BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 22 of 150

Correct — D, None of the above. The 18th G20 Summit was held in NEW DELHI on 9–10 September 2023, at Bharat Mandapam in Pragati Maidan, under India's presidency of the grouping (1 December 2022 to 30 November 2023), and its theme was 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future'. Hold that single fact against the three statements and each one falls. (a) Rio de Janeiro hosted the NINETEENTH summit, on 18–19 November 2024, under Brazil's presidency. (b) 'Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet' was Brazil's theme for that nineteenth summit, not India's for the eighteenth. (c) The Rio de Janeiro Leaders' Declaration did carry the ultra-high-net-worth taxation language — the leaders undertook to engage cooperatively so that very rich individuals are effectively taxed — but that declaration is the output of the nineteenth summit; the eighteenth produced the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration. So the paper has taken one summit's entire fact-set — city, theme and declaration — and hung it on the wrong ordinal. Every substantive option describes the 19th summit, none describes the 18th, and only (d) is left. The Commission itself said as much. Disposing of candidate objections to this item on 31 October 2025, BPSC recorded that the objections failed because none of the options is correct. Read at face value that sentence would swallow option (d) too, and some candidates argued from it that the question ought to have been deleted. It was not: five questions on this paper were struck out (11, 69, 75, 96 and 118) and this was not among them. The reading that survives, and the one the final key enforces, is that none of the three substantive statements (a) to (c) is true of the 18th G20 Summit — which is precisely what option (d) asserts. For the record, what New Delhi actually delivered was the admission of the African Union as a permanent member, a Leaders' Declaration adopted by consensus on the first day, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor and the Global Biofuels Alliance.

• (a)It was held in Rio de Janeiro — One edition out. Rio de Janeiro hosted the 19th G20 Summit on 18–19 November 2024 under Brazil's presidency; the 18th was at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, on 9–10 September 2023. It tempts because Rio was the most recent summit in memory on exam day — the 20th, at Johannesburg, had not yet been held — so 'the G20 summit' and 'Rio' sit together in a candidate's head.
• (b)Its theme was : Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet — That was Brazil's theme for the 19th summit at Rio. India's theme for the 18th was 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future', drawn from the Maha Upanishad. The distractor works on anyone who half-remembers a recent G20 theme without attaching it to a host: themes rotate annually with the presidency, so a theme is only ever evidence about one particular year.
• (c)The Rio de Janeiro Declaration emphasised the taxation of billionaires — The most dangerous option, because the sentence is TRUE — the Rio de Janeiro Leaders' Declaration of November 2024 did press for the effective taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, a priority Brazil pushed all year. It is still a wrong answer, because the question asks what is true OF THE 18TH SUMMIT, and that summit's document was the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration. A true sentence about the wrong summit.

The G20 is not a treaty organisation. It has no charter, no permanent secretariat and no headquarters, and it cannot bind anybody. It began in 1999, in the wake of the East Asian financial crisis, as an annual meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from systemically important economies; the global financial crisis pushed it up a level, and from the Washington meeting of November 2008 it has met as a summit of heads of state and government. Membership was 19 countries plus the European Union until the New Delhi summit of September 2023 admitted the African Union as a permanent member, making 21. Together the members account for roughly 85 per cent of world GDP, about three-quarters of global trade and around two-thirds of humanity. Everything runs on a rotating annual presidency: the chair for the year sets the theme, hosts the summit and steers two parallel workstreams — the Finance Track of ministries and central banks, and the Sherpa Track of leaders' personal envoys and its working groups — with continuity supplied by a troika of the immediate past, present and incoming presidencies (Indonesia–India–Brazil during India's year). Because there is no legal instrument at the end, the summit's only real output is the Leaders' Declaration, a negotiated consensus text. That is exactly why examiners ask about themes, venues and declarations: in the G20 those ARE the substance, and each of them changes every twelve months with the chair.

Everything in this question turns on one number, and the fastest candidates never read past it. Fix two anchors and the item takes ten seconds: New Delhi 2023 was the 18th summit, Rio de Janeiro 2024 was the 19th. Once the 18th is pinned to Delhi, all three statements die together, because all three are Rio facts — the city in (a), Brazil's theme in (b), and Brazil's declaration in (c). If the ordinal will not come, there is a second route. Options (a) and (c) both name Rio, so they stand or fall together; and a theme phrased in plain English about building a just world does not sound like the Sanskrit-rooted 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' that India used and publicised on every hoarding in Delhi that autumn. Either path lands on (d). The single discriminating skill, though, is neither geographical nor chronological — it is grammatical. The stem binds every statement to 'the 18th G20 Summit'. Option (c) is a perfectly true sentence, and a candidate who checks sentences rather than pairings will tick it, congratulate himself and lose 1.33 marks under the paper's minus-one-third rule. Verify the PAIRING, not the sentence. The second trap is format superstition. Candidates trained on papers where the last option is filler assume 'None of the above' cannot be right; in this paper BPSC uses it as a live answer, and the Commission defended it against objection rather than deleting the question.

• The 18th G20 Summit was held at Bharat Mandapam, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi on 9–10 September 2023, during India's presidency of the grouping from 1 December 2022 to 30 November 2023, under the theme 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future'.
• At New Delhi the African Union was admitted as a permanent member, taking the G20 from 19 countries plus the European Union to 21 members; the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration was adopted by consensus on the first day, 9 September 2023, and the summit also launched the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor and the Global Biofuels Alliance.
• The 19th G20 Summit was held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 18–19 November 2024, theme 'Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet'; its Rio de Janeiro Leaders' Declaration committed members to cooperate on the effective taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and Brazil used the summit to launch the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty and the first 'G20 Social'.
• Summit sequence around the question: 17th Bali, Indonesia (2022, theme 'Recover Together, Recover Stronger'); 18th New Delhi (2023); 19th Rio de Janeiro (2024); 20th Johannesburg, South Africa, theme 'Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability' — still upcoming on exam day, 13 September 2025, and held that November as the first G20 summit on African soil. Rio remains the 19th and New Delhi the 18th; those do not move.
• Institutionally the G20 dates from 1999 as a Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors forum after the East Asian crisis and was raised to leaders' level at Washington in November 2008; it has no charter and no permanent secretariat, works through a Finance Track and a Sherpa Track, and is steered by a troika of the past, present and incoming presidencies — Indonesia, India and Brazil in India's year.

• Ticking option (c) because the sentence about the Rio declaration is true — it is true of the 19th summit, and the question asks about the 18th
• Assuming 'None of the above' is filler; BPSC used it as the live key here and defended it against objection instead of deleting the question
• Confusing 1999, when the G20 was created as a finance ministers' forum, with November 2008, when it first met at leaders' level

BPSC pins one edition number to one summit and then offers three statements lifted from a NEIGHBOURING edition, with 'None of the above' live — so the mark goes to whoever attaches facts to hosts rather than collecting them loose. UPSC rarely asks the ordinal outright: in 2023 it asked how the G20 originated and whether digital public infrastructure was an Indian priority, and in 2020 which four named countries are all members. But UPSC 2025 ran precisely this trick on BRICS, keeping the host and the edition number right and altering one word of the theme.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The theme of the 19th G20 Summit, held at Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, was

  • (a)Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future
  • (b)Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet
  • (c)Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability
  • (d)Recover Together, Recover Stronger

  Answer(b) Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet — Brazil's theme for the 19th summit. (a) was India's theme for the 18th at New Delhi in 2023, (c) South Africa's for the 20th at Johannesburg in 2025, and (d) Indonesia's for the 17th at Bali in 2022.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following was admitted as a permanent member of the G20 at the New Delhi Summit of September 2023 ?

  • (a)African Union
  • (b)Association of Southeast Asian Nations
  • (c)Nigeria
  • (d)African Development Bank

  Answer(a) African Union — its admission took the G20 from 19 countries plus the European Union to 21 members. ASEAN and the African Development Bank attend G20 summits only as invited guest organisations, and no individual African country other than South Africa is a member.