BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 31 of 150

Correct — D, More than one of the above. Every one of the three statements is true, so no single-statement option can stand and the combined code is forced. Akashteer is India's fully indigenous, automated Air Defence Control and Reporting system, designed and built by Bharat Electronics Limited for the Indian Army's Corps of Army Air Defence; the Ministry of Defence signed the ₹1,982-crore 'Project Akashteer' contract with BEL on 29 March 2023 — one of two BEL contracts worth about ₹2,400 crore signed that day — and the first batch of control centres was flagged off from BEL's Ghaziabad unit in April 2024. Now take the statements one at a time, which is the only safe way to work this format. Statement (a): the Government's own May-2025 feature on the system describes Akashteer in exactly those words, as the core of the Indian Army's Air Defence system — it is the layer that fuses the Tactical Control Radar REPORTER, the 3D Tactical Control Radars, the Low-Level Lightweight Radar and the Akash Weapon System's own radar into a single track picture and then controls the guns and missiles that actually shoot. Statement (b): the same document records that its seamless integration with India's larger C4ISR ecosystem lets the Army, Navy and Air Force operate with unmatched synergy; in practice Akashteer links laterally to the Air Force's IACCS and the Navy's TRIGUN, so all three services read one sky rather than three. Statement (c): it further states that the system marks a clear shift in India's strategic principle, from passive defence to proactive retaliation — because automated detect-track-engage replaces the older sequence in which a low-level unit reported a contact upward and waited for manual clearance before firing. Three statements, three verified as true, therefore (d). The Commission disposed of every objection filed against this question in a single line — that all the options are correct — which is BPSC's own way of saying the same thing: (a), (b) and (c) are each accurate, and precisely because they are, none of them alone can be the answer.

• (a)Akashteer is the core of the Indian Army’s Air Defence (AAD) system — True in itself, and that is exactly what makes it the trap. Akashteer really does sit at the centre of Army Air Defence — AAD here expands to Army Air Defence, the arm that operates the ground-based guns, shoulder-fired missiles and Akash batteries, and Akashteer is the control-and-reporting layer above all of them. But truth is not sufficiency in this format. Because (b) and (c) are equally true, marking (a) alone reports less than the paper asked for, and the code 'More than one of the above' is what fits.
• (b)It seamlessly integrates India’s larger C4ISR — Also true, and also incomplete. C4ISR expands to Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and Akashteer plugs the Army's air-defence picture into that wider architecture while linking to the Air Force's IACCS and the Navy's TRIGUN. A shared picture is what makes a tri-service engagement possible and is the standard answer to the friendly-fire problem, where one service's aircraft appears as an unidentified contact on another's screen. Correct — but one of three correct lines, not the answer.
• (c)It reflects a strategic shift from passive defence to proactive retaliation — True as well. Under the older manual arrangement a track had to be reported up the chain, identified and cleared before a battery could engage, which in effect confined an air-defence unit to reacting after the fact. Akashteer's automated detection, identification and engagement pushes that decision down to the lowest unit working off a live common picture — the doctrinal change the statement names, and the capability demonstrated against the drone and missile barrage of the night of 9–10 May 2025 during Operation Sindoor. Being true is still not the same as being the only true statement.

An air-defence 'control and reporting' system is not a weapon and shoots nothing down. It is the command-and-control brain sitting between sensors and shooters: it takes raw returns from many radars, correlates them into one track picture, decides which track is hostile and which is a friendly aircraft, and then assigns the right weapon to the right target. That middle layer is where air defence is actually won or lost. A country can own excellent radars and excellent missiles and still fail if the two are joined only by voice reports over a radio net — in that arrangement each battery sees a single slice of sky, the same intruder gets tracked as three different contacts by three different units, and clearance to fire eats minutes that a low-flying drone will not give you. Akashteer replaces that with an automated, vehicle-mounted network, and being vehicle-mounted matters as much as the software: the control centres move with the formation instead of sitting in a fixed hardened bunker, which is what lets air-defence cover advance with an army rather than wait behind it. Two larger ideas travel with this question. C4ISR is the umbrella term for that whole military nervous system, and 'network-centric warfare' is the doctrine holding that an army's advantage comes from how well its sensors, decision-makers and shooters are connected rather than from the quality of any one platform. Akashteer is the Army's expression of both; its siblings are IACCS in the Air Force and TRIGUN in the Navy.

Reason about the format before you reason about the hardware. BPSC leans hard on 'More than one of the above' across this paper, and the option changes the arithmetic completely: you are no longer looking for the best statement, you are counting how many statements survive scrutiny. The instant a second statement checks out, options (a), (b) and (c) are all dead however good any one of them looks, and only (d) is left. So the discipline is to test all three even after the first reads as obviously correct — the commonest way to drop this mark is to recognise (a) as textbook-true, stop reading, and lose 1.33 marks under the +1 / −1/3 scheme. Then apply the content test. Ask of each statement whether it describes what the thing IS, what it CONNECTS to, or what it MEANS: (a) is the identity claim, (b) the connectivity claim, (c) the doctrinal claim. The giveaway is that all three read in the same register and the same vocabulary, because all three are near-verbatim lines from one Government feature published in May 2025. That is the single discriminating observation on this question. When three options in a BPSC current-affairs item share one voice, they have almost always been cut from one press document — and a press document does not contradict itself. For a single statement to have been the answer, the examiner would have had to alter one line: a wrong service, a wrong agency, a wrong number. None of them has been touched, and the Commission's one-line disposal of the objections confirms it.

• Akashteer is an indigenous Automated Air Defence Control and Reporting System designed and manufactured by Bharat Electronics Limited for the Indian Army's Corps of Army Air Defence — a command-and-control network, not a missile or a radar.
• The Ministry of Defence signed the ₹1,982-crore 'Project Akashteer' contract with BEL on 29 March 2023, one of two BEL contracts worth about ₹2,400 crore concluded that day (the other for the Navy's Sarang electronic support measures); the first control centres were flagged off from BEL Ghaziabad in April 2024.
• Its integrated sensor set includes the Tactical Control Radar REPORTER, 3D Tactical Control Radars, the Low-Level Lightweight Radar and the Akash Weapon System radar; the system is vehicle-mounted and networks with IACCS (Indian Air Force) and TRIGUN (Indian Navy).
• Akashteer was employed against the drone and missile barrage of the night of 9–10 May 2025 during Operation Sindoor — four months before this 13 September 2025 paper, which is what made it examinable current affairs.
• C4ISR expands to Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. The Corps of Army Air Defence became a separate arm of the Indian Army on 10 January 1994, bifurcated from the Regiment of Artillery, and its Army Air Defence College is at Gopalpur, Odisha.
• The same May-2025 Government feature that supplies all three statements also records the indigenisation numbers behind them: roughly 65% of defence equipment now made in India, the private sector at 21% of defence production, 16 Defence PSUs, 430-plus licensed companies, about 16,000 MSMEs, and a target of ₹3 lakh crore of annual defence production by 2029.

• Treating Akashteer as a missile or a radar. It is a command-and-control and reporting system; the radars and launchers are what it controls, and the question's own statements describe a network, not a weapon.
• Stopping at the first true statement in a 'More than one of the above' question. Every statement must be tested independently — under +1 / −1/3, marking (a) when (d) is right costs 1.33 marks, not 1.
• Confusing Akashteer (Army) with IACCS (Air Force) and TRIGUN (Navy). Three different service networks; Akashteer connects to the other two but does not replace them.
• Assuming Akashteer and the Akash missile are the same thing because of the shared name — Akash is a DRDO-designed surface-to-air missile system, Akashteer is BEL's control network that can task it.

BPSC lifts three sentences almost verbatim from a government press feature and wraps them in a 'More than one of the above' code, so the mark goes to the candidate who read the official release rather than a coaching digest — and who counted statements instead of ranking them. UPSC almost never does this. It takes the same subject and plants exactly one defect inside a two- or three-statement set — a wrong service, a wrong range, a wrong developer, a wrong country of origin (as it did with THAAD in 2018) — so the skill it rewards is spotting a single falsified detail, not confirming three sound ones. Read the PIB release for BPSC; read it sceptically for UPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Akashteer, in the news in 2025, is best described as

  • (a)A long-range surface-to-air missile developed by DRDO
  • (b)An automated air defence control and reporting system of the Indian Army
  • (c)A satellite-based early warning constellation of ISRO
  • (d)A stealth unmanned combat aerial vehicle

  Answer(b) An automated air defence control and reporting system of the Indian Army — it is a BEL-built command-and-control network that integrates radars and directs ground-based air-defence weapons; it is not itself a weapon.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs of an air-defence or air-picture network and the service that operates it is correctly matched?

  • (a)IACCS — Indian Army
  • (b)TRIGUN — Indian Air Force
  • (c)Akashteer — Indian Army
  • (d)Akashteer — Indian Navy

  Answer(c) Akashteer — Indian Army. IACCS is the Indian Air Force's Integrated Air Command and Control System and TRIGUN belongs to the Indian Navy; Akashteer is the Army's system and links to both.