BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 29 of 150

Correct — C, Kutch Express. The 70th National Film Awards were announced on 16 August 2024 for the best of Indian cinema in 2022, and the winners were felicitated by President Droupadi Murmu at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi on 8 October 2024 — a ceremony originally scheduled for 3 May 2023 and pushed back by more than a year after pandemic-era delays. In that list, the award for Best Feature Film Promoting National, Social and Environmental Values went to Kutch Express, a Gujarati film directed by Viral Shah and produced by Soul Sutra LLP, with a cash prize of Rs 2,00,000 to each of the producer and the director. Set in Bhuj, it follows Monghi, a housewife in a long and unhappy marriage, and the women of her village who close ranks around her — a social-values subject that sits squarely inside what this category exists to reward. Kutch Express was not a one-award film: it took three honours at the 70th, adding Best Actress in a Leading Role for Manasi Parekh, shared with Nithya Menen for the Tamil film Thiruchitrambalam, and Best Costume Design for Niki Joshi. One naming point matters for revision, because it explains the stem's unusually long wording. This category used to carry a personal name — it was the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration. Ahead of this cycle the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting dropped personal names from National Film Award category titles, and the category was recast with the descriptive phrase BPSC quotes verbatim. Note also what Kutch Express did NOT win: the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film at the 70th went to Aattam, a Malayalam film directed by Anand Ekarshi.

• (a)Hellaro — The strongest wrong answer, and the one a well-read candidate picks — because Hellaro won a bigger award, not a smaller one. Abhishek Shah's 2019 directorial debut, about a group of women in the Rann of Kutch in 1975, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, the first Gujarati film ever to take the Swarna Kamal, and its thirteen actresses shared a Special Jury Award. Wrong edition by four cycles and wrong category.
• (b)Chhello Show — Pan Nalin's Chhello Show, released internationally as Last Film Show, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 10 June 2021 and reached Indian theatres on 14 October 2022. It is best remembered as India's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. Its National Film Awards came at the 69th edition, announced in August 2023 — Best Feature Film in Gujarati and Best Child Artist for Bhavin Rabari. Again the right language, the wrong edition and the wrong category.
• (d)More than one of the above — The category awards a single title per cycle, and for the 70th that title is Kutch Express alone. Hellaro and Chhello Show are both genuine National Film Award winners, which is what makes this option tempting — but they won at the 66th and 69th editions respectively and in entirely different categories. Two films cannot share one edition of this award, so (d) is arithmetically ruled out before any recall is needed.

The National Film Awards are India's highest film honours, instituted in 1954 and conferred by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; the festival and awards machinery is now run by the National Film Development Corporation of India, which took over the functions previously handled by the Directorate of Film Festivals. The awards run in three streams — Feature Films, Non-Feature Films and Best Writing on Cinema — and are decided by juries appointed for each cycle. The top prize in each stream is a Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) and the category awards are Rajat Kamals (Silver Lotus), each carrying a cash component. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema is announced and presented alongside them; at the 70th it went to Mithun Chakraborty. Crucially, the awards recognise regional-language cinema on the same national stage as Hindi cinema, through both language-specific categories (Best Feature Film in Gujarati, in Assamese, in Odia, and so on) and pan-Indian thematic categories such as the one in this question. That design is why a Gujarati film with a modest release footprint can appear in a national awards list next to a Kannada blockbuster: at the 70th, Rishab Shetty won Best Actor for Kantara and Ponniyin Selvan: I took the most awards with four, while Kutch Express took three.

The examiner has stacked three Gujarati award-winners against each other, so recognising the language gets you nothing — all three options are real, all three won National Film Awards, and all three are Gujarati. What separates them is the edition number, and matching editions to years is the discriminating skill. Each National Film Award cycle honours one calendar year of cinema: the 66th covered 2018, the 69th covered 2021 and the 70th covered 2022. Hellaro is a 2019 release honoured at the 66th, Chhello Show a 2021-22 release honoured at the 69th, and Kutch Express the only one of the three that appears anywhere in the 70th list. Fix the ordinal and the answer follows without knowing the category at all. Then apply the category as a cross-check, because it independently kills option (a): Hellaro's award was the outright Best Feature Film, the biggest prize in the feature stream, not the national-social-environmental-values category. One dating trap is worth internalising for every future National Film Award question — Kutch Express reached Indian theatres on 6 January 2023 and still competed in the 70th cycle, which covers 2022. A National Film Award year is an eligibility cycle, not a box-office date, so never date one of these awards from the release calendar. The same discipline explains why the 70th awards, covering 2022, were announced only in August 2024.

• 70th National Film Awards: announced 16 August 2024 for Indian cinema of 2022; presented by President Droupadi Murmu at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi on 8 October 2024, after the ceremony originally set for 3 May 2023 was postponed.
• Best Feature Film Promoting National, Social and Environmental Values went to Kutch Express (Gujarati) — producer Soul Sutra LLP, director Viral Shah — with Rs 2,00,000 to each. The category previously carried Nargis Dutt's name as the award for Best Feature Film on National Integration, before personal names were dropped from National Film Award category titles.
• Kutch Express won three awards at the 70th: the national-social-environmental-values category, Best Actress in a Leading Role for Manasi Parekh (shared with Nithya Menen for Thiruchitrambalam), and Best Costume Design for Niki Joshi.
• Other 70th headlines: Best Feature Film (Swarna Kamal) to Aattam, Malayalam, directed by Anand Ekarshi; Best Actor to Rishab Shetty for Kantara; most awards to Ponniyin Selvan: I with four; Best Non-Feature Film to Ayena; Dadasaheb Phalke Award to Mithun Chakraborty.
• The Gujarati precedents in the options: Hellaro (2019, director Abhishek Shah) won Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, the first Gujarati film to do so; Chhello Show / Last Film Show (director Pan Nalin) won Best Feature Film in Gujarati and Best Child Artist for Bhavin Rabari at the 69th, and was India's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.

• Assuming the biggest-sounding Gujarati winner must be the answer — Hellaro won the far larger Best Feature Film award, but at the 66th edition, not the 70th
• Mixing up an Oscar entry with a National Film Award — Chhello Show was India's official entry to the 95th Academy Awards, which is a nomination by the Film Federation of India, not a National Film Award
• Dating a National Film Award from the theatrical release — Kutch Express opened on 6 January 2023 and still belongs to the 70th cycle, which honours 2022

BPSC asks this as pure edition-plus-category recall with the full official category name spelled out, three real winners from one language as decoys, and 'More than one of the above' as the fourth option — the sort of item that rewards a memorised year-by-year winners table more than any understanding of cinema. UPSC has never asked a National Film Award winner in this bare form. When it enters this territory it asks about the institutions and the people behind them — who received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in a stated year (2003), or a statement set on who chairs the Central Board of Film Certification and the Children's Film Society (2004) — so the UPSC-facing revision is the institutional map, not the annual winners list.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film at the 70th National Film Awards was won by which film ?

  • (a)Kantara
  • (b)Aattam
  • (c)Ponniyin Selvan: I
  • (d)Kutch Express

  Answer(b) Aattam — the Malayalam film directed by Anand Ekarshi won Best Feature Film at the 70th. Kantara brought Rishab Shetty the Best Actor award, Ponniyin Selvan: I took the most awards with four, and Kutch Express won the national, social and environmental values category.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Hellaro, the first Gujarati film to win the National Film Award for Best Feature Film, was honoured at which edition of the National Film Awards ?

  • (a)64th
  • (b)66th
  • (c)68th
  • (d)70th

  Answer(b) 66th — Abhishek Shah's Hellaro won Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, which covered the cinema of 2018, and its thirteen actresses shared a Special Jury Award. The 70th awards, covering 2022, gave Best Feature Film to Aattam.