvest festival of Tamil Nadu, and its central day is an offering of thanks to Surya, the Sun God. It falls at the close of the Tamil month of Margazhi and opens the month of Thai, in mid-January, when the first rice of the harvest is boiled in milk until it spills over - the boiling over is the 'pongal' that names the festival. The other three options are the same mid-January harvest festival under other names in other states, so the state named in the question is what settles the answer. So option (b) is correct.

Sangeet Natak Akademi Award Rajashree Shirke is a Kathak dancer and choreographer from Mumbai, known for productions in which the storytelling, or katha, of Kathak is brought back to the front. She received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Kathak in 2013. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, set up in 1952 and functioning from 1953, is India's national academy for music, dance and drama, and its award is the highest national honour for a performing artist. So option (c) is correct.

PMAY-Urban 2.0 Under PMAY-Urban 2.0 an Economically Weaker Section (EWS) family is one whose annual household income is up to ₹3 lakh. The three income slabs run in an unbroken sequence - EWS up to ₹3 lakh, LIG above that up to ₹6 lakh, MIG above that up to ₹9 lakh - so an option that starts at ₹6 or ₹7 lakh cannot be the EWS slab. PMAY-U 2.0, approved in 2024, aims to help 1 crore urban poor and middle-class families over five years with central assistance of about ₹2.30 lakh crore. So option (d) is correct.