BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 19 of 150

Correct — B, Eric Adams. Eric Adams was Mayor of New York City from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2025, so on 14 April 2025 he was the only one of the three men named who held that office at all, and it was he who issued the proclamation designating that date Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Day in New York City. The date is not arbitrary: Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891, so 14 April 2025 was his 134th birth anniversary — the day already observed across India as Ambedkar Jayanti. The proclamation came around observances at United Nations Headquarters in New York, where Ambedkar's birth anniversary has been marked since 2016, and it was pressed for by Indian-American organisations, the campaign being led by Deelip Mhaske of the Foundation for Human Horizon. Its citation honoured Ambedkar as a man who fought exploitation and who spent his life working for diversity, equity and inclusion — American civic vocabulary applied to an Indian constitutional figure, which is itself the point of the story. A mayoral proclamation of this kind is honorific rather than legislative: it creates no public holiday and carries no legal effect, but it is the standard instrument by which a United States city formally recognises a community and a legacy. There is a historical closure in the choice of city that the question does not mention and that is worth carrying away. Ambedkar himself came to New York in 1913, aged 22, on a Baroda State scholarship of £11.50 a month awarded under a scheme of Sayajirao Gaekwad III, and studied economics at Columbia University under the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey; his Columbia doctorate followed in 1927. The city that proclaimed a day in his name in 2025 is the city that trained him 112 years earlier.

• (a)Bill de Blasio — Bill de Blasio was Eric Adams's immediate predecessor as Mayor of New York City, in office from 2014 to 2021. He had left City Hall more than three years before April 2025 and so could not have issued this proclamation. He is the classic 'one term out of date' distractor, and it works on candidates who learned a name years ago and never refreshed it. The safeguard is to store office-holders as spans rather than as bare names: 'de Blasio 2014–2021, Adams 2022–2025' answers this question in a second, while 'de Blasio, Mayor of New York' answers nothing.
• (c)Sadiq Khan — Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London, not of New York — he has held that office since May 2016 and was re-elected in 2021 and again in 2024. He is in the option list because he is by some distance the best-known city mayor in the Western world to an Indian newspaper reader, and because a question about an Indian figure being honoured abroad primes exactly that association. But the stem names New York City, and the mayor of a different city on a different continent has no authority to proclaim anything there. The error under test is a city-office mismatch, not ignorance of who Khan is.
• (d)More than one of the above — Only one person can be Mayor of New York City on a given date, and on 14 April 2025 that person was Eric Adams. The three names cannot overlap even in principle: de Blasio's term had ended in 2021, and Sadiq Khan holds a different office in a different country. Since exactly one option is true, this one fails. Notice how weak the combined option is on office questions in particular — an office is singular by definition, so on any 'who held this post' item it is almost mechanically eliminable, and picking it as a hedge costs 1/3 mark for nothing.

Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891, Mhow – 6 December 1956, New Delhi) is honoured on three distinct grounds, and any explanation of why a foreign city marks his birthday has to keep them apart. First, the constitutional ground: he chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly and became independent India's first Law Minister, and the text he steered abolished untouchability under Article 17 and created the right to constitutional remedies under Article 32 — the provision he himself called the heart and soul of the Constitution. Second, the social and political ground: from the Mahad satyagraha of 1927, through the journal Mooknayak, the Independent Labour Party of 1936 and the All India Scheduled Castes Federation of 1942, he built the organised political voice of the depressed classes, and at the Round Table Conferences he pressed their claim to separate electorates before accepting reserved seats instead under the Poona Pact of September 1932. Third, the intellectual ground: a University of Mumbai graduate, an MA and PhD from Columbia University in New York, an MSc and DSc from the London School of Economics and a barrister of Gray's Inn, at a time when only a handful of Indians reached either institution. He publicly embraced Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956, weeks before his death, and was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1990. That combination — jurist, trained economist and leader of an oppressed community — is what makes him legible outside India as a civil-rights figure rather than as a national politician, and it is why his birth anniversary has been observed at United Nations Headquarters in New York since 2016 and why a United States mayor could proclaim a day in his name in the language of equity and inclusion.

This looks like a current-affairs question and is really a date-and-office matching question, so solve it the way you would solve a matching item rather than by hunting for a memory of the news. Step one: strike out any name that does not belong to the office at all. Sadiq Khan is Mayor of London, so he cannot proclaim anything in New York on any date — one option gone with no knowledge of 2025 whatsoever. Step two: among the remaining New York mayors, test each term against the date printed in the stem. Bill de Blasio's two terms ran 2014 to 2021; Eric Adams took office on 1 January 2022. April 2025 falls squarely inside Adams's term and nowhere near de Blasio's. Step three: because only one person can hold a single office at one time, the combined option becomes impossible the moment one name is established. The single discriminating fact is therefore a span, not an event — Adams, 2022 to 2025 — and you never needed to know that the proclamation happened. Two habits follow. Store office-holders with start and end dates, because both BPSC and UPSC like to fix an event in a year and test whether you know who held the post that year. And anchor everything in this paper to 13 September 2025, when Adams was still the sitting mayor. Honest present-day note for anyone revising from this card now: Adams's term ended on 31 December 2025 and Zohran Mamdani became Mayor of New York City on 1 January 2026, so 'the Mayor of New York' is no longer Eric Adams — but the answer to this question, which is pinned to April 2025, is unaffected.

• Eric Adams served as Mayor of New York City from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2025; his predecessor Bill de Blasio held the office from 2014 to 2021, and Zohran Mamdani took over on 1 January 2026.
• Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow in the Central India Agency and died on 6 December 1956 in New Delhi, so 14 April 2025 was his 134th birth anniversary — the date observed in India as Ambedkar Jayanti.
• Sadiq Khan has been Mayor of London — a different city, a different country and a different office — since May 2016, and was re-elected in 2021 and 2024.
• Ambedkar reached Columbia University in New York in 1913 on a Baroda State scholarship of £11.50 a month granted under a scheme of Sayajirao Gaekwad III, studied under the philosopher John Dewey and received his Columbia doctorate in 1927; he also took an MSc and DSc at the London School of Economics and trained for the bar at Gray's Inn.
• Ambedkar's birth anniversary has been observed at United Nations Headquarters in New York since 2016; the 2025 New York City proclamation was driven by Indian-American organisations with the campaign led by Deelip Mhaske of the Foundation for Human Horizon, and being a proclamation it is honorific — it creates no holiday and no legal obligation.

• Answering with the more familiar name (Bill de Blasio or Sadiq Khan) instead of matching the office to the date actually printed in the stem.
• Mixing up mayors of different cities — Sadiq Khan is London's, and no mayor has authority outside his own city.
• Treating a mayoral proclamation as though it created a holiday or a legal observance; it is symbolic recognition and nothing more.
• Forgetting that this paper is dated 13 September 2025 — New York City has had a different mayor since 1 January 2026, but the question is fixed to April 2025.

BPSC's version is a name-the-office-holder one-liner tied to a specific date, lifted from a news item three to five months before the paper and dressed with 'More than one of the above'; the whole item tests whether your current-affairs notes carry term dates rather than just names. UPSC has never asked who a foreign mayor is and is very unlikely to start. Its Ambedkar questions go at the substance instead — which right he called the heart and soul of the Constitution (2002), which parties he founded (2012), what he demanded at the Round Table Conferences and what the Poona Pact actually provided (2005). The practical consequence for anyone preparing both is that the BPSC layer sits on top rather than instead: learn Ambedkar's constitutional and organisational record for UPSC, then add the datable news events — the UN observance since 2016, the New York City proclamation of 14 April 2025 — for BPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at which of the following places?

  • (a)Mhow, in the Central India Agency
  • (b)Ratnagiri, Bombay Presidency
  • (c)Nagpur, Central Provinces
  • (d)Baroda State

  Answer(a) Mhow, in the Central India Agency — the military cantonment town in present-day Madhya Pradesh, now renamed Dr Ambedkar Nagar. Nagpur is where he embraced Buddhism in 1956, and Baroda is where the scholarship that sent him to Columbia came from, but neither is his birthplace.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Dr. B. R. Ambedkar publicly embraced Buddhism, along with a large number of followers, on 14 October 1956 at which place?

  • (a)Sarnath
  • (b)Bodh Gaya
  • (c)Nagpur
  • (d)Sanchi

  Answer(c) Nagpur — the site is now known as Deekshabhoomi. Sarnath is where the Buddha delivered his first sermon and Bodh Gaya is where he attained enlightenment, but Ambedkar's own conversion took place at Nagpur, less than two months before his death on 6 December 1956.