CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 99 of 120

Correct — A, 1, 2 and 3. Pair 4 is the clear error and it is the fastest way in. The Golden Revolution is the name Indian compilations give to the rise of horticulture — fruit, vegetables and honey — while eggs and poultry are what the Silver Revolution names. Golden with egg production therefore fails, and option (d), the only choice that keeps pair 4, goes with it. What remains is a completeness test on the other three. Yellow for oilseeds names India's push on mustard, groundnut, soyabean, sesamum and sunflower, the crop group whose shortfall still drives the country's edible-oil import bill; Pink is used for prawn and shrimp along with meat processing; Black is read as petroleum and, in the agricultural framing this paper uses, biodiesel. All three hold on the standard convention, so the answer must be the option that carries all three — and only (a) does. Option (b) leaves out the shrimp pair and option (c) leaves out the oilseeds pair, each dropping something the key treats as correct.

• (b)2 and 3 only — Throws away pair 1. Pink is the colour Indian usage attaches to prawn and shrimp along with meat processing, so the shrimp pairing belongs in the answer set.
• (c)1 and 3 only — Rejects the one pairing nobody disputes. Yellow has meant oilseeds in Indian usage since the oilseed drive of the late 1980s, so pair 2 belongs in the answer set.
• (d)2 and 4 only — The only option that keeps the broken pair. Egg and poultry output is conventionally the Silver Revolution; the Golden Revolution is horticulture and honey.

Indian exam preparation labels the country's post-Independence production drives with colours. Green stands for foodgrains, White for milk, Blue for fisheries, Yellow for oilseeds, Pink for prawn, shrimp and meat processing, Silver for eggs and poultry, Golden for horticulture and honey, Black for petroleum and biodiesel, Round for potato and Brown for leather. Only a few correspond to a named government programme; the rest are journalistic and textbook shorthand that hardened into a list.

The route to the answer is elimination followed by completeness. Eggs are the Silver Revolution in every standard compilation, so pair 4 is wrong twice over — Golden is not eggs and eggs are not Golden — and that removes (d) at once. Of the three survivors only (a) carries all of pairs 1, 2 and 3, so it wins as soon as you accept that none of those three is broken. An honest caution about the topic itself: there is no single government publication fixing this colour taxonomy, and compilations genuinely disagree at the edges. Pink is prawn and shrimp in most books but onion in some; Black is petroleum and biodiesel in most but coal in others; Grey is fertilisers in most and wool in a few. This item quietly settles Pink and Black in favour of the commoner reading. That is the key's call, and this card follows it, but a candidate meeting a different pairing in a different book is not misremembering — the list itself is unstable, and only Green, White, Blue and Yellow are safe to treat as fixed.

• Yellow stands for oilseeds — mustard, groundnut, soyabean, sesamum and sunflower — and is the least contested pairing on the list.
• Eggs and poultry are conventionally the Silver Revolution; the Golden Revolution names horticulture, fruit and honey.
• Pink is usually given for prawn and shrimp along with meat processing; Black is read as petroleum and, in this agricultural framing, biodiesel.
• The colour list is a compilation convention rather than a published government scheme list, and Pink, Black and Grey genuinely vary between books.
• India's dependence on imported edible oil is old enough to have been a UPSC prelims theme in 2004, which is why oilseeds keep returning.

• Reading Golden as eggs. Eggs and poultry are Silver; Golden is horticulture and honey.
• Treating every colour as an official scheme with a launch year and a ministry — most have neither.
• Confusing the Golden Revolution with the separate 'Golden Fibre Revolution', which refers to jute.

Almost always as a colour-to-product matching set, occasionally as a single-line question asking what one named colour revolution refers to.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the conventional colour naming of India's production drives, the Silver Revolution refers to a rise in the output of

  • (a)Milk
  • (b)Eggs and poultry
  • (c)Cotton
  • (d)Fish

  Answer(b) Eggs and poultry — milk is the White Revolution and fish the Blue Revolution.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Yellow Revolution in India is associated with a rise in the production of

  • (a)Maize
  • (b)Oilseeds
  • (c)Turmeric
  • (d)Marigold and other floriculture

  Answer(b) Oilseeds — mustard, groundnut, soyabean, sesamum and sunflower.