20 February 2025 · Shift 1

PMO - Principal Secretary Dr Pramod Kumar Mishra - PK Mishra - has been the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi since September 2019 and held the post in September 2024. He is a 1972-batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre; he served as Additional Principal Secretary to the PM from 2014 and was then made Principal Secretary with the rank of a Cabinet Minister. Shivshankar Menon is the tempting name, but he was Foreign Secretary and later National Security Adviser (2010-2014), never Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister.

Film music - Oscar winner AR Rahman composed the songs and the background score of Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle and written by Simon Beaufoy. The film brought him two Academy Awards on the same night - Best Original Score and Best Original Song for 'Jai Ho' - besides two Grammy Awards, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. Pritam, Amit Trivedi and Santhosh Narayanan are all working Indian composers, but none of them scored this film; Rahman's other landmarks are Roja, Bombay and Rockstar.

Census 2011 - child sex ratio The child sex ratio is the number of girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 year age group; Census 2011 recorded it as 919. Do not confuse it with the overall sex ratio of all ages (940 in the 2011 provisional count), and note that 927 was the child sex ratio of Census 2001 - the figure fell by 8 points in that decade. Haryana had the lowest child sex ratio (834) and Arunachal Pradesh the highest among the States; among the Union Territories, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands led with 968.

Five-Year Plans - Fourth Plan The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1969-74) was drawn up after the 1962 war with China, the 1965 war with Pakistan and two bad droughts had forced a three-year 'plan holiday' (1966-69). Its declared objective was 'growth with stability and progressive achievement of self-reliance', so defence preparedness and development were pursued together and dependence on foreign aid was cut. Launched under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it targeted about $5.7\%$ growth but achieved only $3.3\%$, because the 1971 Bangladesh war and refugee relief again drew resources away. The Third Plan (1961-66) was the plan that the wars interrupted; the plan framed in answer to them, with self-reliance as its central goal, is the Fourth.

Banking - IFSC code IFSC is an eleven-character alphanumeric code, allotted by the Reserve Bank of India to every bank branch. The first four characters are letters that stand for the bank, the fifth is always 0 (kept for future use), and the last six identify the branch. The code is what routes an NEFT, RTGS or IMPS transfer to the right branch; the 9-digit MICR code printed on a cheque is a different thing altogether.

Fundamental Rights - Part III The Fundamental Rights are contained in Part III of the Constitution, which runs from Article 12 to Article 35. The Part begins at Article 12 because that Article defines 'the State' against which the rights are enforceable, and Article 13 declares void any law inconsistent with them - which is why (c), starting at 14, is only the list of the rights themselves. Six rights survive: the Right to Property was removed from Part III by the 44th Amendment (1978) and made a legal right under Article 300A. Dr B. R. Ambedkar called Article 32 'the heart and soul of the Constitution'.

Sports - Asian Kho-Kho 2023 India won the women's title at the 4th Asian Kho-Kho Championship, played at Tamulpur in Assam from 20 to 24 March 2023; the Indian men's team won its title as well. The event is run by the Asian Kho Kho Federation, whose headquarters is in New Delhi. The first edition was held at Kolkata in 1996 with five teams, and India has won every edition so far. Kho-Kho is an indigenous Indian sport - India also took both the men's and the women's titles at the first Kho Kho World Cup, hosted in New Delhi in January 2025.

Dadasaheb Phalke Award 2024 Mithun Chakraborty was conferred the Dadasaheb Phalke Award on 8 October 2024, at the 70th National Film Awards ceremony in New Delhi. Instituted in 1969, it is India's highest honour in cinema; it carries a Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus), a shawl and a cash prize of ₹10 lakh, and the first recipient was Devika Rani. Mithun Chakraborty won the National Film Award for Best Actor for his very first film, Mrigayaa (1976), and became a household name with Disco Dancer (1982). Amitabh Bachchan (for 2018) and Rajinikanth (for 2019) had already received this award in earlier years, which is why they look tempting here.

Election Commission - tenure An Election Commissioner holds office for a maximum of six years, or until he attains the age of 65 years, whichever is earlier. The Election Commission was set up on 25 January 1950 under Article 324; since 1993 it has been a three-member body - the Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners - all appointed by the President. Article 324(5) leaves their conditions of service to a law made by Parliament, and that law fixes the six-year term; their salary and status are those of a judge of the Supreme Court. The Chief Election Commissioner can be removed only in the same manner as a Supreme Court judge, and the other Commissioners only on his recommendation - the safeguard that keeps the Commission independent.

Revolutionary societies - Abhinav Bharat Abhinav Bharat Mandir (Young India Society) was founded in 1904 at Nashik by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar along with his elder brother Ganesh Damodar 'Babarao' Savarkar. It grew out of their earlier group Mitra Mela and became a secret revolutionary society with branches across India and in London, where India House was its centre; it was formally dissolved in 1952. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, known as Veer Savarkar, wrote The Indian War of Independence, Hindu Rashtra Darshan and Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History; none of the other pairs founded a revolutionary society of this kind.

Festivals - Konark Festival The Konark Festival is held every year from 1 to 5 December at Konark in Odisha, in the open-air auditorium beside the Sun Temple. Dancers of every classical school perform there against the temple backdrop; the International Sand Art Festival runs alongside it on nearby Chandrabhaga beach. The Sun Temple, built in the 13th century by Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984 - the same State also holds the Jagannath Rath Yatra at Puri.

Classical dance - Mohiniyattam Mohiniyattam is the classical dance of Kerala; its name joins 'Mohini', the enchantress form of Vishnu, with 'aattam', meaning dance. It is danced solo by women in a white-and-gold kasavu costume, in the gentle swaying lasya style, to songs in Manipravalam, a mixture of Malayalam and Sanskrit. Kerala's other classical form is Kathakali; Kuchipudi belongs to Andhra Pradesh and Yakshagana is Karnataka's folk-theatre form, so (a), (b) and (c) are ruled out.

Government schemes - ABRY Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rojgar Yojana (ABRY) was launched in 2020 - announced in November 2020 as part of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat 3.0 package and made effective from 1 October 2020. Its purpose was to restore the jobs lost in the COVID-19 lockdown, so the year must be a post-lockdown one; 2017, 2018 and 2019 are all before the pandemic. Under it the Central Government paid the provident fund contribution for every new employee registered with the EPFO for two years - both shares ($12\%$ employee and $12\%$ employer) in establishments with up to 1,000 workers, and only the employee's share in larger ones. Registration closed on 31 March 2022.

Rivers - course of the Indus The Indus rises near Lake Mansarovar on the Tibetan plateau and enters Indian territory in the Ladakh region, at Demchok. Inside Ladakh it flows north-west along the trough between the Karakoram and the Ladakh ranges and is joined by the Zanskar near Leh, after which it passes into Pakistan. The Kashmir Valley is drained by the Jhelum, not the Indus, so (a) fails; Gilgit lies outside Indian-administered territory and is itself the name of a tributary that joins the Indus in Pakistan, so (c) fails. The river finally empties into the Arabian Sea near Karachi. Under the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) India uses the eastern rivers - Ravi, Beas and Sutlej.

Elements, compounds, mixtures Test each option against the order given: element first, then compound, then homogeneous mixture. Iron (Fe) is an element - made of one kind of atom only. Methane ($C{H}_4$) is a compound - carbon and hydrogen chemically combined in a fixed ratio. Sea water is a homogeneous mixture - salts dissolved uniformly in water, separable by physical means. In (a) salt is a compound, not an element; in (b) mercury and iron are both elements, so the second place has no compound; in (c) milk is a colloid, that is a heterogeneous mixture, so the third place fails.

Gadgil formula - Central assistance The Gadgil formula laid down how Central (plan) assistance was to be distributed among the States. It was adopted in 1969, for the Fourth Five-Year Plan, and is named after DR Gadgil, then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. Its weights were population $60\%$, per capita income $10\%$, tax effort $10\%$, ongoing major irrigation and power projects $10\%$ and special problems $10\%$; it was revised as the Gadgil-Mukherjee formula in 1991. Sharing the divisible pool of taxes is the Finance Commission's work under Article 280, and subsidies or foreign investment were never the subject of this formula - so (a), (c) and (d) are outside its scope.

Ecology - ecological niche An ecological niche is the whole functional role a species plays in its ecosystem - what it eats, what eats it, when it is active, how it uses resources and how it interacts with other species. The standard way to remember it: the habitat is a species' address, the niche is its profession. That is exactly why (b) and (d) fail - they shrink the niche to the habitat or to the physical space occupied, which is only one part of it - while (c) confuses it with genetic diversity. No two species can occupy exactly the same niche in the same habitat for long (Gause's competitive exclusion principle); the functional idea of the niche is credited to Charles Elton.

Neeraj Chopra - 2018 gold At the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Neeraj Chopra threw 88.06 m to win gold and became the first Indian javelin thrower ever to be Asian Games champion. He was India's flag-bearer at the opening ceremony of those Games, and earlier the same year he had won the Commonwealth Games gold at Gold Coast. His Olympic gold came at Tokyo in 2021 and his World Championships gold at Budapest in 2023 - both after 2018, so (a) and (b) do not fit the year given. His under-20 world record throw of 86.48 m was made in 2016 at the World U20 Championships, again not in 2018.

Ancient India - Shaka-Pahlava 'Pahlava' is the Indian name for the Parthians, an Iranian people who ruled the north-west after the Indo-Greeks; Indian texts name them along with the Shakas in the compound 'Shaka-Pahlava'. The two names are joined because Shaka and Parthian rulers governed the same region side by side, but the Iranian group that the term 'Pahlava' stands for is the Parthians. Their best known king is Gondophares of the 1st century AD, at whose court, in Christian tradition, St Thomas the Apostle preached. The Shakas were Scythians from the Central Asian steppe and the Kushanas a branch of the Yuezhi, so neither of them is the group called Pahlava; the Indo-Greeks were Hellenistic, not Iranian.

Padma awards - classical dancer Saroja Vaidyanathan (1937-2023) was a Bharatanatyam dancer, guru and choreographer, honoured with the Padma Shri in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2013. She founded the Ganesa Natyalaya school of Bharatanatyam in New Delhi in 1974 and wrote The Science of Bharatanatyam, Bharatanatyam - An In-Depth Study and The Classical Dances of India. Bharatanatyam itself grew out of the temple dance of Tamil Nadu and was revived in the 20th century by Rukmini Devi Arundale; Kathak, Manipuri and Odissi come from wholly different regions and traditions.