What is the current profession of the young U. P. Woman, Arti, who was conferred the Amal Clooney Women’s Empowerment Award by the King Charles III in May 2024 ?
- (a)Farm labourer
- (b)ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) worker
- (c)E rickshaw driver
- (d)Chikan-kari artisan
Correct — C, E rickshaw driver. Arti, a nineteen-year-old from Bahraich district in Uttar Pradesh and the daughter of daily-wage labourers, drives a battery-operated rickshaw for a living. King's Trust International's own published case study records that she works as a self-employed e-rickshaw driver, on the road about six hours a day, and that she won the Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award in May 2024 at the awards ceremony held at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. She came to it through Project Lehar, run by the Aga Khan Foundation with support from Prince's Trust International, which gave her vocational training, entrepreneurship and life-skills courses after she had left school during class ten on marriage and returned home with her daughter when that marriage ended. The vehicle matters to the story: it is part of a Pink Rickshaw scheme, under which women drivers carry women passengers, so a single intervention creates a livelihood for a vulnerable woman and safer transport for others at the same time. Two details for accuracy. Project Lehar operates in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which is why a Bihar paper takes an interest in a story from Bahraich. And on the stem's own wording — the Trust's case study records the award being presented on stage at the ceremony rather than by the King in person, the royal association coming through the Trust the King founded and patronises — a small looseness in the question that does not touch the answer.
- (a)Farm labourer — This is her family's background, not her occupation. Her parents are daily-wage labourers, and a candidate who half-remembers 'daughter of daily-wage workers' will read it into the answer — but the award recognised her for what she went on to do, which was to earn her own living driving.
- (b)ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) worker — The default association for 'young woman from rural Uttar Pradesh recognised for empowerment work', because ASHA workers are the most visible women's cadre in rural India and have themselves won international recognition. But Arti was not a health worker; she was trained for self-employment in transport.
- (d)Chikan-kari artisan — Chikankari is Lucknow's celebrated hand embroidery, and a plausible-sounding livelihood for a young woman in Uttar Pradesh, which is exactly why it is here. It has nothing to do with this story — Arti's training was in driving and running her own vehicle, not in craft.
The e-rickshaw has changed the economics of last-mile transport in small-town north India over the past decade: it is cheap to buy relative to a car, cheap to run on electricity, needs no heavy licence infrastructure, and can be operated by someone with very little capital. That combination has made it one of the few motorised livelihoods genuinely open to women, and several state and civil-society schemes have used it as an instrument of women's economic participation, sometimes branded as pink rickshaw programmes in which women drive women. The Prince's Trust, founded by the then Prince of Wales and now operating internationally as King's Trust International, works with local partners on youth livelihoods and gives annual awards to young people it has supported; the Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award is one of them. Its Indian partner here is the Aga Khan Foundation, whose Project Lehar works on adolescent girls' education, skills and transitions to work in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — which places this apparently distant story squarely inside the development landscape a Bihar candidate is expected to know.
Person-based current-affairs questions are answered by holding one concrete image rather than a biography. For this item the image is the vehicle: the award went to a young woman who drives an e-rickshaw, and that single picture defeats all three distractors, each of which is a different stereotype of what a rural Uttar Pradesh woman's work might be — the field, the health post, the embroidery frame. Notice how the distractors were chosen: each is a real and common women's occupation in the state, so none can be eliminated on plausibility, only on knowledge of the specific story. Where a specific story is unknown, the fallback is to ask what would be distinctive enough to win an international award: farm labour and craft work are widespread, and an ASHA worker is part of a national cadre, whereas being among the first women in a district to drive an e-rickshaw is precisely the kind of individual first that award juries reward. That reasoning does not guarantee the mark, but it shifts the odds substantially in a question that is otherwise pure recall.
- Arti, from Bahraich district in Uttar Pradesh, is a self-employed e-rickshaw driver and received the Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award in May 2024
- King's Trust International's case study describes her as a nineteen-year-old single mother whose parents are daily-wage labourers, driving about six hours a day
- She was trained through Project Lehar, run by the Aga Khan Foundation with support from Prince's Trust International, in vocational skills, entrepreneurship and life skills
- Project Lehar operates in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar
- Her vehicle is part of a Pink Rickshaw scheme, in which women drivers carry women passengers — creating employment for vulnerable women while improving women's access to safe transport
- The award was presented at the ceremony held at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, in May 2024
- Reading the family's occupation into the answer; her parents were daily-wage labourers, but the award was for her own work
- Defaulting to the most familiar rural women's cadre, the ASHA worker, when the question is about one individual
- Assuming the state named in the stem tells you the craft — chikankari is Uttar Pradesh's famous embroidery but is irrelevant here
BPSC likes an award story with a named individual and asks for one specific attribute — profession, district, the award's name — with distractors built from other real and plausible occupations, so the story has to be remembered as a picture, not as a headline. UPSC does not ask who won which award in the past year; where it enters this area it asks about the institutional framework, such as what a named national award is given for, or how a livelihoods programme is designed to work.
With reference to Stree Shakti Puraskar, for which one of the following is the “Devi Ahilya Bai Holkar Award” given?
- (a) Administrative skills
- (b) Achievements in Scientific Research
- (c) Achievements in Sports and Games
- (d) Courage and valour
Answer(a) Administrative skills
A women's empowerment award tested on exactly the same axis — not who won it, but what precisely it recognises, which is the discriminating fact in both questions.
Match List I (Name of the Lady) with List II (Achievement) and select the correct answer using the codes given below the lists: List I (Name of the lady) List II (Achievement) A. Chinna Pillai 1. Winner of Neerja Bhanot Award B. Kaveri Thakur Puraskar 2. Recipient of Stree Shakti C. Mira Nair 3. Became the fastest swimmer in Asia at the age of 16 years D. Yasoda Ekambaram 4. Recipient of the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival Codes:
- (a) 3 2 1 4
- (b) 2 3 4 1
- (c) 3 2 4 1
- (d) 2 3 1 4
Answer(b) 2 3 4 1
Women recognised for grassroots achievement, matched to what each was actually honoured for — the same demand to attach a specific accomplishment to a specific name rather than a general impression.
Which of the following individuals or organisations was a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award 2024?
- (a) Phuntsho, Karma
- (b) Rural Doctors Movement
- (c) Miyazaki Hayao
- (d) More than one of the above
Answer(d) More than one of the above
The Commission's continuing appetite for international award recall on the next paper, again turning on the precise recipient rather than on the award's reputation.
According to PLFS 2023-24, which of the following statements best describe the nature of employment among women in Bihar?
- (a) Most women are employed in formal, regular wage jobs.
- (b) The majority of women are self-employed, often serving as helpers in household enterprises.
- (c) Majority of women were engaged in secondary sector
- (d) More than one of the above
Answer(b) The majority of women are self-employed, often serving as helpers in household enterprises.
The statistical background to this story, asked for Bihar a year later — women's work in the region is overwhelmingly self-employment, which is precisely the category an owner-driven e-rickshaw falls into.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Project Lehar, which trained the 2024 Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award recipient Arti, is run by
- (a)The Aga Khan Foundation with Prince's Trust International
- (b)The National Skill Development Corporation alone
- (c)UN Women with the Ministry of Rural Development
- (d)The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Answer(a) The Aga Khan Foundation with Prince's Trust International — the programme works on skills, entrepreneurship and life skills for young people in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The 'Pink Rickshaw' model of urban transport is designed primarily to
- (a)Provide subsidised fares to senior citizens
- (b)Employ women as drivers to carry women passengers
- (c)Replace diesel autorickshaws with CNG vehicles
- (d)Offer free rides to school children
Answer(b) Employ women as drivers to carry women passengers — it creates a livelihood for vulnerable women and improves women's access to safe transport at the same time.