18 February 2025 · Shift 2

Carnatic music Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman (1930-2013) was a violinist, vocalist and composer of Carnatic music, the classical tradition of South India, and the creator of the singing 'Lalgudi bani' style of violin playing. Along with M.S. Gopalakrishnan and T.N. Krishnan he is counted in the 'violin trinity' of Carnatic music; he received the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2001. Ghazal belongs to the Hindustani-Urdu light classical tradition of the north, and folk music is regional and orally transmitted, so neither describes a Carnatic violinist of the Tamil Nadu concert stage. Hence the correct option is (a).

Kalakshetra, Chennai Kalakshetra ('sacred space of art') was founded at Adyar, Chennai in 1936 by the Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale, to teach dance and music in the gurukula manner. She lifted Bharatanatyam out of social disrepute and put it on the concert stage, and in 1952 became the first woman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Mrinalini Sarabhai founded the Darpana Academy at Ahmedabad (1949), Yamini Krishnamurthy was a Bharatanatyam-Kuchipudi soloist who founded no such institution, and Hema Malini is a film actor and dancer - none of them set up Kalakshetra. Hence the correct option is (b).

Cell membrane, endocytosis The plasma membrane is a flexible lipid bilayer, so it can bend and fold inward instead of staying rigid. That folding lets the cell wrap a food particle in a pouch of membrane and pull it inside - the process called endocytosis; an Amoeba engulfs its food exactly this way with its pseudopodia. Rigidity and shape come from the cell wall (in plants, fungi and bacteria), not from the membrane's flexibility, so 'defines structure' names the wrong structure. Protection from pollutants follows from the membrane being selectively permeable, and lifespan is set by many factors - neither is a consequence of flexibility. Hence the correct option is (c).

Hornbill Festival The Hornbill Festival is held every year from 1 to 10 December at the Naga Heritage Village, Kisama, near Kohima in Nagaland. It is called the 'Festival of Festivals' because all the major Naga tribes bring their own festivals, dances, crafts and food to one venue; it began in 2000 and is run by the state's Tourism and Art & Culture departments. The name comes from the hornbill bird, whose feathers appear in Naga folklore and traditional headgear. Sikkim is known for Losar and Saga Dawa, Punjab for Baisakhi and Haryana for the Surajkund Crafts Mela - none of these is the Hornbill Festival. Hence the correct option is (b).

Koppen climate groups Köppen named his groups by capital letters, four of them fixed by temperature and one (B) by rainfall. The warm temperate or mid-latitude group is C: the coldest month averages above $-3^{\circ }$C but below ${18}^{\circ }$C, which is the mild-winter belt that includes India's western coastal and monsoon margins. D is the cold snow-forest group (coldest month $-3^{\circ }$C or below) and H is the highland climate added later for mountains, while W is not a group letter at all - it is a lower-case subdivision (BW) meaning desert. Hence the correct option is (b).

Defence Secretary of India Rajesh Kumar Singh, a 1989-batch IAS officer of the Kerala cadre, took charge as Defence Secretary on 1 November 2024, succeeding Giridhar Aramane. The Defence Secretary heads the Department of Defence in the Ministry of Defence, which works from the South Block, New Delhi, and is the senior-most civil servant of the ministry. Before this he was Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), and earlier Secretary, Animal Husbandry and Dairying. Hence the correct option is (c).

First law of thermodynamics Conservation of energy is the first law of thermodynamics: the heat given to a system either raises its internal energy or is spent as work by it. In symbols, $\Delta Q=\Delta U+W$, where $\Delta Q$ is the heat supplied, $\Delta U$ the change in internal energy and W the work done by the system. The other laws answer different questions: the zeroth law defines temperature through thermal equilibrium, the second fixes the direction of a change (heat flows hot to cold, entropy of an isolated system never falls) and the third says entropy tends to a constant as temperature approaches absolute zero. Hence the correct option is (b).

Concurrent List subjects The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution divides subjects into the Union List (97/98 entries), the State List (59 entries after transfers) and the Concurrent List (52 entries), on which both Parliament and a state legislature may legislate. 'Newspapers, books and printing presses' is Entry 39 of the Concurrent List, so it is the only option on which both governments can make law. Currency and coinage are Union subjects, while fisheries and gambling are State subjects - each of those belongs to one government alone. If a central and a state law on a Concurrent subject clash, Article 254 makes the central law prevail. Hence the correct option is (c).

Annual Financial Statement Article 112 of the Constitution requires the President to lay before Parliament, for every financial year, a statement of the estimated receipts and expenditure of the Government of India - the Annual Financial Statement. The Constitution nowhere uses the word 'budget'; the government budget is simply the popular name of this Annual Financial Statement, presented on 1 February for the year running from 1 April to 31 March. The other three names are made up: a budget shows receipts and expenditure together, so a statement of expenditure alone or of revenue alone would not be a budget, and governments do not prepare a profit-and-loss statement. Hence the correct option is (c).

Census of India The first census in India was taken in 1872 under Viceroy Lord Mayo, but it was non-synchronous - different provinces were counted in different years. The first complete and synchronous census, everyone counted on the same reference date, was held in 1881 under Lord Ripon, and the census has been decennial ever since. So 1881 and 1901 mark later stages, not the start; 1947 and 1951 are after independence, and Census 2011 was the 15th in the series and the 7th after independence. Hence the correct option is (b).

Union MSME Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi took charge as Union Cabinet Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in June 2024 and held the post in September 2024. He is a politician from Bihar who was the state's Chief Minister from 20 May 2014 to 20 February 2015 and later founded the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM). The MSME Ministry, with headquarters in New Delhi, frames and administers the laws and schemes for micro, small and medium enterprises, such as Udyam registration and the PMEGP. In the same council Manohar Lal held Housing & Urban Affairs and Power, Dharmendra Pradhan Education, and Piyush Goyal Commerce & Industry - none of them held MSME. Hence the correct option is (a).

Kathak, Padma Shri 2022 The sister duo Kamalini and Nalini Asthana belong to Uttar Pradesh and were awarded the Padma Shri in 2022 in the field of art, for Kathak. They dance in the Banaras gharana of Kathak - the gharana founded by Janakiprasad, also called the Janakiprasad gharana - and have taught and performed it in India and abroad. The other two great Kathak gharanas, Lucknow and Jaipur, also point to Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan respectively, but the Asthana sisters' school is the Banaras gharana of Uttar Pradesh. Hence the correct option is (b).

Second Five Year Plan The plan running from 1956 to 1961 is the Second Five Year Plan, drafted by the statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, founder of the Indian Statistical Institute. His model put the priority on heavy and basic industry and on the public sector, with import tariffs protecting home industry; it is also called the Nehru-Mahalanobis model because Nehru backed it politically, but the plan itself was prepared by Mahalanobis. Its target growth rate was $4.5\%$ against an achieved rate of about $4.27\%$, so the target was just missed. The Harrod-Domar model was the basis of the First Plan (1951-56) and D.R. Gadgil is remembered for the Gadgil formula of plan-assistance to states and for the Fourth Plan. Hence the correct option is (a).

Fundamental Duties Fundamental Duties were inserted by the 42nd Amendment Act, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, and were borrowed from the Constitution of the erstwhile USSR. They sit in Part IV-A as the single Article 51A; ten duties were added in 1976 and the eleventh - a parent's duty to provide education to a child aged 6 to 14 - was added by the 86th Amendment Act, 2002. The 44th Amendment (1978) removed the right to property from Fundamental Rights, the 52nd (1985) brought in the anti-defection law of the Tenth Schedule and the 46th (1982) dealt with sales tax - none of them touched the duties. The 42nd Amendment is called the 'Mini-Constitution' because it changed so much of the Constitution at one stroke. Hence the correct option is (a).

SRS death rate 2020 The crude death rate is the number of deaths in a year per 1,000 people, and the Sample Registration System (SRS) Bulletin for 2020 puts India's figure at 6.0 per 1,000. For the same year the SRS gives a birth rate of about 19.5 per 1,000, so the natural growth rate is roughly 19.5-6.0=13.5 per 1,000. The death rate has fallen steadily from about 25 per 1,000 around 1951 as health care, nutrition and sanitation improved, which is why a figure as high as 20 or even 10 is out of date. Hence the correct option is (b).

Arya Mahila Samaj Pandita Ramabai Saraswati founded the Arya Mahila Samaj at Pune in 1882 to fight child marriage and to spread education among women. A Sanskrit scholar honoured with the titles 'Pandita' and 'Saraswati', she went on to open the Sharada Sadan (1889) for child widows and the Mukti Mission near Pune, and she was one of the women delegates at the 1889 session of the Indian National Congress. The dates alone rule the others out: the Tattvabodhini Sabha is of 1839 (Debendranath Tagore), the Women's Indian Association of 1917 (Annie Besant and Margaret Cousins) and the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti of 1942 in Bengal. Hence the correct option is (c).

Iron Age in India In Indian archaeology the Iron Age follows the Bronze Age (the Harappan civilisation) and is dated roughly 1500 BCE to 200 BCE. It is the age of the Painted Grey Ware and Black-and-Red Ware cultures, and later of the Northern Black Polished Ware, running through the Later Vedic period, the mahajanapadas and the rise of Magadha. Sites such as Malhar and Raja Nal-ka-Tila in eastern Uttar Pradesh have yielded iron slag and furnaces in deposits of about 1400-800 BCE, which is why the period is taken back as far as the middle of the second millennium BCE. The other three ranges all begin after 1000 BCE and end in the common era, so they cover the historical period rather than the Iron Age. Hence the correct option is (a).

GDP as growth indicator Economic growth means a rise in the total output of a country, and Gross Domestic Product is exactly that total - the money value of all final goods and services produced inside a country's borders in a year. Growth is therefore quoted as the annual percentage rise in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP, which is why GDP is the standard indicator. Foreign investment and national consumption are only parts of the demand side - they can rise while output stagnates - and national income (NNP at factor cost) is a narrower measure got after deducting depreciation and net factor income from abroad. Hence the correct option is (a).

Savita Punia, hockey Savita Punia, goalkeeper and later captain of the Indian women's hockey team, was born at Jodhkan in the Sirsa district of Haryana. Her goalkeeping in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics quarter-final against Australia earned her the nickname 'the Great Wall of India'. She received the Arjuna Award in 2018 for her contribution to hockey. Hence the correct option is (d).

Asian Para Games contingent The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports cleared a contingent of 303 athletes across 17 disciplines for the Asian Para Games, along with 143 coaches, escorts, officials and support staff. The 303 athletes were 191 men and 112 women, and the largest single group was athletics with 123 athletes. The size of the contingent is what makes the figure memorable: at the previous edition in 2018 India sent only 190 athletes in 13 disciplines and won 72 medals including 15 golds, so 303 in 17 disciplines was a sharp jump. Hence the correct option is (c).