BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 51 of 150

Correct — C, "To offer personalised mentoring for lagging students to reach grade-level competencies." The Commission settled this one itself. When BPSC disposed of the candidate objections and published its final revised key on 31 October 2025, the Remarks column against this question stated that Mission Daksh started in 2023 to help nearly 25 lakh academically weak students of classes 3 to 8 in government schools through remedial classes. Every clause of that sentence maps onto option (c) and onto nothing else. The beneficiary is the academically weak child, not the unenrolled one. The stage is classes 3 to 8, that is elementary, not senior-secondary. The instrument is the remedial class — extra, targeted teaching for children who have fallen behind — not a training course, not a scholarship, not an infrastructure grant. And the entire point of a remedial class is what option (c) calls reaching "grade-level competencies": closing the distance between the class a child is sitting in and the competencies that class assumes the child already has. The scale is the clinching detail. Twenty-five lakh children of classes 3 to 8 are by definition already on a school roll — no administration can identify a child as academically weak in class 6 unless that child is attending class 6 and being assessed there. A mission built around that target group therefore cannot be an enrolment drive; it is a learning-recovery drive, which is exactly how option (c) describes it. One honest limit on this card, because it changes how you should revise the topic: Mission Daksh does not appear anywhere in the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, the 638-page volume tabled on 28 February 2025, whose school-education chapter discusses NIPUN teaching-learning-material kits and similar programmes instead. The Commission's own published reasoning is therefore the authoritative statement of the scheme's purpose available for this question, and this card asserts nothing beyond it. An expanded form of the name, a precise launch date, a fixed number of students per mentoring teacher and a subject list all circulate in press and coaching write-ups; none of them is confirmed by a government document, and none of them is repeated here.

• (a)To increase school enrolment in primary schools in rural areas. — The right shape of answer for the 1990s, which is exactly why it tempts. Bihar's enrolment machinery is a separate and older apparatus: Article 21-A, inserted by the Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002 and brought into force on 1 April 2010 alongside the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, already makes schooling for ages 6 to 14 an enforceable Fundamental Right, and Samagra Shiksha finances the access side of it. A scheme whose named target group is 25 lakh academically weak children of classes 3 to 8 is aimed at children who are already enrolled and already being taught.
• (b)To provide vocational training to teachers at senior-secondary level. — Wrong on both the beneficiary and the stage. The Commission's remark names students of classes 3 to 8; this option names teachers at senior-secondary level — a different person at a different rung of the school system. Teacher capability in India also runs through an entirely separate statutory channel: under Section 23 of the RTE Act the National Council for Teacher Education prescribes the minimum qualification for appointment as a teacher, and its 2010 notification requires a Teacher Eligibility Test for teaching the primary classes. 'Vocational training' is not a recognised description of any part of that.
• (d)More than one of the above — BPSC's standard fourth option, and it is a real trap because it punishes nothing except loose reading. It can be marked only if at least two of (a), (b) and (c) are independently true. Here (a) fails the beneficiary test — the scheme's target children are already in school — and (b) fails on both beneficiary and stage. Exactly one of the three statements survives, so the compound option collapses. Treat every 'more than one of the above' as a hidden multiple-select and score each statement separately before looking at the codes.

Indian school education is usually taught as three problems tackled in sequence. The first is access — getting every child onto a roll — which Article 21-A and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 turned into a legal entitlement for ages 6 to 14 with effect from 1 April 2010, and which Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and its successor Samagra Shiksha financed. The second is retention: keeping the child there to the end of the elementary stage. The third, and the one that dominates policy today, is learning — a child can be enrolled, present and promoted and still be reading and calculating several grades below the class printed on the register. The standard remedy is remedial or catch-up teaching, often described as teaching at the right level: group or mentor children by the competency they actually possess rather than by the class they sit in, run short intensive cycles on the missing foundational skills, and return them to the regular class once the gap closes. The National Education Policy 2020 made foundational literacy and numeracy the school system's highest and most urgent priority, and NIPUN Bharat — the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy — was launched on 5 July 2021 under Samagra Shiksha to deliver foundational literacy and numeracy to every child by the end of Grade 3, with 2026-27 as the target year. Mission Daksh sits one rung above that mission: classes 3 to 8, the children who missed foundational competency early and have carried the deficit upward with them.

Two moves settle this question even if the scheme's name is new to you. The first is to ask of each option a single question — who is the beneficiary, and at what stage? Option (a) puts the beneficiary at the point of entry, a child not yet in school. Option (b) puts the beneficiary in the staffroom, and at senior-secondary level. Option (c) puts the beneficiary inside the classroom, enrolled and falling behind. The name itself points the same way: daksh means skilled or competent, and a mission named for competence is far more likely to be about what children can do than about how many are registered. The second move is the scale test, and it is the single fact that discriminates. The Commission describes a target of nearly 25 lakh academically weak children of classes 3 to 8 in government schools. A child cannot be classified as academically weak in class 6 without sitting in class 6 and being assessed there, so this is a group defined by enrolment, not by its absence. That observation kills option (a) outright and leaves one live reading of the scheme. The deeper trap is habit. A whole generation of Indian education questions was about enrolment, drop-out and the mid-day meal, so 'increase enrolment' feels like the safe answer to any State education scheme. Since the National Education Policy 2020 and NIPUN Bharat the centre of gravity of Indian school policy has moved decisively to learning outcomes, and this BPSC item is written from the new centre of gravity, not the old one.

• The Commission's own Remarks column in the final revised answer key published on 31 October 2025 is the authoritative statement available for this question: Mission Daksh began in 2023 and provides remedial classes to nearly 25 lakh academically weak students of classes 3 to 8 in Bihar's government schools.
• Mission Daksh is not mentioned anywhere in the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, the 638-page volume tabled on 28 February 2025 — so the expanded form of the name, an exact launch date, a mentoring ratio and a subject list, all of which circulate widely online, rest on no government document and should not be memorised as fact.
• Article 21-A was inserted by the Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002, which received assent on 12 December 2002, but was brought into force only on 1 April 2010, together with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 — free and compulsory education for every child aged 6 to 14 years.
• NIPUN Bharat, the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy, was launched on 5 July 2021 under the Samagra Shiksha scheme with the target of universal foundational literacy and numeracy for every child by the end of Grade 3, to be achieved by 2026-27.
• Bihar's literacy rate for persons aged 7 years and above was 74.3 per cent in the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24 (Appendix-A, Table 7), among the lowest of any State, while the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25 places 43.5 per cent of the State's projected 2021 population in the 0-19 age band — an exceptionally large school-age cohort relative to the population.

• Assuming any State education mission must be about enrolment — since 2020 the policy centre of gravity in Indian schooling is learning outcomes, and a mission with a classes 3-to-8 target group is by construction about children already enrolled
• Repeating the expanded form of the name, the launch date, the students-per-teacher mentoring ratio or the subject list that circulate online for Mission Daksh — none is confirmed by any government document, and the scheme is absent from the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25
• Marking 'More than one of the above' on impression — it requires at least two of the three statements to be independently true, so each one must be scored on its own before the codes are read

BPSC asks a State scheme as a flat one-liner — 'what is the primary objective' — and expects one crisp purpose, so Bihar schemes should be revised as a name-to-objective pair, with remembered extra detail firmly resisted because much of what circulates is unsourced. UPSC almost never names a State scheme at all. It tests the same idea structurally instead: 'With reference to the Right to Education Act, consider the following statements', probing the provision, the implementing authority and the constitutional hook, and building its distractors out of adjacent schemes and adjacent statutes rather than out of adjacent-sounding purposes.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Article 21-A of the Constitution of India, which makes free and compulsory education for children a Fundamental Right, was inserted by which Constitutional Amendment Act ?

  • (a)The Constitution (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992
  • (b)The Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002
  • (c)The Constitution (93rd Amendment) Act, 2005
  • (d)The Constitution (103rd Amendment) Act, 2019

  Answer(b) The Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002 — it inserted Article 21-A, substituted Article 45 to cover early childhood care for children below six, and added Fundamental Duty 51A(k); it came into force only on 1 April 2010 with the RTE Act, 2009. The 73rd created the panchayat system, the 93rd inserted Article 15(5), and the 103rd created the 10 per cent EWS reservation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  NIPUN Bharat, launched by the Ministry of Education in July 2021 under the Samagra Shiksha scheme, sets a national target for which one of the following ?

  • (a)Universal enrolment at the secondary stage by 2030
  • (b)Foundational literacy and numeracy for every child by the end of Grade 3
  • (c)Vocational education for every student of classes 9 to 12
  • (d)Hundred per cent adult literacy in every district

  Answer(b) Foundational literacy and numeracy for every child by the end of Grade 3 — NIPUN stands for National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy, with 2026-27 as the target year, and it operationalises the National Education Policy 2020's insistence that foundational literacy and numeracy is the school system's most urgent priority.