English

I. English encodes class in India. It does so by sliding into the DNA of social division: income, caste, gender, religion or place of belonging. The threat it poses to social cohesion has worried public commentators across the political spectrum. In an address delivered as independent India’s Parliament dilly-dallied over the suggestion to replace English with regional languages as the medium of instruction for higher education, Gandhi said, ‘This blighting imposition of a foreign medium upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest tragedies. Our boys think, and rightly in the present circumstances, that without English they cannot get government service. Girls are taught English as a passport to marriage.’

A hundred years later, the language continues to be seen as a tool of exclusion. The problem now is about inequality of access. ‘To be denied English is harmful to the individual as well as our society,’ writes Chetan Bhagat, selfappointed leader of a class war set off by unequal access to English.

Bhagat, an engineer-turned-investment banker, wrote his first college romance in English in 2004. Then only a certain kind of person—someone who grew up reading, writing and speaking the language—wrote books in English—big words, long sentences, literary pretension, heavy with orientalism. In the ten years since Bhagat put the popular in ‘popular’ English fiction, he has written six other novels and sold millions of copies all told. With every new book, all written in deliberately simple English, Bhagat has recruited thousands of new soldiers in his crusade against what he calls the ‘caste system around the language’. Bhagat even has a term for Indians who ‘have’ English: E1. ‘These people had parents who spoke English, had access to good English-medium schools—typically in big cities, and gained early proficiency, which enabled them to consume English products such as newspapers, books and films. English is so instinctive to them that even some of their thought patterns are in English. These people are much in demand.’ The people E1 presumably control, through a nexus of privilege built on ownership of English, are E2: ‘probably ten times the E1s. They are technically familiar with the language. [But] if they sit in an interview conducted by E1s, they will come across as incompetent, even though they may be equally intelligent, creative or hardworking.’

The situation may not be so comically stark. The haves and have-nots may not exactly fit into Bhagat’s stereotypes of urban, sophisticated rich people and provincial, uncultured poor. His argument does not factor in many other walls around English in India. You are more likely to learn English if you are born a man rather than a woman, high caste rather than low caste, south Indian rather than north Indian. There is more than one kind of E1 and more than one kind of E2. And there is more than one way E2s can overthrow E1s. One is to speak it like they know it.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, by Snigdha Poonam, Penguin Viking, 2018.]

Q. 1 Which of the following can be inferred about the author’s views on English in contemporary India?

Q. 2 Who among the following would defy Chetan Bhagat’s neat categorisation of Indian English-speakers into E1 and E2?

Q. 3 Which of the following best describes the author’s response to Bhagat’s views on English?

Q. 4 Which of the following can be inferred from Gandhi’s views with respect to English in post-independence India?

Q. 5 All the following pairs of words are synonyms, except:

II. I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup.... Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

Q. 6 What use was the kabadiwala (wastepicker) to the author?

Q. 7 What according to the author is essential about the experience of being a ‘provincial reader’?

Q. 8 Why did the author feel a sense of epiphany and deep sadness?

Q. 9 What does the word ‘anachronistic’ as used in the passage, mean?

Q. 10 Which of the following options captures the meaning of the last sentence best?

III. ‘So pick a bird,’ Iff commanded. ‘Any bird.’ This was puzzling. ‘The only bird around here is a wooden peacock,’ Haroun pointed out, reasonably enough. Iff gave a snort of disgust. ‘A person may choose what he cannot see,’ he said, as if explaining something very obvious to a very foolish individual. ‘A person may mention a bird’s name even if the creature is not present and correct: crow, quail, hummingbird, bulbul, mynah, parrot, kite. A person may even select a flying creature of his own invention, for example winged horse, flying turtle, airborne whale, space serpent or aeromouse. To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being. Or, in this case, the said bird or Imaginary Flying Organism.’

‘That may be true where you come from,’ Haroun argued. ‘But in these parts, stricter rules apply.’

‘In these parts,’ rejoined blue-bearded Iff, ‘I am having time wasted by someone who will not trust in what he can’t see. How much have you seen, eh? Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And submarines? Huh? Also, hailstones, baseballs, pagodas? Goldmines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eves and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.’ With that, he plunged his hand into a pocket of his auberginey pajamas, and when he brought it forth again it was bunched into a fist. ‘So take a look, or I should say a gander, at the enclosed.’ He opened his hand, and Haroun’s eyes almost fell out of his head. Tiny birds were walking about on Iff’s palm; and pecking at it, and flapping their miniature wings to hover just above it. And as well as birds there were fabulous winged creatures out of legends: an Assyrian lion with the head of a bearded man and a pair of large hairy wings growing out of its flanks; and winged monkeys, flying saucers, tiny angels, levitating (and apparently air-breathing) fish. ‘What’s your pleasure, select, choose,’ Iff urged. And although it seemed obvious to Haroun that these magical creatures were so small that they couldn’t possibly have carried so much as a bitten-off fingernail, he decided not to argue and pointed at a tiny crested bird that was giving him a sidelong look through one highly intelligent eye.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie, Granta & Penguin, 1990.]

Q. 11 If Iff is right, which of the following statements is true?

Q. 12 Which of the following applies to Iff?

Q. 13 Which of the following most accurately describes what the underlined sentence means in the context of the passage?

Q. 14 All the words below are related in meaning, except:

Q. 15 What does ‘fabulous’ mean in the passage?

IV. The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection— this feverish, electric, unliveable hell.

The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 2019.]

Q. 16 Which of the following statements can be inferred from the above passage?

Q. 17 All the following statements are ‘truisms’, except;

Q. 18 Which of the following comes closest to the underlined sentence in the passage?

Q. 19 Which of the following is a metaphor?

Q. 20 Which of the following categories best describes this piece of writing?

V. Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase. The ‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought to have urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date back significantly. ... Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC, and old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence remained absent. Evidence indicated similarities between graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the IVC. It bolstered the arguments of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for years that their ancestors existed contemporaneously with the IVC. ... All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was too soon to make definitive links between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have invited keen political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. ... The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought. So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but people who lived there had developed their own script. “The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but 2600 years ago writing was prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. “A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ “

[Excerpted from “The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]

Q. 21 What was the assumption about the origin of urban life in India before the Keeladi dig?

Q. 22 “The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life.” — in elaboration of this sentence, which of these options follows?

Q. 23 Language, including a script similar to the Brahmi script, emerged in Keeladi in the sixth century BCE. Which of the following is the most convincing conclusion from this statement?

Q. 24 BCE is the acronym for:

Q. 25 “A farmer could write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt it myself.’ “ — These sentences imply:

VI. Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep in the ground. They then drag thick hoses toward a queue of 20-odd tanker trucks idling quietly with their headlights turned off. The men work in a team: While one man fits a hose’s mouth over a borehole, another clambers atop a truck at the front of the line and shoves the tube’s opposite end into the empty steel cistern attached to the vehicle’s creaky frame. ‘On kar!’ someone shouts in Hinglish; almost instantly, his orders to ‘switch it on’ are obeyed. Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks. The full trucks don’t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, drivers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby highway. There, they turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty to factories and hospitals, malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across this city of 25 million. Everything about this business is illegal: the boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment. ‘Water work is night work,’ says a middle-aged neighbour who lives near the covert pumping station and requested anonymity. ‘Bosses arrange buyers, labour fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure that no one says nothing to nobody.’ Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls short of the city’s needs. A quarter of Delhi’s households live without a piped-water connection: most of the rest receive water for only a few hours each day. So residents have come to rely on private truck owners—the most visible strands of a dispersed web of city councillors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water each day from illicit boreholes, and sell the liquid for profit. The entrenched system has a local moniker: the watertanker mafia. A 2013 audit found that the city loses 60 percent of its water supply to leakages, theft, and a failure to collect revenue. The mafia defends its work as a community service, but there is a much darker picture of Delhi’s subversive water industry: one of a thriving black market populated by small-time freelance agents who are exploiting a fast-depleting common resource and in turn threatening India’s long-term water security.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “At the Mercy of the Water Mafia”, by Aman Sethi, Foreign Policy]

Q. 26 Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

Q. 27 Which of the following, used in the passage, suggests that the illegal supply of groundwater is not a recent phenomenon?

Q. 28 Which of the following seems to be the author’s main concern in the passage?

Q. 29 All of the following are sounds you can hear as the water tankers are filled, except:

Q. 30 Which of the following words from the passage means ‘hidden’?

Current Affairs Including General Knowledge

VII. YouTuber Nas Daily in one of his videos named him as the Most Generous Billionaire who wanted to donate all his wealth to charity. But ten months later, ‘[1]’ is no longer a billionaire. He is alleged to have caused massive losses worth $1 billion to investors. Known by his initials, he is the co-founder and former CEO of FTX, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange which has recently filed for bankruptcy in the US.

Once a billionaire with an estimated wealth of $26 billion at peak, according to Bloomberg estimates, [1] has seen his wealth been entirely wiped out. [1] studied physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and traded currencies, futures and exchange-traded funds before moving to crypto trading, setting up [2] in 2017.

[1] teamed up with Gary Wang, a former software engineer at Google and a fellow MIT graduate, to launch FTX in 2019. The company offered trading on crypto tokens and derivatives. At the start of 2022, investors valued FTX and its U.S. operations at $40 billion. [1] transferred $10 billion in customer funds to his hedge fund, [2] without publicly disclosing it, many say this become the reason for collapse of his empire.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Who is [1], the co-founder of collapsed crypto firm FTX”, Hindustan Times]

Q. 31 Which person’s name has been replaced with ‘[1]’ in the passage above?

Q. 32 Which hedge fund’s name has been replaced with ‘[2]’ in the passage above?

Q. 33 This person was once named “the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire” by Forbes magazine and is the founder of the company Theranos. What is the name of this person?

Q. 34 The Reserve Bank of India recently announced the launch of ‘Digital Rupee — Wholesale Segment’, a form of which of the following?

Q. 35 Which of the following technologies does cryptocurrency rely on?

Q. 36 What is the name of the Government of India-owned corporation that mints coins used as legal tender in India?

Q. 37 Who was the Founder and Former Chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd., and was sentenced to prison and fined for a corporate governance scam?

VIII. Former Governor of a State and National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate Droupadi Murmu was elected the 15th President of India, the first tribal woman to be elected to the position and the youngest as well. She was declared elected on Thursday after four rounds of counting, although she had crossed the half-way mark after the third round of counting itself, posting an unassailable lead over her rival and the Opposition’s candidate who conceded the election thereafter. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the first to greet Ms. Murmu at her residence in New Delhi after the third round of counting showed that she had crossed the half-way mark.

Ms. Murmu hails from the Santhal tribe and was born in the district of Mayurbhanj, coming up the hard way in fife, graduating and teaching in Odisha before entering electoral politics at the local body level and later being elected MLA and serving as a Minister in the Biju Janata Dal-BJP coalition government from 2000 to 2004. She remained an MLA till 2009, representing Rairangpur in Odisha, a town that burst into celebrations since her name was announced as a candidate for the post of President of India. She was known to intervene in stopping amendments to the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act that was being brought in by the BJP government of Raghubar Das, which involved changing land use in tribal areas.

[Excerpt taken and edited from “Droupadi Murmu elected 15th President of India”, The Hindu]

Q. 38 Before Droupadi Murmu, India had only one other female president, Pratibha Patil. When did Patil serve as the President of India?

Q. 39 President Murmu has earlier served as a Governor of which State?

Q. 40 The first presidential election was held by the Election Commission in which year?

Q. 41 The Rashtrapati Bhavan was formerly known as the Viceroy’s palace (during colonial times). Where did the Governor General reside before the transfer of the British capital to Delhi in 1911?

Q. 42 Who among the following was a candidate in the elections for the Vice President of India in 2022?

Q. 43 Voting in an Indian Presidential Election is through:

Q. 44 Who was the first Dalit to hold the office of the President of India?

IX. The agriculture sector has experienced buoyant growth in the past two years. The sector, which is the largest employer of workforce, accounted for a sizeable 18.8 per cent (2021-22) in Gross Value Added (GVA) of the country registering a growth of 3.6 per cent in 2020-21 and 3.9 per cent in 2021-22. Growth in allied sectors including livestock, dairy and fisheries has been the major drivers of overall growth in the sector. When measured in total value of agricultural production, India is ranked fourth largest in the world. Post-independence, there was a need to import food grains due to low-productivity, stagnant food-crop sector and poor rural infrastructure making food self-sufficiency a major national goal. The introduction of the Green Revolution then yielded spectacular results and we became one of the largest producers of many agricultural commodities such as rice, wheat, pulses, fruits and vegetables. From being a net importer of foods in the 1960s, India is now a net exporter, thanks to Indian farmers and the Indian agriculture input industry.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “India’s changing agricultural landscape and its way to inclusive growth”, by NS Ramaswamy, The Economic Times]

Q. 45 Which of the following is the largest exported agricultural product from India?

Q. 46 According to provisional data released by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, India achieved record exports of agricultural exports for the financial year FY22. What was the value of India’s agricultural products exports according to this data?

Q. 47 Who among the following is also called the ‘Father of the Wheat Revolution’?

Q. 48 India is the world’s largest producer of which of the following?

Q. 49 What is India’s ranking in the 2022 Global Hunger Index?

Q. 50 The National Commission on Farmers, constituted in December 2004, which recommended the C2+50% formula for calculation of the Minimum Support Price, was chaired by:

Q. 51 The bio-decomposer technology to avoid stubble burning around the Delhi NCR was developed by:

X. As a result of FIFA’s restrictions on players wearing [1] rainbow armbands during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the German Football Association (DFB) has taken the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In a protest against FIFA’s rule regarding the armband meant to support the [2] community, the German players covered their lips in a team picture taken before their 2-1 defeat to Japan.

On Wednesday, Germany played against Japan. Before the game, FIFA warned the DFB of “severe” athletic fines if they breached tournament regulations by allowing their captain to wear the [1] armband, which promotes diversity and inclusion. The DFB told German captain Manuel Neuer not to wear the rainbow armband during the game.

If CAS rules quickly against the suspension’s legality, Neuer might continue to wear the captain’s armband for Germany’s next game against Spain on Sunday. CAS has set up a special ad hoc branch for this World Cup to ensure that applications are processed within 48 hours. Germany’s players protested by covering their lips as they sought to wear the rainbow armband during their team’s dramatic 2-1 defeat to Japan at the Khalifa Stadium.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “World Cup 2022: Germany’s players cover mouths during team photo to protest FIFA’s rainbow armband rule”, The Economic Times]

Q. 52 What is the name of the armband which has been replaced with ‘[1]’ in the passage above?

Q. 53 The name of which community has been replaced with ‘[2]’ in the passage above?

Q. 54 What is the name of the system used to monitor and regulate migrant labourers, which is used in Qatar and a few other countries, and which came under heavy criticism in the build-up to the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar?

Q. 55 Where is the Court of Arbitration for Sport based?

Q. 56 Who is the current captain of the Indian men’s football team?

Q. 57 Timothy Weah, the Paris Saint Germain and U.S. national team player in the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar is the son of the President of which country?

Q. 58 Which of the following is the oldest football tournament in India?

XI. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” wrote LaMDA in an “interview” conducted by engineer Blake Lemoine and one of his colleagues…..Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development of LaMDA for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues. These led him to ask if the software program is sentient. In April, Lemoine explained his perspective in an internal company document, intended only for Google executives. But after his claims were dismissed, Lemoine went public with his work on this artificial intelligence algorithm—and Google placed him on administrative leave….Regardless of what LaMDA actually achieved, the issue of the difficult “measurability” of emulation capabilities expressed by machines also emerges. In the journal Mind in 1950, mathematician [1] proposed a test to determine whether a machine was capable of exhibiting intelligent behaviour, a game of imitation of some of the human cognitive functions.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Google Engineer Claims Al Chatbot Is Sentient: Why That Matters”, by Leonardo De Cosmo, Scientific American]

Q. 59 Whose name has been replaced with ‘[1]’ in the passage above?

Q. 60 Garry Kasparov, (then) world chess champion, was defeated in 1997 by a supercomputer in a chess tournament. What was the name of this supercomputer?

Q. 61 The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics, published in 1989, was written by a British mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2020. Who was this mathematician?

Q. 62 What kind of computing model resembles the way in which biological neurons exchange signals in the human brain?

Q. 63 What is the full form of ‘LaMDA’?

Q. 64 Meta’s newly released, fully trained large language Al model is called:

Q. 65 What is the name of the Al-enabled legal research assistive tool launched by the Supreme Court of India in April 2021?

Legal Aptitude

Assume that the statements in the passages are the applicable law.

XII. Parliament passed the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 (the “Act”) in March 2022. The legislation enables police and central investigating agencies to collect, store and analyse the measurements of arrested persons. Until rules are notified, an Act cannot be implemented or come into force. On September 19, 2022, the Ministry of Home Affairs (the “MHA”) notified the rules (the “Rules”) under the Act.

The Act empowers a Magistrate to direct any person to give measurements to the police, which till now was reserved for convicts and those involved in heinous crimes. It also enables police personnel of the rank of Head Constable.or above to take measurements of any person who resists or refuses to give measurements when ordered to do so by a Magistrate. As per the Rules, “measurements” mean finger-impressions, palm-print, footprint, photographs, iris and retina scan, physical, biological samples and their analysis, behavioural attributes including signatures, and handwriting. Though it has not been specified, analysis of biological samples could also include DNA profiling.

However, the Rules state that measurements of those detained under preventive Sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (“CrPC”) shall not be taken unless such person is at that time charged or under arrest in connection with any other offence punishable under any other law. Measurements can also be taken under the Rules if a person has been ordered to give security for his good behaviour for maintaining peace under Section 117 of the CrPC for a proceeding under that Section.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Explained | Rules for identifying criminals”, by Vijaita Singh, The Hindu]

Q. 66 Bhargesh is arrested by the police on April 11, 2022, on suspicion of having committed a series of minor thefts. During their investigation, the police find some fingerprints at the crime scenes, and on April 12, 2022, they tell Bhargesh that he must provide his finger-impressions to them so that they can check whether they match the fingerprints from the crime scenes. When Bhargesh refuses, the police tell him that he has no choice but to provide his measurements, as the Act had been passed by Parliament the previous month. Was Bhargesh bound to provide his finger-impressions under’ the Act?

Q. 67 Bhargesh is later released by the police because they are unable to find enough evidence to make a strong case against him. On October 5, 2022, the police receive a complaint alleging that Bhargesh had beaten up his neighbour and caused the neighbour severe injuries. They ask the local Magistrate to issue an order directing Bhargesh to provide the police his blood samples, so that they can match them against some blood stains that were found on the neighbour’s clothes. The Magistrate issues the order, but Bhargesh refuses to provide the blood samples. Is Bhargesh bound to provide his blood samples to the police under the Act?

Q. 68 On October 15, 2022, the police detain Bhargesh under a preventive Section of the CrPC, since they believe that he had plans to disturb the public peace during a festival day. They then tell Bhargesh that he must provide his measurements to them for their records. Bhargesh refuses again. Is Bhargesh bound to provide his photographs to the police under the Act?

Q. 69 Two days later, the police obtain an order from the Magistrate directing Bhargesh to provide them his photographs. As Bhargesh continues to refuse to provide his photographs, a regular police constable forces him to stand still and takes his photographs. Bhargesh files a case in court, claiming that the constable’s actions violate the Act. Will he succeed?

Q. 70 The police release Bhargesh, but to ensure that he does not disturb the public peace, they ask the Magistrate to issue an order under Section 117 of the CrPC, directing Bhargesh to provide a security of Rs. 1,00,000/- for his good behaviour and to ensure he maintains the peace, which the Magistrate refuses. The police now tell Bhargesh he must provide them his iris and retina scans. Is Bhargesh required to do so?

Free legal aid is the provision of free legal services in.civil and criminal matters for those poor and marginalised people who cannot afford the services of a lawyer for the conduct of a case or a legal proceeding in any Court, Tribunal or Authority. These services are governed by the Legal Services Authority Act, 1987 (the “Act”) and provided by the National Legal Services Authority (“NALSA”).

Provision of free legal aid includes:
• Representation by an advocate in legal proceedings;
• Payment of process fees, expenses of witnesses and all other charges payable or incurred in connection with any legal proceedings in appropriate cases;
• Preparation of pleadings, memo of appeal, paper book including printing and translation of documents in legal proceedings;
• Drafting of legal documents, special leave petition etc.; and
• Supply of certified copies of judgments, orders, notes of evidence and other documents in legal proceedings.

Free legal aid also includes provision of aid and advice to the beneficiaries to access benefits under welfare statutes and schemes framed by the Central Government or the state governments and to ensure access to justice in any other manner. Free legal aid is not confined to cases before the subordinate courts. Free legal aid must be provided to the needy from the lowest court to the Supreme Court of India.

According to Section 13(1) of the Act, any individual who satisfies any criteria under Section 12 is entitled to receive free legal aid, provided that NALSA is satisfied that such person has a genuine case to prosecute or defend the matter. There is hence no bar as to which kind of cases one can apply and not apply for. Section 12 of the Act includes the following:
• a member of a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe;
• a woman or a child;
• a person with a disability;
• an industrial workman; or
• a person in police custody.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “FAQs”, National Legal Services Authority]

Q. 71 Divya was arrested by the police and charged with having committed a murder. She was convicted by the trial court and appealed to the high court. She lost her appeal there and decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. By this time she has run out of money, so she approaches NALSA and asks them to help her get an advocate who can represent her before the Supreme Court. Is Divya entitled to support from NALSA?

Q. 72 Divya is acquitted by the Supreme Court and goes back to her regular life. Some days later, she has a fight with her neighbour Riya over a petty matter and decides to file a criminal case against her. She approaches NALSA for free legal aid to prosecute the matter. She tells NALSA representative that she knows she does not have a genuine case, but just wants to harass Riya.

NALSA refuses to provide Divya free legal aid because they believe she does not have a genuine case to prosecute. Can NALSA do so?

Q. 73 Incensed at Divya, Riya decides to file a civil case against Divya, claiming that Divya had violated the terms of a contract they had made some time back. Divya approaches NALSA for free legal aid to defend the matter, which NALSA agrees to provide. Since Riya is also short of funds, she too approaches NALSA for free legal aid. NALSA refuses to provide legal aid to Riya, since they are already providing Divya free legal aid in the same case. Is NALSA right in refusing free legal aid to Riya?

Q. 74 Farhan is an up-and-coming artist and makes a living selling his paintings. Since he is not very well known yet, he isn’t able to sell too many paintings, and is dependent on aid from the government and well-wishers. He reads about a new Central Government scheme in the papers one day, under which artists would be provided a monthly stipend by the local government. Since he finds the language of the scheme document very complex to understand, he approaches NALSA for help in understanding the scheme and obtaining the stipend. Is he entitled to free legal aid from NALSA in this regard?

Q. 75 Vikram is a rich businessman and has a huge art collection. Farhan invites Vikram to his studio one day, hoping to convince Vikram to buy some of his paintings. Vikram doesn’t buy any of his paintings, but after he leaves, Farhan notices that one of his newest paintings is missing. He suspects that Vikram has stolen it, and complains to the police, who promptly arrest Vikram. Vikram approaches NALSA for free legal aid, so that he can obtain bail. Is Vikram entitled to free legal aid from NALSA?

XIV. Until 2017, India did not have a codified law to order internet shut downs. A general power was vested in District Magistrates in this regard. The Magistrate could issue an order ordering a shut down if a ‘speedy remedy’ (extending to internet shut down) is desirable for ‘immediate prevention’ of an event. The Magistrate had to be satisfied that the order is ‘likely to prevent or tends to prevent obstruction, annoyance or injury to human life, health or safety, or a disturbance of public tranquillity’. The Magistrate’s order cannot be for longer than two months.

In 2017 new rules to order internet shut downs were introduced taking the power away from the Magistrate. These rules — the Temporary Suspension Rules — state that internet shut downs can now only be ordered by the Home Secretary of the Union or State Governments. Only in “unavoidable circumstances” can the passing of orders be delegated to someone lower than the rank of a Joint Secretary to the Government of India. And even in this case, the official must be authorised by the Centre or State Home Secretary. Shut downs can be ordered where ‘necessary’ or ‘unavoidable’ during a ‘public emergency’ or in the ‘interest of public safety’. Shut down orders must necessarily detail the reasons to shut down the internet. The orders must also be sent to a review committee under the state or central government within 24 hours. The committee must then review them within five working days. The rules state that apart from the Chief Secretary and Legal Secretary, the committee can comprise a secretary other than the home secretary.

In January 2020 the Supreme Court passed its judgement in the case of Anuradha Bhasin. The judgement in this case explicitly recognised two things: that the freedom to access information is a fundamental right under Article 19(l)(a) of the Constitution of India (which protects the freedom of speech and expression); and that the freedom to conduct your trade, profession or business over the internet is also a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India (which protects the freedom to practice any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business). Every time the internet is suspended, it is quite obvious that it is a violation of these rights. These rights can only be curtailed in the interest of the ‘sovereignty and security of the state, integrity of the nation, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence’. The Supreme Court’s judgement in Anuradha Bhasin’s case had also underlined that shut down orders must clearly provide reasons for the shut down and they must be publicly available.

[Extracted with edits and revisions from “In India, are internet shut downs in accordance with law? Not always”, by Diksha Munjal, News Laundry]

Q. 76 In 2014, India was hit by a terrible pandemic. It was the first time the country was experiencing a pandemic. People panicked. WhatsApp and Facebook groups became common platforms for sharing information about the pandemic. Messages were forwarded from group to group. Many of these messages prescribed different remedies to prevent and cure the flu caused by the pandemic. In Merodha district, people following these remedies began to fall sick. The already overburdened public sector hospitals became even more full. The district administration requested people to stop sharing such misinformation. However, these requests were not heeded. The District Magistrate issued an indefinite order to shut down the internet to prevent the transmission of these messages. Is this order legal?

Q. 77 The Central government was preparing to conduct the National Medical Eligibility Test (“NMET”) on 25 October 2021. The exams were to be conducted in public schools around the country on computers provided by the government. In July 2021, there were rumours that several groups had hatched plans to share answers with the students taking the exam. A special chat application was developed. The student simply had to open the application on the browser of the computer on which they were taking the exam, allowing persons on the other end to send them the answers. The government was very concerned. If the rumours were true, the quality of doctors in training (who were selected through the NMET) would be severely affected. To prevent this public emergency, the government issued orders under the Temporary Suspension Rules to shut down internet countrywide on 25 October 2021. Many protested against this decision. They argued that the government could prevent cheating in the exams by shutting down the internet in the public schools where the exam was taking place. A nation-wide blanket shut down was not required for this purpose. Now, the issue is before the Supreme Court. What will the Court decide?

Q. 78 In the above instance, the order was passed by the Communications Minister of the Indian Central Government. The Communications Minister is below the rank of Joint Secretary. The Home Secretary was away for a conference in Geneva and thus was not present in Delhi when the decision to pass the order was made. However, the Home Secretary could be contacted by phone or email. She had, in fact, explicitly said that she should be contacted if any need arises, however minor. As she had taken measures to make herself available virtually, the Home Secretary did not authorise any other official to exercise her functions. Against this, consider the following statements:
i. The Communications Minister had the power to pass the order under the 2017 Rules.
ii. The passing of the order by the Communications Minister was avoidable.
iii. The power to pass the order remained with the Home Secretary.
iv. The Communications Minister did not have the power to pass the order under the 2017 Rules.

Which of the following statements are false?

Q. 79 Assume that in the above instance, the Joint Secretary passed the order. The order stated: “By means of the discretion vested in me by the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules 2017, I suspend internet across all Indian States and Union Territories on October 25, 2021’. The order was passed on 15 October, 2021. The order was sent to the Central Government review committee within 8 hours of its passing. The committee reviewed and approved of the order on 22 October, 2021. Is the order legal?

Q. 80 In January 2022, communal riots were rife in five states in India, between two dominant communities, X and Y. The primary mode of communication amongst the rioters was Signal which could be accessed through the internet via mobile phones and computers. The State governments of the five States received information that some members of X group were planning to set the houses of members of Y group on fire. Through broad Signal broadcasts amongst all users, the leaders of X group were instigating members of their group to participate in this exercise, threatening public order. Creating or inciting threat to public order is a criminal offence under Section 163F of the Indian Penal Code. To prevent further communication between the leaders of X group and their members, the State shut Signal down.

However, communication then shifted to other platforms. Realising that targeting isolated platforms would not work, the State governments issued an order shutting down internet completely in all the States. Two groups protested against this order. First, students whose education was being conducted online due to the riots. They argued that they were prevented from accessing vital information, central to their education. Second, business owners who conducted business on the internet. The State’s order read: ‘In the five Indian States fisted below, internet will be suspended for a period of two months from 10 January 2022 to 10 March 2022’. The State’s order was not displayed anywhere (in print or virtually) from January to March 2022.

Consider the following statements:
i. The students’ right under Article 19(l)(a) was violated by the State order.
ii. The business owners’ right under Article 19(l)(g) was violated by the State order.
iii. The State order validly restricted the said fundamental rights.
iv. The State’s order complied with the guidelines under Anuradha Bhasin.

How many statements are true?

XV. Quashing a case of cruelty that was filed against a man by his wife, the Bombay High Court said that if a married lady is asked to do household work for the family, it cannot be said that she is treated “like a maid servant”. The Court was hearing an application by the husband and his parents seeking that proceedings against them are quashed. A First Information Report (“FIR”) was filed against the trio in September 2020, around nine months after the marriage, alleging that they hounded the woman for money to purchase a car, harassed her mentally and physically and treated her like a maid servant. Examining the evidence, the Court found that there was no merit to the woman’s allegations. The Court said that though the FIR says that she was treated properly for about a month and then “like a maid servant”, there are no details of what this meant. The Court added: “If a married lady is asked to do household work for the purpose of the family, it cannot be said that it is like a maid servant.” The Court held that the mere use of the word harassment “mentally and physically” in the FIR is not sufficient to constitute an offence Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (“IPC”), which punishes the husband, or a relative of the husband of a woman who subjects her to cruelty in any way. It is interesting to note that Section 498A of the IPC also provides that if a married woman is actually treated like a ‘maid servant’, it would be an offence under that Section.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “If Wife Is Asked To Do Household Work, Does Not Mean She Is Treated Like Maid: Bombay HC”, The Wire]

Q. 81 Ashwin and Ashima were married in February 2020. In March 2020, Ashwin asked Ashima to take care of all their household work, such as cooking, cleaning, and other domestic chores, as he was very busy with his professional responsibilities. Ashima claims that this amounts to treating her like a maid servant and constitutes an offence under Section 498A of the IPC. Applying the Bombay High Court decision, is she likely to succeed?

Q. 82 In April 2020, Ashwin’s friend Rakesh visits Ashwin and Ashima’s home, and stays with them for a few days. During his visit, he is very mean to Ashima, and uses abusive language with her. He also threw a plate at her one evening when he was unhappy with the meal that she had prepared. Ashima now claims that Rakesh has committed an offence under Section 498A of the IPC. Is she likely to succeed?

Q. 83 Frustrated and upset with her marriage, Ashima applies for and is granted a divorce from Ashwin in November 2020. Since she and Ashwin had been friends for many years before they got married, she stays in touch with him. She moves into her own apartment and starts going to office regularly at a new job. Ashwin is very upset at this and starts treating Ashima very cruelly. Ashima again claims that Ashwin has committed an offence under Section 498A of the IPC. Is she right?

Q. 84 Assume that the government passes a new law in January 2021, called the Protection of Rights of Married Women Act, 2021 (the “PoMWA”), according to which, asking a married woman to take care of household chores would be an offence. The PoMWA also provides that if a man commits such an offence, he would have to pay compensation to the woman. The PoMWA even applies to actions that were committed any time in the three years prior to the new law coming into force, and even if the man and woman involved in the matter were no longer married. Upon hearing about this new law, Ashima once again alleges that Ashwin has committed an offence under Section 498A of the IPC, and claims compensation under the PoMWA for his actions. Is she right, and will she succeed?

Q. 85 Assume that in March 2021, the government changes Section 498A of the IPC. The effect of this change is that asking a married woman to do household chores — even for their own family — by herself would be considered cruelty, and therefore, an offence under the Section. Some days after this change comes into effect, Shamita, Ashima’s friend at work, tells her that her husband has been forcing her to do all the household work by herself. Ashima tells Shamita that her husband’s actions would amount to an offence under Section 498A of the IPC, even though Ashima herself has been unsuccessful in having Ashwin convicted under that Section in the past. Is Ashima’s advice to Shamita correct?

XVI. Surrogacy is defined by law as “a practice whereby one woman bears and gives birth to a child for an intending couple” and intends to hand over the child to them after the birth, as per the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 (the “SRA”). The SRA restricts altruistic surrogacy to legally wedded infertile Indian couples. The couple is deemed eligible for surrogacy only if they have been married for five years. The SRA sets an age limitation for the couple. A husband must be between 26 and 55 years of age and a wife between 23 and 50 years. Further, Indian couples with biological or adopted children are prohibited from undertaking surrogacy, save for some exceptions such as mentally or physically challenged children, or those suffering from a life-threatening disorder or fatal illness. The SRA provides that the surrogate mother has to be a close relative of the couple (such as a sibling of one of the members of the couple), a married woman with a child of her own, aged between 25 and 35 years, who has been a surrogate only once in her life. Even within this category of people, commercial surrogacy is banned in India and that includes the “commercialisation of surrogacy services or procedures or its component services or component procedures”. The surrogate woman cannot be given payments, rewards, benefits or fees, “except the medical expenses and such other prescribed expenses incurred on the surrogate mother and the insurance coverage for the surrogate mother”.

A legal commentator points out some criticisms of the law. “Permitting limited conditional surrogacy to married Indian couples and disqualifying other persons on basis of nationality, marital status, sexual orientation or age does not pass the test of equality,” he writes. He adds that reproductive autonomy, inclusive of the right to procreation and parenthood is protected under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. The intending parents typically sign a contract with the surrogate. The Indian Contract Act, 1972 (the “ICA”) provides that a valid contract has to be in writing, and signed in the presence of two witnesses. The ICA also provides that a contract that is prohibited by any other law will not be valid under the ICA.

[Extracted with edits and revisions from “What laws regulate surrogacy in India”, The Indian Express]

Q. 86 Rani and Shiva would like to opt for surrogacy. They have been married for 6 years. Rani is aged 51 and Shiva is aged 53. Both Rani and Shiva have built successful business empires. They are now working together on a joint initiative. Due to the demanding nature of their work, they have not thought about children previously. However, they are now keen to have a child via surrogacy.

Are Rani and Shiva eligible for surrogacy under the SRA?

Q. 87 Assume Rani and Shiva are eligible for surrogacy under the SRA. They approach Geeta to act as a surrogate. Geeta is Rani’s sister. She is 29 years old. She is married, has one child and has been a surrogate twice before. Which of the following statements are false?
i. Geeta is eligible to be a surrogate because she is a close relative.
ii. Geeta is eligible to be a surrogate because she is married.
iii. Geeta has been a surrogate only twice before and is now eligible to be a surrogate for Rani.
iv. Geeta is eligible to be a surrogate because she is 29.

Q. 88 Joseph and Neena are keen to have a child via surrogacy. They have been married for 8 years, and have been unable to conceive biologically due to infertility. Joseph is 40 years old and Neena is 42 years old. They have an adopted daughter. Maya, who is 4 years old. Maya has been diagnosed with Striker’s Syndrome, which would cause slow neurological deterioration, with chances of death. Devastated, Joseph and Neena decide to opt for surrogacy, to become parents to their biological child. Are they eligible for surrogacy?

Q. 89 Queen runs a surrogacy clinic. She employs 54 women, aged between 25 and 35 years. They are all married women with one or more children. Most of them belong to economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They choose to be surrogates because it gives them a reliable source of income. Kishore and Noor are intending parents. They have been married 5 years, are both aged 35, and do not have children. Kishore has been certified as infertile. So, they decide to approach Queen’s clinic. They sign a contract with the surrogate. The contract is in writing and is signed in the presence of two witnesses. As per the contract, Kishore and Noor are required to remunerate the surrogate with Rs. 2 lakh per child born as a result of surrogacy, and take care of her medical needs, including providing her with medical insurance. A healthy baby girl is born as a result of surrogacy. Kishore and Noor are overjoyed. They take care of the surrogate’s medical expenses. However, they do not pay the surrogate the Rs. 2 lakh. The surrogate, supported by Queen, now wants to take Kishore and Noor to court, to demand that they make the payment. Will she succeed?

Q. 90 Karan and Daniel are in a homosexual relationship. As per the Hindu Marriage Act, marriage is allowed only between heterosexual couples. As a result, Karan and Daniel are not married. However, they wish to have children and decide to go in for surrogacy. When they approach Queen’s clinic, they are informed that they do not meet the requirements for an intending couple under the SRA. Karan and Daniel wish to challenge the SRA for violating their constitutional right to non-discrimination. The non-discrimination clause under the Constitution of India reads: ‘No citizen shall be discriminated on the basis of sex, caste, religion, nationality, place of birth or any other ground’. Karan and Daniel argue that the SRA discriminates against them on the basis of sexual orientation, because it restricts surrogacy to heterosexual couples alone. Which of the following arguments would most strongly support their claim in court?

XVII. Consumers are people who buy and use goods or services. Consumers have a right to file a complaint for any of the services or goods used by them under Consumer Protection Law. Under Consumer Protection Law, a ‘consumer’ means:

Person buying and using goods and services: A consumer includes any person who buys goods and services, as well as anyone who uses them. For instance, a person who watches a movie after buying a movie ticket is a consumer and similarly, a person who uses a gift voucher gifted from someone else is also a consumer.

Person using goods for self-employment, and not for commercial purposes: The consumer protection law does not apply to people who use goods and services for commercial purposes. However, there are some exceptions to this. For example, people who use goods for self-employment are considered as consumers. For example, artists who buy art supplies for their work or beauticians who buy beauty products are consumers.

Person using online facilities: A consumer also includes any person who buys or hires goods or services online. For example, if you order from an online clothes website, you are a consumer.

People facing issues related to food: Consumers also include people who may be facing issues related to food items, such as adulteration, poor quality, lack of service, etc. For instance, issues related to food can cover problems across a wide range of products, starting from water that goes into the production of items like juices as well as the sale of animals like chicken, mutton etc. that are expressly intended for human consumption.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Who is a Consumer?”, Nyaaya India]

Q. 91 Clint Leone Morricone Ltd. (“CLML”) is a factory manufacturing bicycles. For the purpose of documentation and record keeping, it purchased a laptop from Pacer. However, within a month of the purchase, the laptop crashed and there was a motherboard failure. Despite a warranty, Pacer failed to replace the motherboard. Which of the following statements is correct?

Q. 92 Sita Das has been working as a freelance journalist. She writes columns and news-reports for various newspapers and news-portals and is paid on the basis of each column and report. For the purpose of her writing work, she purchases a Pacer laptop. However, within a month of the purchase, the laptop crashed and there was a motherboard failure. Which of the following statements is correct?

Q. 93 Kalpavruksha Charitable Trust runs a hospital. The hospital charges a fee from its patients. The fee is however 30% less than the commercial rates for all services and medical devices sold to patients. The hospital purchased a pacemaker from St. Rude’s — a globally reputed manufacturer of pacemakers, to be resold to and used by patients. Which of the following statements is correct?

Q. 94 Fitzit is an online platform that provides physiotherapy and other ancillary medical services. Amit Ghosh booked a physiotherapist on Fitzit for three months by paying an amount of Rs. 25,000. Fitzit guaranteed the availability of qualified physiotherapists for the duration. However, Fitzit failed to provide a qualified physiotherapist and the persons who were sent for the first two visits had no training or certification in the field. Amit Ghosh seeks to proceed against Fitzit under Consumer Protection Law. Which of the following statements can be correctly inferred?

Q. 95 Jitesh Shah purchased from BreatheEasy, a company selling respiratory devices, a nebuliser device for his son, Jignesh Shah, for use for clearing his nasal passages. The nebulizer was however defective and led to severe respiratory distress for Jignesh. Jignesh is considering filing a complaint against BreatheEasy under the Consumer Protection Law. Which of the following statements can be correctly inferred?

XVIII. Twitter’s lawyer on October 27, said before the Karnataka High Court that Union government orders to block certain Twitter handles and posts must contain reasons for the same that can be communicated to users of the microblogging site. He said this applies to all blocking orders sent to social media platforms. The lawyer representing Twitter said that reasons for the blocking order must be provided to users so they can determine whether or not they want to challenge the orders.

Challenging the blocking orders, Twitter’s July 5 petition contended that several blocking orders “demonstrate excessive use of powers and are disproportionate”. Such orders can only be issued by the Union government and not the state governments, he said, which increases the danger of such abuse. Twitter also claimed that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had sent it a letter threatening consequences for failing to comply with the blocking orders, such as criminal proceedings against the company’s chief compliance officer and the stripping away of Twitter’s safe harbour immunity, otherwise available to social media platforms under Section 79(1) of the Information Technology Act (the “IT Act”). Note that the Government has the power to strip away such safe harbour immunity under the IT Act. Further, in a previous hearing, Twitter’s lawyer said that the company was asked to block entire accounts, although Section 69A of the IT Act does not permit blocking of the whole account. It only permits the blocking of information, or a particular tweet or post. It argued that the Union government’s direction to block whole accounts will affect its business, adding that several prominent persons have them accounts on the platform.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “‘Government Must Provide Reasons for Blocking User Accounts,’ Twitter Tells Karnataka HC”, The Wire]

Q. 96 Sunil is a high-ranking officer of the Union government. While scrolling through his timeline on a social media platform, he notices some posts by Sachin, a private businessman, which he finds objectionable. He sends an order to UnReal, the company that owns that social media platform, that the posts must be blocked, as they may bring disrepute to India. UnReal claims that Sunil has not provided a clear, detailed reason for blocking the posts, and so, the order is not valid. Is UnReal right?

Q. 97 Some days later, Sunil notices another post from Sachin on UnReal’s social media platform; this post contains some highly sensitive information about the country’s defence policies. He issues an order to UnReal, that the post must be blocked since it divulges the government’s confidential information. The order also says that UnReal should not let anyone know about the blocking order, or that the post was ordered to be deleted, since it relates to secret government information. UnReal claims that this order is invalid. Is UnReal right?

Q. 98 Sunil sends UnReal a third blocking order. UnReal claims that this order too was invalid. Upset with UnReal for claiming that all his blocking orders were invalid, Sunil sends them a letter in which he says, “If you do not comply with my blocking orders, then I will be forced to initiate criminal proceedings against you and cancel your safe harbour immunity.” UnReal claims that Sunil has broken the law by making these statements in the letter. Is UnReal right?

Q. 99 Complying with a fourth blocking order that they receive from Sunil, UnReal blocks Sachin’s account, since his posts were seen as increasingly objectionable by the government. Sachin asks UnReal to share the reasons for the blocking order, which they do, yet Sachin claims the blocking order is invalid. Is he right?

Q. 100 Sunil sends UnReal a fifth blocking order, which says that several of Sachin’s latest posts must be blocked. The blocking order sets out several reasons why the posts should be blocked, but UnReal does not find them satisfactory. Rather than take on another fight with a government official however, UnReal blocks the posts, and gives Sachin what it thinks is a better set of reasons for blocking the posts. When Sachin finds out, he claims this was wrong on UnReal’s part, and that the blocking order was inappropriate. Which of the following is most accurate in this regard?

XIX. The government has amended the Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018. The Ministry of Finance on November 7, 2022, issued a notification for amending the scheme to provide “an additional period of 15 days” for their sale “in the year of general elections to the Legislative Assembly of any States or Union Territories with Legislature”. The bonds under this scheme are usually made available for purchase by any person for a period of ten days each in the months of January, April, July, and October, when specified by the Union Government. The original scheme had provided for an additional period of thirty days, as specified by the Government, in the year when Lok Sabha elections are held, while the amendment adds another 15 days.

Since Assembly elections to various States and Union Territories are held every year, the amendment effectively means that there will be 15 additional dates annually during which the bonds can be sold. Immediately after issuing the notification, the Union Government also announced the sale of electoral bonds under the 23rd tranche from the authorised branches of the State Bank of India. The notification said the sale of bonds would take place through the 29 authorised branches of the said bank from November 9 to November 15, 2022. Like in previous rounds of sale, the electoral bonds shall be valid for 15 calendar days from the date of issue and no payment shall be made to any payee political party if the bond is deposited after expiry of the validity period. The Electoral Bond deposited by an eligible political party in its account shall be credited on the same day.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Electoral Bonds Scheme Amended To Allow Sale for Additional 15 Days in Assembly Election Years”, by Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar, The Wire]

Q. 101 Assad buys an electoral bond worth Rs. 1,00,000/- on November 9, 2022 and plans to give the bond to the Popular People’s Party (the “PPP”), which he has been supporting for many years. On November 10, he must travel out of station on some urgent business, and he only hands the bond over to a representative of the PPP on November 14, 2022. The PPP’s representative deposits the bond in the Party’s account on November 16, 2022, but the bank refuses to credit the bond to the party’s account, on the grounds that it was no longer valid. Is the bank correct?

Q. 102 The Government announces that there would be a sale of a 24th tranche of electoral bonds on February 10, 2023, for a period of 15 days, since elections to the Legislative Assembly of some States are scheduled for that year. Since there are no elections to the Lok Sabha or the Legislative Assembly of the State in which Assad resides, he claims that the Government does not have the power to issue this 24th tranche of electoral bonds in 2023. Is he right?

Q. 103 On November 10, 2022, Palak purchases an electoral bond from a branch of the State Bank of India, and hands it over to a representative of the PPP. The next day, the PPP announces that it has changed its candidates for the upcoming elections in Palak’s State. Upset at this news, she tells a PPP representative that she would like her bond back. The representative tells her that the bond has already been deposited, and that the money has been credited to the party’s account. Palak claims that since the period of validity of the bonds has not expired, she has the right to get her bond back from the party. Is she right?

Q. 104 On November 15, 2022, the Government issues another notification, announcing that from that date onwards, only political parties that have received at least 1% of the votes polled in the last elections to the Lok Sabha, or the last elections to the Legislative Assembly of a State, would be eligible to receive and deposit electoral bonds. In the sale of the 24th tranche of electoral bonds, Palak decides to give the electoral bonds she has purchased to the newly formed More Popular People’s Party (the “MPPP”), which is likely to win the first elections it would be contesting, in July 2023. Is the MPPP eligible to receive the electoral bonds?

Q. 105 Abraham, who lives in a different State from Assad, purchased an electoral bond in the sale of the 23rd tranche. He decides to give the electoral bond to the PPP, even though the PPP is only active in Assad’s State. When the PPP representative goes to an authorised branch of the State Bank of India to deposit the electoral bond on December 5, 2022 however, the bank refuses to credit the money to the PPP’s account. Which of the following would be the most valid reason for the bank to refuse to credit the money to the party’s account?

Logical Reasoning

XX. While men and women are both considered to be more capable as they get older, only women bear the brunt of being seen as “less warm” as they age, new research has found. This series of studies is reportedly the first to look at both gender and age to determine how perceptions of women and men differ. “It’s just stunning... These stereotypes are so hard-wired and deeply entrenched that they come out even when absolutely identical information is provided about a man and a woman,” Jennifer Chatman, Distinguished Professor of Management at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said. In an analysis of professors’ evaluations, female professors witnessed a decline as they moved from their 30s to 40s, hitting an all-time low around the age of 47. All this while, the evaluation of male professors remained consistent. Interestingly, after the age of 47, the evaluations for women increased again, becoming equal with those of men around the early 60s. “At that point, there are different stereotypes of women, and they may benefit from being seen as more grandmotherly,” said Laura Kray, faculty director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at Berkeley Haas and an author of the study.

Women around the age of mid 30s to late 40s also face what is called “the motherhood penalty,” where assumptions around parenting duties lead people to believe women are less committed to their careers than men. This has several repercussions, most particularly evident in hiring, promotions and wages. Women executives further pointed out that they face “hyper-scrutiny” and “scepticism” which harks back to perceptions of likeability versus agency. Gendered networks in the workplace, with men gaining greater access to senior leaders, become cemented mid-career, pose another difficulty for working women. Negative perceptions of women in middle-age can also be linked to stereotypes around menopause. In 2008, psychologists studied the attitudes of people towards women in different reproductive stages. They found that while the pregnant women or the woman with the baby were thought about in glowing terms, menopausal women were associated with negative emotions, illness and ageing.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “How Stereotypes Affect Middle-Aged Women’s Careers”, by Ananya Singh,
The Swaddle]

Q. 106 Which of the following is most likely to be true if the author’s statements about gendered networks in the workplace are true?

Q. 107 Which of the following is most likely to be an outcome of what the author describes as the “motherhood penalty”?

Q. 108 If professors’ evaluations are the most important criteria in awarding promotions, then which of the following would be the most likely outcome, based on the information provided in the passage?

Q. 109 Which of the following is the author most likely to disagree with?

Q. 110 Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the main argument in the passage?

Q. 111 Which of the following, if true, would most weaken Laura Kray’s arguments?

XXI. The depreciation of an economy’s currency is not a matter of concern in itself. The decline in value against major currencies has to be viewed within a set of macroeconomic factors. The recent depreciation of the Indian rupee is a case in point. The rupee has been depreciating for a long time. What are of concern now are the rate at which the depreciation is occurring and the underlying factors causing the change. The Russia-Ukraine war has disrupted supply chains causing commodity prices to rise, leading to a worldwide hardening of inflationary trends. This, in turn, has caused major central banks to raise interest rates, forcing investors back to the safe haven of the US dollar. For India, these headwinds from the global economy have caused several problems. The rise in international prices, especially of crude oil, has led to a higher import bill and, hence, a greater demand for dollars. Higher interest rates in developed country markets have caused a significant outflow of portfolio investments from India, aggravating the already climbing demand for dollars from a rising import bill. By May 2022, foreign institutional investors had pulled out Rs. 1.50 lakh crore from Indian markets.

In the face of these pressures, the rupee, left to itself, wrould decline in value as the rupee-price of a dollar would increase substantially. One way the Reserve Bank of India could stem the tide would be to sell off dollars in the market to ease the supply situation. However, this would mean that while the value of the rupee could be contained, the nation’s foreign exchange kitty would start to erode further. The RBI has been doing exactly that. The challenge before the RBI is this: how much to let the rupee depreciate and how much to intervene to prop it up? Too much depreciation would raise domestic inflation rates as the rupee-price of imports, especially oil, would raise costs of production. It could trigger a rise in policy-controlled interest rates while closely monitoring inflationary expectations. The biggest challenge is to navigate unpredictable international economic shocks in the near future. The Indian economy’s health is not exactly at its best. Exports may not be able to take advantage of a falling rupee since international demand is expected to stagnate. India’s growth and employment situations are yet to stabilise to what they were about a decade ago. The RBI has difficult choices: controlling inflation versus stimulating growth and stabilising the rupee without severely diminishing the economy’s foreign exchange kitty.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Stiff test: Editorial on depreciation of rupee & challenges before RBI”, The Telegraph]

Q. 112 Which of the following is the author most likely to agree with?

Q. 113 Based on the author’s arguments, which of the following, if true, would reduce the decline in value of the rupee?

Q. 114 Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s arguments?

Q. 115 Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the author’s arguments for why Indian exports may not be able to take advantage of a falling rupee?

Q. 116 Based on the author’s arguments, which of the following must necessarily be true?

Q. 117 Which of the following is the author most likely to agree with?

XXII. Why are we humans so susceptible to the doom and gloom of the news? Two reasons. The first is what psychologists call negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened of a spider or a snake a hundred times too often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too little surely would.

Second, we’re also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common. The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft disasters, child snatchers and beheadings — which tend to lodge in the memory — completely skews our view of the world.

In this digital age, the news we’re being fed is only getting more extreme. In the old days, journalists didn’t know much about their individual readers. They wrote for the masses. But the people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google know you well. They know what shocks and horrifies you, they know what makes you click. They know’ how to grab your attention and hold it so they can serve you the most lucrative helping of personalised ads. This modern media frenzy is nothing less than an assault on the mundane. Because, let’s be honest, the lives of most people are pretty predictable. Nice, but boring. So while we’d prefer having nice neighbours with boring lives, ‘boring’ won’t make you sit up and take notice. ‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads. And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021.]

Q. 118 Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s arguments?

Q. 119 Which of the following is the author most likely to agree with?

Q. 120 Based only on the author’s statement that “we’d prefer having nice neighbours with boring lives”, and the author’s argument about the nature of news that modern media exposes us to, which of the following would the author be most likely to agree with?

Q. 121 The author’s statements about negativity bias, if true, provide most support for which of the following conclusions?

Q. 122 Which of the following would be the most effective way of countering the effects of what the author describes as our ‘availability bias’?

Q. 123 The author says that “The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft disasters, child snatchers and beheadings — which tend to lodge in the memory — completely skews our view of the world.” The conclusion the author draws in this argument follows logically if which of the following is assumed?

XXIII. In this moment, the developed countries — I point to them, because these countries have already burnt massive amounts of carbon dioxide for energy to build their economies — are faced with a real energy conundrum. On the one hand, developed countries are battered because of a fast-heating planet; temperatures have gone through the roof; droughts and extreme weather events are hitting them as well. On the other hand, ordinary people in these countries are worried, not just because of climate change but because of the lack of energy to heat their homes this coming winter. In the US, gas prices went up in summer, so much so that people travelled less and consumption of fuel dropped. But now prices are down and it is business as usual.

The fact is that this energy disruption has provided the much-needed vault to the beleaguered fossil fuel industry. Governments are asking this industry to supply more. Europe has baptised natural gas, a fossil fuel less polluting than coal but still a major emitter of carbon dioxide, as “clean”. The US has passed a climate bill, which will invest in renewable energy but conditional to increased spends on oil and gas and the opening up of millions of hectares of federal land for drilling. Through this bill the US will do more than ever before to build a manufacturing base for renewable energy, particularly solar. Europe, even in this desperate scramble for gas, is working to ramp up its investment in renewable power. So, it is the worst of times. It could be the best of times, but there are some caveats. One, this renewed interest in fossil fuels must remain temporary and transient. Given the nature of economies, once the investment has been made in this new infrastructure or the supply of fossil fuel has increased from new oil and gas discoveries, it will be difficult to wean off. Two, these countries should not be entitled to more use of fossil fuels in our world of shrunk carbon budgets. They need to reduce emissions drastically and leave whatever little carbon budget space that is remaining to poorer countries to use, thereby satisfying such poorer countries’ demands.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “New energy conundrum”, by Sunita Narain, Down To Earth]

Q. 124 Which of the following is the author most likely to agree with?

Q. 125 Which of the following is most similar to the author’s statements about developed countries’ renewed interest in fossil fuels?

Q. 126 If the information in the passage above is correct, which of the following must necessarily be true?

Q. 127 Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s argument about why travel and fuel consumption in the US reduced in summer?

Q. 128 Which of the following, if true, would resolve the ‘conundrum’ the author says developed countries face now?

Q. 129 Assuming the aim of the US climate bill is to reduce fossil fuel consumption, which of the following would be the strongest argument that it will fail to achieve such an aim?

XXIV. The post-truth era is, expectedly, marked by a discerning erosion of public trust in sources of information. Mass media — both traditional and new-age avatars — has borne the brunt of this mistrust. And for good reasons too. Social media, its most popular platform, is a harbinger of falsity. It is thus encouraging to see that at least the old guard of the media ecosystem — the newspaper — continues to defy this discouraging trend. A pan-India survey of media consumption by Lokniti found that print media remains the most trusted source of information. The finding is consistent with the heartening surge in public endorsement of the reliability of newspapers since the pandemic. An earlier survey, which attempted to examine the impact of the lockdown on ‘reading patterns’, had found that the number of readers who used to spend over an hour on newspapers every day had risen to 38%, up from 16% in the pre-lockdown period. The increased trust in newspapers is because the lockdowns coincided with the dissemination of the crudest kinds of misinformation about the pandemic in India and around the world and newspapers played a pivotal role in exposing these lies.

But that is where the good news ends — for the print media, at least. Among other things, the data collated by the survey found deepening footprints of social media in rural and urban constituencies while television continues to dominate the screen. These developments are consistent with global trends that reveal that the newspaper industry is struggling to contain the migration of readers and revenue to other formats, especially digital media. Ironically, the pandemic, which saw a resurgence in collective trust in newspapers, adversely affected the print media as traditional advertisers, reeling under the economic fallouts of CoVID-19, cut back on advertisements. But the crisis in print precedes the pandemic. Newspapers have been outpaced by speedier, but also spurious, sources of information. The dominance of the image over text as a cultural phenomenon is another formidable challenge. The print media’s hopes of remaining competitive and profitable must, therefore, centre on using this collective trust as a form of capital. Survival strategies, especially the revenue model, must be re-explored and the emphasis shifted to in-depth analyses of news as well as eye-catching layouts now that newspapers are slower to reach news to the audience.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Good news: Editorial on print media remaining the most trusted source of information”, The Telegraph]

Q. 130 Which of the following is the author most likely to agree with?

Q. 131 Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the author’s arguments?

Q. 132 Which of the following would be an effective way of making print media more competitive?

Q. 133 Based on the author’s arguments, which of the following, if true, would have resulted in the weakening, rather than deepening of public trust in newspapers since the pandemic?

Q. 134 What would be the impact on the readership and revenues of the print media if the image were not dominant over text as a cultural phenomenon?

Q. 135 How does the author suggest newspapers can overcome the problem of being outpaced by speedier sources of information?

Mathematics

XXV. The findings of Oxfam India’s latest ‘India Discrimination Report 2022’ indicate that there is a significant gap in the earnings between men and women in the case of regular and self-employment in urban areas. The lower wages for salaried women are due to 67 percent of discrimination and 33 percent due to lack of education and work experience. The average earning is Rs.16,000 for men and merely Rs. 6,600 for women in urban areas in self-employment. The average earning of men is Rs. 19,800 as against Rs. 15,600 for women in regular/salaried employment in urban areas. Also, in urban areas the average earnings of men (Rs. 9,000) are significantly higher than women (Rs. 5,700) even in casual employment. Apart from women, historically oppressed communities along with religious minorities also continue to face discrimination in accessing jobs, livelihoods, and agricultural credit. The mean income for Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes (“SC/ST”) persons in urban areas who are in regular employment is Rs.15,300 as against Rs.20,300 for persons belonging to the non-SC/ST category. The average earning of self-employed workers is Rs.15,900 for non- SC/STs and Rs.10,500 for SC/STs. The average monthly earning for the SC/ST workers in casual work is Rs. 8,000 below the corresponding figure of Rs. 8,600 for the non-SC/ST.

[Data Source: Oxfam India]
[Note: Values have been approximated to the nearest hundred]

Q. 136 Choose the correct option:

Q. 137 Of the regular employed in urban areas, the earnings of a non-SC/ST worker is what percent more than a SC/ST worker?

Q. 138 Of those in casual employment, if a man’s average earnings was deposited at a rate of 16% simple interest for 20 years, in how many years at the same rate of simple interest a SC/ST worker must deposit their average earnings to earn the same amount as a man in 20 years?

Q. 139 The findings also indicate discrimination as a driving factor behind low Women’s Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in the country. As per the Union Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI), LFPR for women in India was only 25.1 percent in 2020-21 for urban and rural women. This is considerably lower than South Africa where the LFPR for women is 46 percent in 2021 as per the latest World Bank estimates. The LFPR for women in India has rapidly declined from 42.7 percent in 2004-05 to mere 25.1 percent in 2020-2021 showing the withdrawal of women from the workforce despite rapid economic growth during the same period. In 2019-20, 60 percent of all males aged 15 years and more have regular salaried and self-employed jobs while 19 percent of all similarly aged females get regular and self-employment. Use the additional data in the passage above to answer this and the next question.

If the number of women in India in 2020-2021 is 670 million which is 24% more than in 2004-2005, what is the difference in the number of women in LFPR 2004-05 and 2021?

Q. 140 In 2019-20, if the number of males aged 15 years and more is 76% of the total male population and the number of females aged 15 years and more is 72% of the total female population and the total male population is 1.05 times the total female population, what is the ratio of females to males aged 15 years and more that have regular salaried and self-employed jobs?

XXVI. Players are selected for Judo based on their body weights from the following 10 weight groups:
1. (48 kg - 52 kg)
2. (52 kg - 56 kg)
3. (56 kg - 60 kg)
4. (60 kg - 64 kg)
5. (64 kg - 68 kg)
6. (68 kg - 72 kg)
7. (72 kg - 76 kg)
8. (76 kg - 80 kg)
9. (80 kg - 84 kg)
10. (84 kg - 88 kg)

The average weight of the players after selecting one player from each group is 68 kg. If one of the players (named S) leaves the team, their average weight comes down to 66.5 kg.

Q. 141 Player S is from the weight group:

Q. 142 If S leaves the group and two new players join the group, their average weight increases to 68 kg. These players can NOT be from groups:

Q. 143 What is the average weight of all the players taken together?

Q. 144 In the average of all the groups together, which group contributes most in overall average?

Q. 145 If one of the new two players is from group 4, which group the other player is from?

XXVII. World fruit production went up 54 percent between 2000 and 2019, to 883 million tonnes. Five fruit species accounted for 57 percent of the total production in 2019, down from 63 percent in 2000. Use the data in the passage to answer the following questions.
[Data source: FAO]

Q. 146 What was the world fruit production in 2000?

Q. 147 Of the five fruit species mentioned in the passage above, the share of bananas and plantains increased by 1 percentage point between 2000 and 2019, watermelons in 2019 was 6 percentage points lower than bananas and plantains in 2000, apples remained stable at 10%, and the percentage share of oranges and grapes reduced to half of bananas in 2019. What was the percentage of bananas and plantains in 2019?

Q. 148 Of the watermelons in 2000, one-eighth perished, one-fifth of the remaining was sold to be juiced and 30% of the remaining was exported. If the percentage share of oranges in 2000 was equal to the percentage share of watermelons in 2019, how many watermelons were retained for home sale and consumption?

Q. 149 Assume that all grapes and apples were sold through a single organisation in 2000. Grapes and apples were sold to 4 different customers such that a certain quantity of apples were sold to the first customer, same number of apples were sold to the second customer as to the first and a certain number of grapes were sold to that customer after which apples were over. Twice the quantity of grapes sold to the second was sold to the third customer and twice the quantity sold to the third was sold to the fourth customer. The total quantity of grapes is equal to the total quantity of apples sold and the remaining grapes were stored. How many grapes were sold to each customer?

Q. 150 Frutopia and Fruitfix both sold oranges at the same selling price. However, Frutopia gave customers a 15% discount on the marked price whereas Fruitfix sold the oranges for a discount of 20% on the marked price. If the marked price of oranges on Frutopia is Rs. 75/kg, what is the marked price of oranges on Fruitfix?