EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 110 of 120

Correct — C, (c) 1 and 2 only. Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana, printed in italics in the booklet, is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment's umbrella scheme for senior citizens, the renamed and revised form of the earlier National Action Plan for Senior Citizens. Judge the four listed items against what that umbrella actually contains. Item 1 is correct. Meeting the basic needs of destitute elderly citizens is the core of the scheme's largest component, the Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens. Under it, grant-in-aid goes to State Governments and to voluntary organisations to run senior citizens' homes, continuous care homes, mobile medicare units and physiotherapy clinics, so that poor and indigent older people receive shelter, food, medical care and recreation. That is the plainest description of what the scheme does on the ground. Item 2 is correct as the key grades it. Regional Resource and Training Centres are run under the same Integrated Programme, by voluntary organisations receiving grant-in-aid, and their work is advocacy and awareness generation on issues affecting senior citizens, training and capacity building of those who care for them, research and documentation, and coordination with State Governments to strengthen elderly-care services. Strengthening bonds between the generations is among the aims the scheme sets for itself, and the training centres are the arm through which that awareness and capacity-building work is carried out, so the pairing in item 2 is one the scheme supports. Item 3 is wrong. Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana does not provide a guaranteed monthly pension. Old-age income support in India comes from elsewhere: the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme under the National Social Assistance Programme, run by the Ministry of Rural Development, and the contributory Atal Pension Yojana, regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority, which is open to subscribers between 18 and 40 years of age and pays a guaranteed minimum pension in return for contributions. Neither is part of this umbrella, and the shared word Atal in the second is exactly the trap. Item 4 is wrong for the same reason in a different costume. Atal Incubation Centres belong to the Atal Innovation Mission at NITI Aayog and support start-ups and innovators; they have nothing to do with elderly care. The scheme does have a start-up element of its own, the Seniorcare Ageing Growth Engine initiative, which supports enterprises building products and services for older people, but that is not an Atal Incubation Centre. So items 1 and 2 stand and items 3 and 4 fall, which is option (c). Note also that this question does not use the standard code set of '1 only, 2 only, Both 1 and 2, Neither 1 nor 2'; it prints its own combinations, and the combination that matches has to be found rather than assumed.

• (a)1, 2, and 4 — This gets items 1 and 2 right and then adds item 4, which is the Atal Incubation Centre claim. Those centres are set up under the Atal Innovation Mission at NITI Aayog to incubate start-ups, and no version of them is directed at elderly citizens. The confusion is understandable, because the scheme really does have an enterprise-facing arm in the Seniorcare Ageing Growth Engine initiative, which encourages start-ups working on products and services for older people. That initiative is not an incubation centre programme and does not carry the Atal Innovation Mission's name, so the pairing in item 4 remains wrong. Note also that this option is printed as '1, 2, and 4', with a comma before the word and, which is the booklet's own punctuation.
• (b)3 and 4 only — This picks out precisely the two items that are wrong, so it is the exact inverse of the answer. It is the option a candidate reaches by reading the stem as though it asked which statements are not correct. The stem here asks which statements are correct, and it contains no negative ask at all. Both items it selects fail on the substance too: the scheme carries no guaranteed monthly pension, that being the business of the old-age pension scheme under the National Social Assistance Programme and of the contributory Atal Pension Yojana, and Atal Incubation Centres belong to the Atal Innovation Mission at NITI Aayog. Choosing the complement of the right answer is a recurring failure mode in list questions, and the guard against it is to write down what the stem asks before scoring the items.
• (d)1 only — This keeps item 1, which is safe, and drops item 2, which is also correct. A candidate lands here by treating the Regional Resource and Training Centres as an invented detail, or by assuming that a scheme for the elderly cannot have an intergenerational purpose. Both assumptions are wrong: the training centres are a named component funded through the Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens and run by voluntary organisations, and strengthening the bonds between generations is among the aims the scheme states for itself. The general lesson is that an item naming an unfamiliar institutional detail is not thereby suspect; schemes of this size have many named components, and the examiner uses them precisely because they are the part a hurried reader has not met.

Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment's umbrella scheme for the welfare of senior citizens, adopted in 2021 as the renamed and revised form of the National Action Plan for Senior Citizens. It gathers several distinct programmes under one head. The Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens gives grant-in-aid to State Governments and voluntary organisations for senior citizens' homes, continuous care homes, mobile medicare units, physiotherapy clinics and Regional Resource and Training Centres, the last of which handle advocacy, awareness generation, training and capacity building, research and documentation and coordination with the States. Rashtriya Vayoshri Yojana supplies assisted-living devices free of cost to older people of limited means who have age-related disabilities. Further components cover State action plans for senior citizens, awareness generation and capacity building, elderly self-help groups, the silver economy including the Seniorcare Ageing Growth Engine start-up initiative, the Elderline national helpline, and the Vayoshreshtha Samman awards. The scheme sits alongside, and must be distinguished from, the legal and income-support instruments for older people: the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, which creates a legal duty of maintenance; the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme under the National Social Assistance Programme; and the contributory Atal Pension Yojana regulated by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority.

Scheme questions are a fixed feature of the governance and economy block in the EO/AO General Ability Test, and an umbrella scheme is a favourite target because a candidate has to know what is inside the umbrella and what merely sounds as though it should be. This item is built almost entirely out of that distinction: two of its four statements describe components that are genuinely part of the scheme and two describe programmes run by completely different arms of Government that share a name or a beneficiary. The habit rewarded is to learn each umbrella scheme as a list of named components with the ministry attached, and to be alert whenever a familiar word such as Atal appears in more than one place.

• Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment's umbrella scheme for senior citizens, the renamed National Action Plan for Senior Citizens.
• Its Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens funds senior citizens' homes, continuous care homes, mobile medicare units, physiotherapy clinics and Regional Resource and Training Centres.
• Regional Resource and Training Centres do advocacy and awareness generation, training and capacity building, research and documentation, and coordination with State Governments.
• Rashtriya Vayoshri Yojana, a component of the umbrella, provides assisted-living devices free of cost to eligible senior citizens.
• The scheme does not pay any guaranteed monthly pension.
• Old-age income support comes from the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme under the National Social Assistance Programme, and from the contributory Atal Pension Yojana under the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority.
• Atal Incubation Centres are set up under the Atal Innovation Mission at NITI Aayog to support start-ups, not senior citizens.
• The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 is the statutory instrument for the elderly, separate from this scheme.

• Confusing schemes that share the word Atal: the elderly-welfare umbrella, the contributory pension scheme and the innovation mission are run by three different arms of Government.
• Choosing the exact complement of the right answer by reading a positive ask as a negative one.
• Assuming a welfare umbrella for the elderly must include a pension; income support is a separate instrument.
• Dismissing a named component such as a Regional Resource and Training Centre as invented detail.
• Expecting the standard code set of '1 only, 2 only, Both 1 and 2, Neither 1 nor 2'; this question prints its own combinations.

Umbrella schemes appear in EO/AO papers as multi-statement code items like this one, as single-line questions about the nodal ministry, and as matching items pairing components with parent schemes. The examiner's standard device is to insert a component from a different scheme that shares a name, a beneficiary group or a ministry. Preparation that lists components under their parent scheme, rather than collecting scheme names alone, is what defeats that device.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Rashtriya Vayoshri Yojana, a component of the Government's umbrella scheme for senior citizens, provides :

  • (a)A monthly pension to senior citizens below the poverty line
  • (b)Assisted-living devices free of cost to eligible senior citizens
  • (c)Free railway travel to senior citizens above seventy years of age
  • (d)Interest subvention on housing loans taken by senior citizens

  Answer(b) Assisted-living devices free of cost to eligible senior citizens

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Atal Incubation Centres are set up under which one of the following ?

  • (a)Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment
  • (b)Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority
  • (c)Atal Innovation Mission of NITI Aayog
  • (d)Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship

  Answer(c) Atal Innovation Mission of NITI Aayog