BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 9 of 143

Correct — A, Coconut. The Union Budget 2024-25 speech, delivered on 23 July 2024, carries a paragraph headed "Missions for pulses and oilseeds" which reads: "For achieving self-sufficiency in pulses and oilseeds, we will strengthen their production, storage and marketing. As announced in the interim budget, a strategy is being put in place to achieve 'atmanirbharta' for oil seeds such as mustard, groundnut, sesame, soybean, and sunflower." Five crops are named, and three of the four options are among them — sesame, groundnut and soybean are all inside the goal, so none of those can be what the stem is asking for. Coconut is the only option missing from the list, which makes it the answer. Its absence follows a real administrative line rather than an accident of drafting. The five named crops are annual field oilseeds, sown and harvested within a season in the kharif and rabi cycles and handled through the oilseeds stream of the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Coconut is a perennial palm grown on plantations and administered through the horticulture stream, and the same Budget speech keeps the two apart: paragraph 11 speaks of new varieties of "field and horticulture crops" as distinct groups, and vegetables and horticulture get their own paragraph immediately after the oilseeds mission. One more detail is worth carrying: the 2024-25 speech says the strategy was "announced in the interim budget", the interim Budget presented on 1 February 2024, so the same five names appear in both of that year's Budget speeches and either one answers this question.

• (b)Sesame — Sesame — named in the speech in exactly that word, second-last in the list of five. Sesame (til, sesamum) is one of India's oldest oilseed crops and a genuine target of the self-reliance push, so it is inside the goal and therefore cannot be the crop 'not covered' by it.
• (c)Groundnut — Groundnut — named in the speech, and the most tempting wrong answer because a candidate who half-remembers the list often recalls only mustard and soybean from it. Groundnut is a principal kharif oilseed of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and sits squarely inside the atmanirbharta strategy.
• (d)Soybean — Soybean — named in the speech, and the crop that dominates the oilseed belt of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Soybean oil is also one of the vegetable oils India imports in bulk, which is precisely why it is a target of the self-reliance goal rather than an exception to it.

India does not grow enough vegetable oil for its own consumption and has met the gap with imports for decades, which is why 'atmanirbharta in oil' is a standing policy objective rather than a one-Budget announcement. The response has come in waves — the Technology Mission on Oilseeds of the 1980s, the National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm that followed, the National Mission on Edible Oils devoted to oil palm launched in 2021, and now the oilseeds self-reliance strategy first set out in the interim Budget of February 2024 and repeated in the full Budget of July 2024. Underlying all of them is a classification that decides questions like this one. In Indian agricultural administration, 'oilseeds' means annual seed crops raised in the field and crushed for oil, and those crops sit with the agriculture wing. Tree-borne and plantation oil sources — coconut and oil palm above all — are counted with horticulture and run through separate programmes and separate boards. So a crop can supply cooking oil to millions of households and still fall outside an 'oilseeds' mission, because the mission is defined by the category of crop, not by whether oil comes out of it.

The reliable route here is classification, not recall of the speech. Three of the four options — sesame, groundnut, soybean — are annual field oilseeds of exactly the same type: sown from seed each season, harvested, and crushed. Coconut is the odd one out on every axis. It is a perennial palm that takes years to bear, it is grown on plantations rather than in field rotations, and its oil comes from the dried kernel of a fruit rather than from a seed sown that year. When a list of four contains three members of one category and one member of another, the outlier is what an examiner is pointing at, and here the outlier is also the right answer. That generalises: BPSC builds a great many current-affairs list questions where the odd item can be found by taxonomy even by a candidate who never read the document. If you do want the memory route, the mnemonic for the five named crops is that they are the five common Indian cooking oils sold by seed name — mustard, groundnut, sesame, soybean and sunflower — and coconut oil, though it is a cooking oil in the south, is not on that Budget list.

• Union Budget 2024-25 speech, 23 July 2024, paragraph 13 under the heading 'Missions for pulses and oilseeds': the atmanirbharta strategy is stated for "oil seeds such as mustard, groundnut, sesame, soybean, and sunflower" — five crops, coconut not among them.
• The same paragraph records that the strategy had already been "announced in the interim budget", i.e. the interim Budget of 1 February 2024, so both 2024 Budget speeches carry the identical five names.
• Paragraph 18 of the same speech provides Rs 1.52 lakh crore for the agriculture and allied sector for 2024-25.
• Paragraph 11 promises 109 new high-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of 32 field and horticulture crops — the speech's own wording keeps field crops and horticulture as separate groups, which is the line coconut falls on the far side of.
• The Budget set out nine priorities, with agriculture first: Productivity and resilience in Agriculture; Employment and Skilling; Inclusive Human Resource Development and Social Justice; Manufacturing and Services; Urban Development; Energy Security; Infrastructure; Innovation, Research and Development; and Next Generation Reforms.
• Other agriculture announcements in the same section: one crore farmers to be initiated into natural farming over two years with 10,000 bio-input resource centres; digital crop survey for kharif in 400 districts under the agriculture Digital Public Infrastructure; and Jan Samarth-based Kisan Credit Cards enabled in five states.

• Assuming any crop that yields cooking oil must be inside an 'oilseeds' mission. Coconut oil is a household cooking oil across south India and is still outside this list, because the mission is defined by crop category, not by end product.
• Reversing the polarity of the stem. It asks which oilseed was noted as NOT being covered, so the three options that appear in the Budget speech are all wrong answers, which feels counter-intuitive under time pressure.
• Confusing the two Budgets of 2024. The interim Budget was presented on 1 February 2024 and the full Budget on 23 July 2024; on this point they say the same thing, but on allocations and new schemes they do not.

BPSC lifts a named list straight out of a Government document — a Budget speech, an Economic Survey, a scheme guideline — and then asks which item is missing from it, which is harder than asking which item is on it because the answer is the one word the document never says. UPSC has almost never asked what a Budget speech listed; it asks the economics behind the announcement instead, testing whether you know that India imports more edible oil than it produces and why oilseed output has stayed rain-dependent and stagnant. Prepare the same topic twice over: the list for BPSC, the reasoning for UPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Union Budget 2024-25 provided how much for the agriculture and allied sector ?

  • (a)Rs 1.25 lakh crore
  • (b)Rs 1.52 lakh crore
  • (c)Rs 2.00 lakh crore
  • (d)Rs 1.48 lakh crore

  Answer(b) Rs 1.52 lakh crore — stated in paragraph 18 of the Budget speech. Rs 1.48 lakh crore, option (d), is the figure in the same speech for education, employment and skilling, which is why it is the dangerous decoy.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was the first of the nine priorities listed in the Union Budget 2024-25 ?

  • (a)Employment and Skilling
  • (b)Energy Security
  • (c)Productivity and resilience in Agriculture
  • (d)Next Generation Reforms

  Answer(c) Productivity and resilience in Agriculture — it was Priority 1 of nine. Employment and Skilling was second, Energy Security sixth, and Next Generation Reforms ninth and last.