CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 78 of 120

Correct — B, Hriday Nath Kunzru. Kunzru (1887-1978) joined the Servants of India Society, the body Gopal Krishna Gokhale had founded at Pune in 1905, in 1909, and rose to be its life President in 1936. Allahabad was his base — he sat on the Executive Council of Allahabad University and took his honorary LL.D. there — and the social-service work he built up in that city is the Seva Samiti of the question. He remained one of the founders of Indian Scouting, becoming the first National Commissioner of the Bharat Scouts and Guides, and later helped establish the Indian Council of World Affairs and the Indian School of International Studies. The three wrong names are placed to reward exactly that combination of Society membership and Allahabad.

• (a)Shri Ram Bajpai — The strongest distractor, and it is planted deliberately. Sri Ram Bajpai's name is attached to the Seva Samiti Boy Scouts Association, the scouting offshoot that grew out of the same Allahabad social-service work — but he was a Seva Samiti worker, not a member of the Servants of India Society, and the stem asks specifically for a Society man.
• (c)S. G. Vaze — S. G. Vaze was a Servants of India Society man, so the first half of the stem fits him, but his work centred on Pune, where he was associated with the Society's journal 'The Servant of India'. He is not connected with Allahabad.
• (d)Srinivas Shastri — V. S. Srinivasa Sastri was also a Servants of India Society man — indeed he succeeded Gokhale as its President — but he was a Madras-based Moderate, later Agent-General in South Africa, and had nothing to do with an Allahabad Seva Samiti.

The Servants of India Society was founded by Gopal Krishna Gokhale at Pune in 1905 to train a cadre of full-time public workers who would take a vow of simple living and devote themselves to national service — constitutional politics, education, famine relief and work among depressed classes. Its members drew a subsistence allowance and gave their careers to it. Out of that model grew a family of provincial service organisations, of which the Seva Samiti at Allahabad was one, running relief in floods and epidemics, spreading education and sanitation and working among the depressed classes.

Every name in the option set is real and three of them are genuinely of the Servants of India Society, so the question is decided on geography rather than on affiliation. Kunzru is the Allahabad man, and the fastest route to him is the scouting connection: he was the first National Commissioner of the Bharat Scouts and Guides, and the Seva Samiti's own scouting wing at Allahabad is where that story starts. One honest caveat is owed here. The founding of the Seva Samiti at Allahabad in 1914 by Kunzru is the settled account in the standard histories and it is what UPSC keyed, but we were not able to confirm the 1914 date against a primary or encyclopaedic source; the general reference works date the Seva Samiti Scout Association at Allahabad to 1917 and associate Madan Mohan Malaviya with Kunzru in founding it. Rest your recall on the checkable part — Kunzru, Servants of India Society, Allahabad, scouting — rather than on the year alone.

• The Servants of India Society was founded by Gopal Krishna Gokhale at Pune in 1905.
• Hriday Nath Kunzru joined the Society in 1909 and became its life President in 1936.
• Kunzru was one of the founders of Indian scouting and the first National Commissioner of the Bharat Scouts and Guides.
• He was a member of the Constituent Assembly, of the States Reorganisation Commission of 1953-55, and chaired the committee whose recommendation produced the National Cadet Corps in 1948.
• He declined the Bharat Ratna in 1968, on the ground he had argued in the Constituent Assembly that a republic should not confer such titles.

• Picking the name attached to the Boy Scouts offshoot when the stem asks for a Servants of India Society member.
• Assuming any Servants of India Society man will do; the discriminator in this item is Allahabad, not the Society.
• Confusing the Servants of India Society, founded by Gokhale in 1905, with Lala Lajpat Rai's Servants of the People Society, founded in 1921.

As a founder-to-organisation item, usually with two or three plausible members of the same body among the options.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Servants of India Society was founded in 1905 by

  • (a)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (b)Gopal Krishna Gokhale
  • (c)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (d)Mahadev Govind Ranade

  Answer(b) Gopal Krishna Gokhale — he set it up at Pune in 1905 to train full-time workers for public service.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who among the following was the first National Commissioner of the Bharat Scouts and Guides?

  • (a)Madan Mohan Malaviya
  • (b)Hriday Nath Kunzru
  • (c)V. S. Srinivasa Sastri
  • (d)Rajendra Prasad

  Answer(b) Hriday Nath Kunzru — he served as the organisation's first National Commissioner from 1952.