BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 112 of 142

Correct — C, the telecast of e-content for class IX-X students. Read the stem's two constraints together: the department is the Education Department, and the month is April 2020, three weeks into a nationwide lockdown that had shut every school in the country. What an education department does in that situation is push school teaching out over whatever medium still reaches children who have no computer and no reliable data connection — and in April 2020 that medium was the state Doordarshan channel. Two of the four options are not education-department work at all, which reduces the question at once to a choice between two class ranges, and the derived answer takes the secondary cohort. One honest caution belongs on this card: the class range in option (c) could not be confirmed against a retrievable Bihar government page or a contemporaneous official notification, so this answer rests on eliminating the alternatives and on the ordinary priority of a board-going cohort in a year when Classes X and XII examinations were the immediate crisis, rather than on a document that can be quoted back. Treat the elimination as solid and the choice between (c) and (d) as the part of this question that carries real risk. The national frame around it is firmer: the Centre declared DIKSHA — the school-education platform the Ministry of Education and NCERT had launched on 5 September 2017 — as India's 'One Nation, One Digital Platform' in May 2020 under the PM e-Vidya programme, precisely because state-level telecast and digital delivery had become the only channel left.

• (a)the telecast of Karsak-Chopal program for farmers — A farmers' extension broadcast — the kind of programme an agriculture department or a Krishi Vigyan Kendra runs to carry advice on sowing, seed and crop protection to cultivators. Whatever its merits, it is not a programme of the Education Department, and the stem names the department, so this option fails on the face of the question.
• (b)the telecast of a cultural program to save old culture of Bihar — Cultural preservation belongs to an art and culture department or an academy, not to the school-education machinery, and nothing about April 2020 makes a heritage telecast the urgent business of the moment. The option is built to attract a candidate who associates Doordarshan with cultural programming rather than with classroom teaching.
• (d)the telecast of e-content for class V-VI students — The genuinely close alternative, and the only one that cannot be dismissed on the department's remit — it differs from the correct option in nothing but the class range. The reason to prefer Classes IX and X is that the secondary and board-going cohort was the segment under the tightest examination pressure in 2020, and primary-grade telecast is the harder format to make work without an adult present. That is a judgement about priorities, not a sourced fact, and a student should know which part of this answer is which.

The COVID-19 lockdown closed schools across India from March 2020, and the response split into three layers. At the top, the Union government's PM e-Vidya programme of May 2020 designated DIKSHA — launched by NCERT and the Ministry of Education on 5 September 2017 — as the country's single digital platform for school education, and added television and radio channels so that children without internet were not excluded. At the state level, education departments used their regional Doordarshan channels and All India Radio stations to broadcast recorded lessons on a fixed timetable, because a television set was the device most likely to be present in a rural household. At the school level, teachers used whatever messaging tools reached parents. Bihar's use of DD Bihar from April 2020 sits in that middle layer. The design problem it addresses is the one every education question about this period turns on: reach versus interaction. Broadcast reaches nearly everybody but cannot answer a question, while an online class can answer questions but excludes anyone without a device.

For scheme questions the reliable method is to test each option against the named authority before testing it against your memory of the scheme. Here the stem says 'Bihar Education Department', which immediately disqualifies a farmers' programme and a culture-preservation programme regardless of whether either exists — a department's programmes have to fall within its subject. That single filter takes a four-option question down to two. What remains is a detail — which classes — and details of this kind are exactly where a candidate should be honest with themselves about the difference between knowing and guessing, because a wrong answer costs a third of a mark. The wider lesson for Bihar-specific preparation is to follow the state's own sources: the Economic Survey of Bihar, the state budget documents and departmental notifications carry the scheme names, launch dates and coverage that the Commission lifts questions from, and a coaching listicle will not distinguish a Class IX–X telecast from a Class V–VI one.

• Schools across India were closed from March 2020 under the COVID-19 lockdown, which forced education departments onto broadcast media to continue teaching
• DIKSHA, the national school-education platform built by NCERT and the Ministry of Education, was launched on 5 September 2017 and was declared India's 'One Nation, One Digital Platform' in May 2020 as part of the PM e-Vidya programme
• Doordarshan's state channels, including DD Bihar, were the delivery route chosen for households without internet access, since a television was the most widely available device
• The Bihar Education Department's DD Bihar telecast of recorded e-content began in April 2020; the class range printed in this option could not be verified against a retrievable Bihar government source, and the card says so rather than dressing the claim up
• Education was the sector with the highest allocation in the Bihar Budget for 2024-25, which is the scale of the department this question is about

• Answering a scheme question from the scheme's name without checking whether the named department could run it at all
• Assuming any Doordarshan initiative is cultural programming; in 2020 the state channels were used mainly as classrooms
• Treating a plausible detail as a known one — the difference between the two surviving options here is a class range, and no amount of reasoning about the department settles it

BPSC asks state schemes with the department, the month and the medium built into the stem, and the option set then varies one detail at a time, which is why Bihar-specific preparation has to come from state documents rather than general awareness. UPSC does not ask about a state department's telecast at all; when it touches education delivery it asks about national platforms and statutory rights, so this is a purely state-paper item.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which platform was declared India's 'One Nation, One Digital Platform' for school education under PM e-Vidya in 2020 ?

  • (a)SWAYAM
  • (b)DIKSHA
  • (c)e-PATHSHALA
  • (d)National Digital Library

  Answer(b) DIKSHA — launched by NCERT and the Ministry of Education on 5 September 2017 and designated the single national school-education platform in May 2020.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  During the COVID-19 school closures, state education departments used Doordarshan's regional channels mainly because

  • (a)television reached households that had no internet access or personal device
  • (b)broadcast lessons allow two-way interaction with teachers
  • (c)Doordarshan is administered by the state education departments
  • (d)online platforms were not available anywhere in the country

  Answer(a) television reached households that had no internet access or personal device — reach was the whole point of the broadcast route, and its known cost is that it cannot answer a student's question.