4 February 2025 · Shift 2

Independence and British PM Correct option: (c) Clement Attlee. Clement Attlee of the Labour Party was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and it was his government that carried the Indian Independence Act, 1947 through the British Parliament. On 20 February 1947 he announced in the House of Commons that Britain would transfer power in India by June 1948, and he sent Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy to complete the process, which was finished early, on 15 August 1947. Winston Churchill is the tempting choice because he is the famous wartime Prime Minister and the loudest opponent of Indian freedom, but he lost the July 1945 general election to Attlee and returned to office only in 1951 - well after independence.

Five-Year Plans of India Correct option: (c) Fifth Plan, due to a change in government. The Fifth Five-Year Plan was framed for 1974-79 with 'Garibi Hatao', employment generation and self-reliance as its themes, and it was drafted under D. P. Dhar. When the Janata Party came to power, the Morarji Desai government terminated the plan in 1978, a year ahead of schedule, and replaced it with a 'rolling plan' - which makes the Fifth Plan the first plan ever to be cut short. The Third Plan (1961-66) is the trap: it ran its full term and it was only afterwards that three Annual Plans - the 'Plan Holiday' of 1966-69 - had to be used because of the wars and the drought. That was a gap after a plan, not a plan ended midway.

Bleaching powder Correct option: (a) Calcium oxychloride. Calcium oxychloride, $CaOC{l}_2$, is the chemical name of bleaching powder - the pale yellow, chlorine-smelling solid that textile mills use to whiten cloth and strip out colour before dyeing. It is made by passing chlorine over dry slaked lime: $Ca{\left(OH\right)}_2+C{l}_2\to CaOC{l}_2+H_{2}O$. On standing in air, or with a dilute acid, it gives up chlorine, and the bleaching is really the work of that released chlorine. The other three are familiar salts with nothing to do with bleaching: sodium hydrogencarbonate is baking soda, calcium chloride is a drying agent, and sodium carbonate is washing soda used to soften hard water.

National MPI 2023 Correct option: (c) Uttar Pradesh. In 'National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023', released by NITI Aayog in July 2023, Uttar Pradesh showed the sharpest fall in poverty - about 3.43 crore people moved out of multidimensional poverty between NFHS-4 (2015-16) and NFHS-5 (2019-21). For the country as a whole the headcount ratio fell from 24.85% to 14.96% over the same five years, so roughly 13.5 crore Indians escaped multidimensional poverty. The index uses the Alkire-Foster method over 12 indicators grouped into three equally weighted dimensions - health, education and standard of living. Karnataka, Haryana and Manipur already had low poverty levels, so a fall of this size was simply not available to them; the biggest drops came from the states that started highest.

First Five-Year Plan Correct option: (a) Agricultural development. The First Five-Year Plan (1951-56) was built around agriculture and irrigation, because Partition had cut the country off from its main food-surplus areas and India was importing grain; the largest outlays went to irrigation and power, including the Bhakra-Nangal and Hirakud projects. It was based on the Harrod-Domar model, targeted 2.1% growth and comfortably exceeded it at about 3.6% - the widest margin of success any Indian plan has recorded. Rapid industrialisation and heavy industry are the theme of the Second Plan (1956-61), built on the Mahalanobis model, so those two options simply describe the plan that came next; privatisation was no part of planning at all in that era.

Hindi film music Correct option: (c) Rahul Dev Burman. Rahul Dev Burman - 'Pancham da', son of the composer S. D. Burman - was the music director who first carried the Rock 'n' Roll idiom into Hindi film tunes, setting electric guitar, bongos, drums and later synthesisers against an Indian melodic line. Teesri Manzil (1966) is usually taken as the film where he let the style loose, and songs like 'Aao Twist Karen', 'Dum Maro Dum' and 'Piya Tu Ab To Aaja' are the ones every list quotes. The other three names are giants of Indian classical music, not film composers of this kind - Zakir Hussain on the tabla, Hariprasad Chaurasia on the bansuri and Ravi Shankar on the sitar - so none of them fits 'brought Rock 'n' Roll to Hindi tunes'.

Goals of planning Correct option: (d) Equity. The four long-term goals of India's Five-Year Plans are growth, modernisation, self-reliance and equity, and equity is the only one stated in terms of people: the benefits of development must reach every section, so that the poor too get food, education, health care and a fair share of income and assets. Growth means a larger stock of goods and services, modernisation means new technology and a changed social outlook, and self-reliance means depending less on imports - all three are statements about the economy, while equity is a statement about the citizen. That is also why a country can post high growth and still fail on the plan's own terms: without equity the extra output simply piles up with those who already have it.

Wayanad seat resignation Correct option: (a) Rahul Gandhi. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election Rahul Gandhi won from two seats - Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh and Wayanad in Kerala - and since a person may hold only one seat, he had to vacate one. The Speaker accepted his resignation from Wayanad on 18 June 2024. The rule behind it is Article 101(2) of the Constitution read with Section 70 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951: a candidate elected from more than one constituency must resign all but one within 14 days, or every seat falls vacant. He kept Rae Bareli, his family's traditional seat, and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra then fought the Wayanad by-election in November 2024 - her first contest - winning it by over 4 lakh votes. So option (b) names the person who later won Wayanad, not the one who resigned from it.

Nilgiri hills location Correct option: (d) Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka. The Nilgiris - the 'blue mountains' - stand exactly where Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka meet, at the knot where the Eastern Ghats run into the Western Ghats, and they are among the oldest hill masses of the Peninsula. Doddabetta (2,637 m) in Tamil Nadu is their highest peak and also the highest point of the Western Ghats south of the Nilgiri gap; Ooty (Udhagamandalam) is their best-known hill station. A useful anchor: the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, notified in 1986, was the first biosphere reserve declared in India, and it too spreads across these same three states. The other three options list northern and western states that lie nowhere near the Ghats.

Kalinga Mahotsav Correct option: (c) Odisha. The Kalinga Mahotsav (Dhauli-Kalinga Mahotsav) is held every year at the foot of the Dhauli hills near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, on the bank of the Daya river where the Kalinga War was fought. Its declared theme is the 'victory of peace over war', recalling Ashoka's turn to Buddhism after that war, and it is staged as a festival of martial-art based dance - Chhau and Paika of Odisha, Thang-Ta of Manipur and Kalaripayattu of Kerala. Tie it to the white Dhauli Shanti Stupa standing on the same hill and to Ashoka's rock edicts carved there, and the state can never be confused; the other options are simply states with no Kalinga connection.

Judo belt grades Judo grades climb a fixed ladder of belt colours: the kyu (student) grades run white, yellow, orange, green, blue and brown. The dan (master) grades begin with black; the 6th to 8th dan may wear a red-and-white panelled belt and the 9th and 10th dan a solid red belt. So white, blue and red all sit somewhere on the judo ladder, but pink appears nowhere on it. Memory hook: judo was founded by Jigoro Kano at the Kodokan, Tokyo, in 1882, and it was Kano who invented the coloured-belt system that other martial arts later copied. The colour NOT associated with judo grades is therefore Pink, so the correct option is (a).

Actinide series The actinides are the 5f inner-transition elements and they run from actinium (Z = 89) to lawrencium (Z = 103), fifteen elements in all. Lawrencium (Lr) closes that series, so its atomic number is 103. Check the distractors: 99 is einsteinium, 101 is mendelevium and 108 is hassium, which is a period-7 transition metal and not an actinide at all. Memory hook: the series is bounded by two easy numbers, 89 and 103; lawrencium is named after Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, and was first made at Berkeley in 1961. Hence the correct option is (d).

Padma Shri folk dance Ummathat (Ummatt-aat) is a folk dance of the Kodava community of Kodagu, the district better known as Coorg, in Karnataka. Rani Machaiah, popularly called 'Ummathat ki Rani', received the Padma Shri in 2023 in the field of Art (Folk Dance) for keeping this form alive. In the dance, Kodava women in traditional dress with kumkuma on the forehead move in a circle to a swinging rhythm, striking brass cymbals, while one woman at the centre holds a pot of water that stands for Mother Kaveri. That Kaveri image is the giveaway: the river's source, Talakaveri, lies in Kodagu, so the dance can belong only to Karnataka and not to Kerala, Telangana or Goa. Hence the correct option is (b).

Article 21 rights Article 21 says that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law. In Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs Union of India (2017) a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held unanimously that the Right to Privacy is intrinsic to life and personal liberty, and therefore flows from Article 21. The other three options live elsewhere in the Constitution: free speech under Article 19(1)(a), equality under Article 14, and property, which the 44th Amendment (1978) removed from the Fundamental Rights and left as a mere constitutional right under Article 300A. Memory hook: Article 21 is the Court's favourite hook - the right to livelihood, to clean air and water, to education and to privacy have all been read into it. Hence the correct option is (d).

The four Vedas The Atharvaveda is the fourth and last Veda, and the only one that turns away from public ritual towards everyday life: it is a collection of magical spells, charms and cures used to drive off evil spirits, enemies and disease. It is named after the sage Atharvan; its two surviving recensions are the Paippalada and the Saunakiya, and its Brahmana is the Gopatha Brahmana. It also carries the Mundaka Upanishad, from which India's national motto 'Satyameva Jayate' is taken. The other three have plainly different purposes: the Rigveda is hymns of praise, the Samaveda is the book of melodies sung at sacrifices, and the Yajurveda supplies the sacrificial formulae. Hence the correct option is (b).

Para badminton player Parul Parmar of Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is India's most decorated para badminton player; polio in childhood left her with a leg impairment and she competes in the standing SL3 class. She has been world champion more than once and won gold at the Asian Para Games in 2014 and 2018, and she represented India at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. She received the Arjuna Award in 2009 and the Eklavya Award from the Government of Gujarat. Memory hook: Parul Parmar is the senior name in the same para badminton set-up under coach Gaurav Khanna that later produced Pramod Bhagat and Krishna Nagar. Hence the correct option is (c).

SC and ST list amendment The Constitution (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) Orders (Amendment) Bill, 2024 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 5 February 2024 and it revises the SC and ST lists of Odisha. It adds communities such as Muka, Mooka, Nuka and Nooka Dora in specified districts and Konda Reddy or Konda Reddi to the Scheduled Tribes list of the state. It also shifts Tamadia and Tamudia out of the Scheduled Castes list and into the Scheduled Tribes list of Odisha. Note the constitutional route, because that is what the question is really testing: under Articles 341 and 342 the President notifies the SC and ST lists, but only Parliament may add to or take away from them, which is why every such change comes as a Bill. Parliament passed the Bill on 8 February 2024 along with a companion Bill for Andhra Pradesh, so the state named in this one is Odisha and the correct option is (d).

Dissolution of Assembly Article 174(2)(b) states that the Governor may from time to time dissolve the Legislative Assembly of the state. Ordinarily he does so on the advice of the Chief Minister and the Council of Ministers; he uses his own discretion only when no party is able to form a stable government. The Chief Minister can recommend dissolution but cannot order it, the Chief Secretary is a civil servant with no such power, and the Chief Justice of a High Court belongs to the judiciary, which never dissolves a legislature. Parallel at the Centre: the President dissolves the Lok Sabha under Article 85(2)(b), and the Governor is simply the state-level counterpart of that power. Hence the correct option is (d).

Kathak exponent Shovana Narayan is a leading exponent of Kathak, the classical dance of north India, and a senior disciple of Pandit Birju Maharaj of the Lucknow gharana. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 1999-2000, and she carried on a full career in the Indian Audit and Accounts Service alongside her dancing. The clue that settles the question is the guru: Birju Maharaj is the name most tightly bound to Kathak, so a dancer described as his disciple can only be a Kathak dancer. Hence the correct option is (c).

State religion of Bangladesh Article 2A of the Constitution of Bangladesh declares that the state religion of the Republic is Islam, while the state must ensure equal status and equal right in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and other religions. The article was inserted by the Eighth Amendment in 1988; the Fifteenth Amendment of 2011 put secularism back into the Constitution yet retained Article 2A, so Bangladesh is at once secular in principle and has a state religion in law. The demography points the same way: about nine in ten Bangladeshis are Muslim, with Hindus the largest minority, so neither Buddhism nor Hinduism nor Christianity could be the state religion. Hence the correct option is (b).