Assistant Provident Fund Commissioner (APFC) 2016 recruitment test, advertisement 170. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, B-CRHE-O-PAPA); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part B. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

What is Know India Programme (KIP) ?

(a)A programme for children aged 12 – 15 years from rural areas to make them aware of different aspects of India
(b)A programme that facilitates visits of rural teachers to different parts of the country
(c)An out-reach programme of the Ministry of External Affairs to build closer ties with India's neighbourhood
(d)A programme for diaspora youth to promote awareness among them about different aspects of India

Answer

Why

Correct — D, (d) A programme for diaspora youth to promote awareness among them about different aspects of India.

The Know India Programme is the Ministry of External Affairs’ orientation programme for young people of Indian origin living abroad, and its purpose is exactly what the keyed option says: to promote among diaspora youth an awareness of different aspects of India.

The Ministry’s own description sets it out plainly. The programme’s primary objective is to foster a closer connection between Indian diaspora youth and their ancestral homeland by augmenting their understanding of India. It works as a visit of about three weeks — the Ministry calls it a ‘knowledge tourism’ programme — during which the participants are shown different aspects of the country’s growth and development, meet officials and institutions, and spend part of the time in a partner State.

The eligibility conditions confirm who it is for. It is open to youth of Indian origin, within an age band the Ministry prescribes, and non-resident Indians — that is, Indian citizens living abroad — are expressly excluded, because the point is to reach the descendants of emigrants rather than Indian passport-holders overseas. Preference is given to persons of Indian origin from the Girmitiya countries, the places to which indentured labourers were carried in the nineteenth century, and each edition of the programme takes a small group, up to about forty participants, who are given full hospitality in India.

So the two features that identify it are the audience, diaspora youth, and the object, familiarity with contemporary India. Only one option carries both.

Why the others are wrong

(a)A programme for children aged 12 – 15 years from rural areas to make them aware of different aspects of India — This option changes the audience twice over: it makes the participants children of twelve to fifteen and places them in rural India. The Know India Programme is neither a school programme nor a domestic one; it brings young adults of Indian origin from other countries to India. The option is built to be plausible in the abstract — the Government does run exposure and exchange schemes for schoolchildren — and it keeps the one phrase from the real description that a candidate is likely to remember, ‘different aspects of India’. That is a common construction in option sets of this kind: the purpose is copied accurately and the beneficiary is changed. The defence is to read the beneficiary first. A programme named ‘Know India’ and run by the Ministry of External Affairs must be aimed at people who do not already live here.
(b)A programme that facilitates visits of rural teachers to different parts of the country — This option keeps the idea of travel and learning but attaches it to rural teachers moving about within India. That is a domestic education initiative, which would fall to the education ministry rather than to the Ministry of External Affairs, and it has nothing to do with the diaspora. Its presence is a reminder that the ministry which runs a scheme is itself a strong clue to what the scheme does: External Affairs deals with foreign policy, missions abroad, consular services and the overseas Indian community, so its programmes will involve people or interests outside India. Sorting central schemes by the ministry that administers them is one of the most economical ways to prepare this part of a general-studies paper, because it converts a long list of names into a small number of families.
(c)An out-reach programme of the Ministry of External Affairs to build closer ties with India's neighbourhood — This is the near miss and the best-built option on the list, because it gets the Ministry right. The Know India Programme is indeed run by the Ministry of External Affairs; what this option changes is the audience, making the programme an outreach to India’s neighbouring countries rather than to people of Indian origin. India does conduct a great deal of neighbourhood diplomacy, and exchange and training programmes form part of it, so the sentence reads convincingly. But the Know India Programme is a diaspora programme: its participants are persons of Indian origin, drawn from countries around the world and not from the neighbourhood, and non-resident Indians are excluded from it. An option that is right about the administering ministry and wrong about the beneficiary is the standard trap in scheme questions, and the way past it is to fix the beneficiary before anything else.

Concept

India’s engagement with its overseas community is handled by the Ministry of External Affairs, and a small family of schemes carries it out. The Know India Programme is the orientation visit for diaspora youth. The Scholarship Programme for Diaspora Children supports higher education in India for students of Indian origin. Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, held on 9 January, is the periodic convention that brings the overseas community together, the date marking Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915. The Overseas Citizen of India card gives long-term entry and residence rights to people of Indian origin abroad, and replaced the earlier Person of Indian Origin card when the two schemes were merged.

The distinctions that scheme questions turn on are worth fixing. A non-resident Indian is an Indian citizen residing abroad. A person of Indian origin is a foreign citizen with Indian ancestry. The Know India Programme is aimed at the second group and excludes the first, which is the sort of detail an examiner likes because it separates a candidate who has read the scheme from one who has heard of it.

The Girmitiya countries, given preference in selection, are those to which indentured labourers were taken from India under the agreement system in the nineteenth century — the word comes from the labourers’ pronunciation of ‘agreement’ — and the descendants of those emigrants form large communities in Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Guyana and the Caribbean.

Questions on government programmes are a fixture of general-studies papers and are usually asked in one of two ways: the name is given and the description wanted, as here, or a description is given and the name wanted. The option list in the first form is almost always built by holding one element of the real scheme constant and varying the rest, so the reliable method is to identify the two or three elements that define the scheme — who runs it, who benefits, what it does — and check each option against all of them.

Here the elements are the Ministry of External Affairs, diaspora youth, and familiarisation with India. One option keeps the purpose and changes the beneficiaries to rural schoolchildren; one keeps the idea of a visit and changes it into a domestic teachers’ scheme; one keeps the Ministry and changes the beneficiaries to the neighbourhood. Only the fourth keeps all three.

The paper prints two small typographic features in this item that are worth noting because they are the booklet’s own: the age range in the first option is set with a spaced en dash, ‘12 – 15 years’, rather than a hyphen, and ‘out-reach’ in the third option is hyphenated. Neither affects the sense.

Key facts

The Know India Programme is an initiative of the Ministry of External Affairs for youth of the Indian diaspora.
Its primary objective is to foster a closer connection between diaspora youth and their ancestral homeland by augmenting their understanding of India.
It runs as a visit of about three weeks, described by the Ministry as a ‘knowledge tourism’ programme, covering different aspects of India’s growth and development.
It is open to youth of Indian origin and expressly excludes non-resident Indians, that is, Indian citizens living abroad.
Preference in selection is given to persons of Indian origin from the Girmitiya countries, and about forty participants are taken in each edition, with full hospitality provided in India.
Related diaspora schemes of the same Ministry include the Scholarship Programme for Diaspora Children, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas on 9 January, and the Overseas Citizen of India card.

Study next

Ministry of External Affairs schemes for the overseas community, and the difference between a non-resident Indian and a person of Indian origin.The Overseas Citizen of India card, its rights and its limits, and the merger of the earlier Person of Indian Origin card into it.Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and the reason for its date.The Girmitiya emigration of the nineteenth century and the communities it created in Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Guyana and the Caribbean.Method for scheme questions: identify the administering ministry, the beneficiary and the benefit, and test every option against all three.

Common traps

Choosing the option that names the right Ministry but the wrong beneficiaries. Neighbourhood diplomacy is not what this programme does.
Reading a familiar phrase from the real description — ‘different aspects of India’ — as though it settled the answer.
Forgetting that non-resident Indians are excluded, so that the programme is for foreign citizens of Indian descent.
Assuming a programme with an Indian-sounding purpose must be domestic; the administering ministry is the first clue to look at.

Government schemes appear on EPFO papers in both directions — name to description and description to name — and the option sets are built by varying one element of the real scheme at a time. The most frequent variation is the beneficiary, because that is the element candidates remember least precisely, and the strongest distractor usually keeps the correct ministry. Diaspora and external-affairs schemes come up alongside the welfare and social-security schemes that these papers favour, so it is worth preparing them as a table: name, ministry, beneficiary, benefit, year of launch. A candidate who can fill those five columns for thirty schemes will answer most questions of this kind without hesitation.

Related PYQs

EPFO_APFC_2016_Q25

Which of the following are incorporated in the Government approved National Telecom Policy, 2012 ? 1. Broadband for all with a minimum download speed of two megabits per second 2. India's rural tele-density to be improved from 39% to 70% in the next five years 3. Roaming charges shall be scrapped Select the correct answer using the codes given below :

(a) 1 and 2 only
(b) 1 and 3 only
(c) 2 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer(d) 1, 2 and 3

Another policy item on this paper answered from the text of a Government document, where the detail of what the policy actually provides decides the answer.

EPFO_APFC_2016_Q26

Which of the following is one of the Millennium Development Goals fixed by the UNO ?

(a) Halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS
(b) Develop a new variety of foodgrains which can ensure bumper crops
(c) To ensure that population does not increase in the least developed countries
(d) Develop procedures towards adequate and timely forewarning on hurricanes and tsunamis

Answer(a) Halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS

An item on an international programme, useful beside this one because it likewise turns on matching a stated objective to the right body.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
Which of the following is a scheme of the Ministry of External Affairs aimed at students of Indian origin abroad ?
- (a)Scholarship Programme for Diaspora Children
- (b)National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship
- (c)Post Matric Scholarship for Scheduled Castes
- (d)Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship
Answer(a) Scholarship Programme for Diaspora Children — it supports higher education in India for children of the overseas Indian community and is administered by the Ministry of External Affairs. The other three are domestic scholarship schemes for students in India, run by education and welfare ministries.
practice — not a real PYQ
For the purposes of India’s diaspora schemes, a ‘person of Indian origin’ means
- (a)an Indian citizen residing outside India
- (b)a foreign citizen with Indian ancestry
- (c)any person born in India
- (d)an Indian citizen holding a second passport
Answer(b) a foreign citizen with Indian ancestry — the term is distinguished from a non-resident Indian, who is an Indian citizen living abroad, and it is persons of Indian origin whom the Know India Programme is designed for. Option (a) defines the non-resident Indian, option (c) is too broad, and option (d) describes a status Indian law does not permit.