20 February 2025 · Shift 3

Union Council of Ministers HD Kumaraswamy holds the Union Ministry of Heavy Industries, along with the Ministry of Steel, in the Council of Ministers sworn in during June 2024 - so he was the cabinet minister in September 2024. He is a Janata Dal (Secular) leader and a former Chief Minister of Karnataka, elected to the Lok Sabha from Mandya in 2024. The other three names are all cabinet ministers, but of other ministries, so the portfolio - not the seniority - is what decides this question.

Festivals of eastern India Bihula - also called Bihula-Bishahari - is the festival at which the serpent goddess Mansa (Bishahari) is worshipped, in eastern Bihar and the neighbouring parts of Bengal and Jharkhand. It falls in the Sawan-Bhado season (around August) and retells the legend of Bihula, who won back the life of her husband Bala Lakhindar from the snake goddess. Bhagalpur, its main centre, is also the home of Manjusha art, the folk painting style that narrates this very legend. The distractors belong elsewhere: Kumbh is the pilgrimage held by turns at Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik, Ambubachi is the fair of the Kamakhya temple in Assam, and 'Matasya' is not a festival at all.

Moseley's law - atomic number In 1913 Henry Moseley measured the wavelengths of the characteristic X-rays of a long list of elements and found that they changed regularly with a whole number, which he identified as the atomic number. His result, Moseley's law, is $\sqrt{\nu }=a\left(Z-b\right)$ - the square root of the X-ray frequency is a straight-line function of the atomic number Z. This settled that the periodic table must be arranged by atomic number and not by atomic mass, which is why the pairs that look out of order by mass, such as Ar-K and Co-Ni, fall into place. The other years belong to other landmarks - Mendeleev's mass-based table is of 1869 and Chadwick's neutron of 1932 - so 1913 is the only date that fits this experiment.

Badminton - shuttlecock specification Under the Laws of Badminton a feathered shuttle carries 16 feathers, each 62 to 70 mm long, and it must weigh from 4.74 g to 5.50 g. So the blank is filled by 4.74 and 5.5 g, which is option (a). The 2.74 g offered in options (b) and (c) is barely half the legal weight - a shuttle that light could not be driven to the back service line - and the lower limit is 4.74, not the 4.22 of option (d).

Deoband Movement Muhammad Qasim Nanotavi, together with Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, founded the Darul Uloom at Deoband in Saharanpur district in 1866 and led the movement that took its name from the town. Its aim was to preserve Islamic culture by teaching the Quran and the Hadith in a seminary run on public donations, deliberately kept free of government money and control. Syed Ahmed Khan is the tempting name, but he led the rival Aligarh Movement, which asked Muslims to take modern Western education and to keep away from politics. Shah Waliullah was an eighteenth-century reformer who died long before 1866, and Abul Kalam Azad belongs to the twentieth-century national movement, so neither could have led Deoband.

Typhoid - cause and diagnosis Statement A is wrong: typhoid is caused by the bacterium Salmonella typhi, which lives in the small intestine; Streptococcus pneumoniae causes pneumonia and other respiratory infections. Statement B is right: the Widal test looks for agglutinating antibodies against the O and H antigens of Salmonella typhi and is the usual confirmatory test for typhoid. Statement C is right as well: in the second or third week the ulcers formed in the ileum can burst, and this intestinal perforation is the classic serious complication of the disease. Only B and C hold, so option (c) is correct.

Census 2011 - literacy Kerala recorded the highest male literacy rate of the four states in Census 2011, at 96.11 per cent. Kerala also topped the overall literacy table at 94.00 per cent, while Bihar was last at 61.80 per cent. Mizoram is the close second at 93.35 per cent, so remembering only that 'the north-east is highly literate' is not enough here - the two figures have to be compared.

Higher education enrolment The Economic Survey 2022-23 put students' enrolment in higher education in 2020-21 at about 4.1 crore, so option (d) is correct. The figure it quotes from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) is 4.14 crore, up from 3.85 crore in 2019-20. The Gross Enrolment Ratio for the 18-23 age group in that year was about 27 per cent; the National Education Policy 2020 sets a target of 50 per cent by 2035. 3.7 crore was the level two years earlier, which is why option (a) tempts a student who remembers an older edition of the survey.

Appointments - BSF Daljit Singh Chaudhary, a 1990-batch IPS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, was given charge of the Border Security Force as its Director General in August 2024. He was heading the Sashastra Seema Bal at the time and had earlier served as a Special Director General in the CRPF. He replaced Nitin Agarwal, who was repatriated to his parent cadre; Pankaj Kumar Singh, BSF Director General in 2021-22, had by then moved on as Deputy National Security Adviser. The BSF, raised in 1965 after the war with Pakistan, guards the borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh and is the largest border-guarding force in the world.

Classical dance exponents CV Chandrasekhar is a Bharatanatyam dancer, guru and choreographer, honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1993. He trained at Kalakshetra in Chennai under Rukmini Devi Arundale and later taught dance at Banaras Hindu University and at MS University, Baroda. Bharatanatyam is the classical dance of Tamil Nadu, codified from the temple dance of the devadasis and described in the Abhinaya Darpana. The other options come from other regions - Kathakali and Mohiniyattam from Kerala and Kathak from north India - so none of them is his school.

Fluvial landforms A river slows down as it nears the sea, drops the silt it was carrying, and its channel splits into many distributaries across that deposit - the landform so built is a delta. The Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, the Sundarbans, is the largest delta in the world; the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri also build deltas on the east coast. The tempting option is the estuary, but an estuary is the opposite case - one wide funnel-shaped mouth in which tides scour the silt away, as with the Narmada and the Tapi - so it fails the 'splits into several channels' clue.

Musicians and instruments Anil Srinivasan is a pianist, and he is called unique because very few musicians have brought the piano into the Carnatic concert platform. He is best known for his long partnership with the vocalist Sikkil Gurucharan and for his work in taking music education into schools across south India. Tamil Nadu conferred its Kalaimamani award on him for the year 2019. The mandolin is the trap here, because that instrument is tied to a similar-sounding Carnatic name, U Srinivas, who was a different musician altogether.

Directive Principles - Part IV Part IV of the Constitution, Articles 36 to 51, contains the Directive Principles of State Policy. The idea was borrowed from the Constitution of Ireland; the Principles cannot be enforced in any court, yet Article 37 declares them fundamental in the governance of the country. Options (b) and (c) name the parts on either side - citizenship is Part II and Fundamental Rights are Part III - so counting the parts in order is the safest way to answer.

Five-Year Plans The Third Five-Year Plan (1961-66) is the plan built around self-reliance; its stated goal was a self-reliant and self-generating economy. It pushed food-grain output, especially wheat, and heavy industry, so that India would stop depending on imported grain and imported machinery. The war with China in 1962, the war with Pakistan in 1965 and the drought of 1965-66 wrecked its targets and forced a three-year plan holiday from 1966 to 1969.

Commonwealth Games 2010 The opening ceremony of the 19th Commonwealth Games was held at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi on 3 October 2010, and the closing ceremony there on 14 October 2010. It was the first Commonwealth Games hosted by India and the largest multi-sport event ever held in the country; the mascot was Shera, a tiger. The other Delhi venues did stage events - hockey at the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium and boxing at the Talkatora Indoor Stadium - but not the ceremonies. The Arun Jaitley Stadium (formerly Feroz Shah Kotla) is a cricket ground and was not a Games venue at all.

National Emergency - Article 352 While a Proclamation of Emergency under Article 352 is in operation, Parliament may extend the normal five-year term of a State Legislative Assembly by up to one year at a time. The extension may be repeated year after year while the Emergency lasts, but it can never run beyond six months after the Proclamation ceases to operate. The power sits in the proviso to Article 172(1) for the Assemblies and in Article 83(2) for the Lok Sabha; it was actually used during the 1975-77 Emergency, when the Fifth Lok Sabha was extended twice. Six months is the figure for how long an extension may survive after the Emergency ends, which is exactly why option (a) tempts.

Union Budget 2023-24 schemes The Union Budget 2023-24 announced 500 new 'waste to wealth' plants under the GOBARdhan scheme, with a total investment of ₹10,000 crore. The 500 are made up of 200 compressed biogas plants, 75 of them in urban areas, and 300 community or cluster-based plants. GOBARdhan stands for Galvanizing Organic Bio-Agro Resources Dhan and turns cattle dung and farm waste into biogas and bio-fertiliser, so 'waste to wealth' is its own description. PM-KUSUM is about solar pumps for farmers and Ujjwala about LPG connections for poor households, so neither answers a question about waste.

Green Revolution The primary effect of the Green Revolution was self-sufficiency in food grains - India stopped living on imported wheat and built a buffer stock of its own. From the mid-1960s high-yielding dwarf varieties of wheat and rice, chemical fertilisers, assured irrigation and pesticides were introduced, first in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Norman Borlaug bred the dwarf wheat that made it possible, and MS Swaminathan led the Indian programme, which is why he is called the father of the Green Revolution in India. Options (b) and (c) state exactly the reverse of what happened - output rose sharply and imports fell - and option (a) points at industry, which the programme was not aimed at.

Dance awards - institutions The Nritya Chudamani is conferred every year by the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha of Chennai on a distinguished exponent of Indian classical dance. The sabha was founded in 1953 and is one of Chennai's oldest cultural bodies; it gives the matching Sangita Chudamani for music during the December season. Kalakshetra Foundation, set up by Rukmini Devi Arundale in 1936, is the tempting answer because it is the best-known Bharatanatyam institution - but it is a teaching academy and does not give this award. Kala Utsav is a school-level arts festival run by the Ministry of Education, and Revathi Natyalaya is a dance school, so neither confers a national-level honour of this kind.

Iron Age in India The earliest iron objects in India come from South India, from the layers where the Neolithic phase overlaps the Megalithic phase. Hallur in Karnataka and Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu are the classic sites: iron appears there between the last Neolithic settlement and the Megalithic burials, around the twelfth to tenth centuries BCE. Excavations at Mayiladumparai in Tamil Nadu have since pushed the date of iron in the region back further still. In North India iron comes a little later, with the Painted Grey Ware sites such as Atranjikhera, so option (d) is not the earliest.