BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 48 of 150

Correct — C, Atal Innovation Mission. Two independent tests both point at the same option. The first is chronology: the Atal Innovation Mission is NITI Aayog's flagship innovation and entrepreneurship programme and dates from 2016, four years before the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy document of December 2020. A programme that already existed cannot be an outcome of a later policy, whatever its subject matter. The second is parentage: AIM sits inside NITI Aayog, with its own verticals — Atal Tinkering Labs in schools, Atal Incubation Centres, Atal Community Innovation Centres, the Atal New India Challenge and ARISE — while the STI Policy is a document of the Department of Science and Technology under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Different institution, different instrument. The Commission's own disposal of objections gives exactly this reason: the Atal Innovation Mission of 2016 was brought by NITI Aayog, while the other two were brought by the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020. And the other two really do sit in the policy's own text, with section numbers you can point to: 'One Nation, One Subscription' is section 1.5, in Chapter 1 on Open Science, and 'Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks (RIEF)' is section 4.2.1 in Chapter 4 on Research, with a further reference at 10.2.5. One honest caveat that changes nothing about the key but should change how you revise: the document in circulation is STIP Doc 1.4 of December 2020, a draft policy, and we could not establish that it was ever formally notified in that form. 'Outcome' in this question therefore means 'a proposal that appears in the policy document' — which is how BPSC has used it, and on that reading the answer is unambiguous.

• (a)One nation, one subscription — This IS a proposal of the STI Policy 2020, so it cannot be the item that was NOT an outcome. Section 1.5, in the Open Science chapter, says the Government will negotiate with journal publishers for a 'one nation, one subscription' arrangement under which a single centrally-negotiated payment gives every individual in India access to journal articles, replacing thousands of separate institutional subscriptions. It is also the proposal that travelled furthest: by the September-2025 exam ONOS was live, run through the INFLIBNET Centre at Gandhinagar.
• (b)Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks (RIEF) — RIEF comes straight out of the same document, so it is not the odd one out either. Section 4.2.1, under the chapter on Research, proposes Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks to raise the quality of Indian research by widening the talent pool and benchmarking institutions internationally, and the policy returns to it at 10.2.5. Unlike ONOS it has stayed largely inside the document, which is precisely why candidates who go by news memory rather than by the text pick it as the 'unfamiliar' one and get the question wrong.
• (d)More than one of the above — This requires at least two of the three named items to fall outside the STI Policy 2020. Only the Atal Innovation Mission does. Both One Nation, One Subscription and RIEF are numbered sections of the policy, so neither can join the Atal Innovation Mission in the 'NOT an outcome' bucket. The reason this option tempts candidates is that RIEF is genuinely obscure — but obscure is not the same as absent, and the section number settles it.

India has restated its science policy roughly once a decade, and each statement carries the preoccupation of its era: the Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958 on building a scientific temper and a national research base, the Technology Policy Statement of 1983 on technological self-reliance, the Science and Technology Policy of 2003 on investment and international linkage, and the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of 2013 which first put innovation in the title. The Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of December 2020 — issued as Doc 1.4 by the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology — is the successor to the 2013 policy. It is organised into chapters, each carrying numbered proposals, and the chapters that matter here are Chapter 1 on Open Science, which houses One Nation, One Subscription at 1.5, and Chapter 4 on Research, which houses the Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks at 4.2.1. The thing to notice about a question of this shape is that it is not really about science at all: it asks whether you can separate a policy document's own proposals from pre-existing programmes that operate in the same space and use the same vocabulary. That distinction — document versus programme, proposal versus institution — is a recurring examinable idea across every ministry.

Attack the negative first. The stem asks which item was NOT an outcome, so two of the three named items must be genuine policy proposals and the answer is the outsider; candidates who read past the 'NOT' end up defending the very items the question wants them to discard. Then apply the two filters that decide it. The chronology filter: the STI Policy document is dated December 2020, so anything that demonstrably existed before that date cannot be its outcome. The Atal Innovation Mission was set up in 2016 and had been running Atal Tinkering Labs in schools for years by 2020, so it fails the date test on its own. The parentage filter: AIM belongs to NITI Aayog, which is not a ministry and does not write science policy, whereas the STI Policy is a Department of Science and Technology document — a policy of one body cannot produce the flagship programme of another. Either filter alone gets you to (c). There is also a useful vocabulary tell. 'One Nation, One Subscription' and 'Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks' are phrases you will only ever have met inside the policy text or in reporting about it; 'Atal Innovation Mission' is a household name with its own website, its own budget line and its own labs. The single discriminating fact worth memorising is the pairing Atal Innovation Mission — NITI Aayog — 2016, because UPSC has asked it as a bare one-line question in its own right.

• The Science, Technology and Innovation Policy document, STIP Doc 1.4, was released by the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, in December 2020, as successor to the STI Policy of 2013. India's earlier statements were the Scientific Policy Resolution 1958, the Technology Policy Statement 1983 and the Science and Technology Policy 2003.
• Section 1.5 of the policy, in Chapter 1 on Open Science, proposes 'One Nation, One Subscription' — a single centrally-negotiated payment to journal publishers that gives all individuals in India access to journal articles instead of thousands of separate institutional subscriptions.
• Section 4.2.1 of the policy, in Chapter 4 on Research, proposes Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks (RIEF) to raise research quality by expanding the talent pool and benchmarking internationally; the policy refers to RIEF again at 10.2.5.
• The Atal Innovation Mission was set up in 2016 under NITI Aayog and runs Atal Tinkering Labs in schools, Atal Incubation Centres, Atal Community Innovation Centres, the Atal New India Challenge and ARISE — Applied Research and Innovation for Small Enterprises. NITI Aayog is a policy think tank of the Government of India, not a ministry, which is why AIM sits outside the science ministry's policy chain.
• As of the September-2025 exam One Nation, One Subscription had moved from proposal to operation: the ONOS portal is coordinated by the INFLIBNET Centre at Gandhinagar and covers more than 6,500 government higher-education and research institutions, over 30 global publishers and more than 13,000 full-text journals. Research funding was reorganised in the same period around the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, created by legislation in 2023.

• Reading the question the wrong way round. It asks which item was NOT an outcome, so the two genuine policy proposals are the wrong answers and the familiar-sounding outsider is the right one.
• Attaching the Atal Innovation Mission to the Department of Science and Technology or to the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. It sits under NITI Aayog, and UPSC has asked this as a stand-alone question.
• Confusing 'One Nation, One Subscription' with the other 'One Nation, One …' initiatives — One Nation One Ration Card belongs to the Department of Food and Public Distribution, and One Nation One Election is a constitutional-amendment question entirely.

BPSC's habit here is the negative stem — 'which of the following was NOT' — attached to a named policy document and year, with 'More than one of the above' held in reserve, so the paper rewards knowing what is inside a document rather than what a scheme does. UPSC almost never quotes section numbers from a policy paper; its standard form is the bare parentage question, as in its 2019 one-liner asking which body the Atal Innovation Mission is set up under, or a two-statement test of whether a named body is autonomous and what its actual remit is. Learn the document-and-year for BPSC and the parent-body-and-remit for UPSC, and one set of facts answers both.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  'One Nation, One Subscription' first appeared as a numbered proposal in which of the following?

  • (a)National Education Policy 2020
  • (b)Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020
  • (c)National Research Foundation Act
  • (d)National Digital Library Mission

  Answer(b) Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020 — it is section 1.5 of the policy, in the chapter on Open Science, and is now administered through the INFLIBNET Centre at Gandhinagar.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Atal Tinkering Labs, Atal Incubation Centres and the Atal New India Challenge are all programmes of

  • (a)the Department of Science and Technology
  • (b)the Ministry of Education
  • (c)the Atal Innovation Mission under NITI Aayog
  • (d)the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship

  Answer(c) the Atal Innovation Mission under NITI Aayog — all three are AIM verticals, alongside Atal Community Innovation Centres and ARISE; AIM was set up in 2016, well before the 2020 STI Policy.