MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 92 of 100

Correct — option (3), Operation Dost. On 6 February 2023 two earthquakes struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria, and India launched Operation Dost within hours to send search, rescue and medical assistance. The name was chosen for its meaning: dost is the word for friend in Hindi and in Turkish alike, and the mission was presented as an act of friendship rather than of aid. The operation was run as a whole-of-government effort coordinated by the Ministry of External Affairs, with the National Disaster Response Force providing the search and rescue teams, the Indian Air Force the airlift and the Army a field hospital. Three NDRF teams totalling a hundred and fifty-one personnel, with dog squads and cutting and drilling equipment, worked at thirty-five sites in the towns of Nurdağı and Antakya, clearing debris, using life-detection equipment, recovering bodies and rescuing survivors; the Army's medical team set up a field hospital in the Iskenderun region. C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Super Hercules aircraft carried the teams and their loads of medical supplies and equipment, and relief material was sent to Syria as well. The teams worked for about ten days before returning. For an examination written on 4 June 2023 this was recent and prominent news, and it is the kind of event a State Public Service Commission will always pick up, because it is dated, uncontroversial and easy to key. Option (3) is the answer.

• (1)Operation Rahat — Operation Rahat is a real Indian operation and the strongest distractor in the set, which is why it is offered first. It is best known as the evacuation of Indian and foreign nationals from Yemen in 2015, when the civil war there closed the country's airspace and Indians were brought out by ship from Aden and by air from Sana'a in one of the largest such operations India has mounted. The word rahat means relief, so the name fits a rescue mission well enough to be believable in any humanitarian context. What distinguishes it from Operation Dost is the nature of the mission: Rahat was an evacuation, the bringing home of Indian nationals from a country in crisis, whereas Dost was an outward relief mission sending Indian teams into a foreign country to help its own people. Sorting India's named operations into evacuations and assistance missions is the quickest way to keep them apart.
• (2)Operation Hamdard — No Indian relief or evacuation mission of this name could be traced to any official source, and the option appears to have been constructed to sound like one. The word hamdard, from the Persian, means a sympathiser or one who shares another's pain, which is precisely the register in which India names its humanitarian missions, and that is what makes the option serviceable as a distractor. This is a general feature of operation-name questions and worth recognising: the wrong options are usually built from vocabulary drawn from the same emotional field as the correct one — friendship, relief, compassion, sympathy — so that a candidate who reasons from the sound of a name rather than from memory of the event has no way to discriminate. The defence is to learn the operations as events with dates and places rather than as words that feel appropriate.
• (4)Operation Sakha — This option is the cleverest in the set, because sakha is the Sanskrit word for a friend or companion — very nearly the meaning of dost, the name actually used. A candidate who remembers only that the Türkiye mission was named after friendship, and who is thinking in Sanskrit rather than in Hindi or Turkish, will find this option reading exactly right. No Indian mission of this name to the earthquake-hit region could be traced. The lesson is that recalling the sense of a name is not the same as recalling the name, and in an option set deliberately built from synonyms it is worth nothing at all. What secures Operation Dost in the memory is the reason for the choice — dost is the same word in Hindi and in Turkish, so the name said something to both countries at once, and that shared meaning is the detail worth carrying rather than the general idea of friendship.

India's humanitarian assistance and disaster relief abroad has become a recognisable instrument of its foreign policy, and the named operations of the last decade form a short list worth knowing as a set. Operation Maitri took relief to Nepal after the earthquake of 2015. Operation Rahat evacuated Indians and foreign nationals from Yemen in the same year. Operation Samudra Setu brought Indians home by sea during the coronavirus pandemic, and Operation Sanjeevani flew medical supplies to the Maldives. Operation Ganga evacuated students and other Indians from Ukraine in 2022, and Operation Kaveri brought Indians out of Sudan in April 2023, weeks before this paper was written. Operation Dost belongs to the assistance rather than the evacuation branch of this family. Its institutional interest lies in the machinery it used: the National Disaster Response Force, raised under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 as a specialist federal force for search and rescue, deployed abroad; the Indian Air Force's strategic airlift capability in the C-17 and C-130J; and the Army's field hospitals, which can be set up quickly in a disaster zone. The ability to reach a distant emergency within a day is what these deployments demonstrate, and it is the reason such missions carry diplomatic weight.

Named operations are a favourite of current affairs papers because they are unambiguous, dated and easy to key, and MPSC sets at least one such question in most years. The examiner's method is always the same: offer the real name among three others drawn from the same vocabulary, so that recognition by feel is impossible. Here two of the three wrong options carry words meaning relief and friendship, and one of them, sakha, is a near-synonym of the correct answer. The only preparation that works is to hold each operation as an event — what happened, where, when, which agencies took part — rather than as a word. A second point this question illustrates concerns how recent current affairs can be. The earthquakes struck on 6 February 2023 and the paper was written on 4 June 2023, so this question was set on an event four months old; the Sudan evacuation of April 2023 was younger still. Note two printing details as well: the English stem reads 'to aid earthquake affected in Turkey', with no noun after 'affected', and the country is called Turkey where it had formally adopted the name Türkiye at the United Nations in 2022. Both are features of the paper, not clues.

• Operation Dost was India's relief mission to Türkiye and Syria after the earthquakes of 6 February 2023, launched within hours and coordinated by the Ministry of External Affairs.
• The name was chosen because dost means friend in both Hindi and Turkish, which allowed the mission to be presented as an act of friendship rather than of aid.
• Three National Disaster Response Force teams of a hundred and fifty-one personnel with dog squads worked at thirty-five sites in Nurdağı and Antakya, and the Army set up a field hospital in the Iskenderun region.
• The Indian Air Force carried the teams, equipment and medical supplies in C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Super Hercules aircraft, and the teams worked for about ten days before returning.
• The operation belongs to a series of Indian missions abroad that includes Operation Maitri to Nepal in 2015, Operation Rahat from Yemen in 2015, Operation Samudra Setu and Operation Sanjeevani in 2020, Operation Ganga from Ukraine in 2022 and Operation Kaveri from Sudan in April 2023.

• Recalling the sense of an operation's name rather than the name itself, which is useless when the wrong options are built from synonyms
• Confusing an evacuation of Indian nationals, such as Operation Rahat or Operation Ganga, with an assistance mission sent to help another country's people, such as Operation Dost or Operation Maitri
• Assuming that any plausible-sounding operation name must be genuine, when option sets in this family routinely include invented ones
• Neglecting events of the final months before the examination, when a paper written in June 2023 drew on a February 2023 earthquake and could as easily have drawn on the April 2023 Sudan evacuation

Named operations appear in MPSC current affairs sections almost every year, in one of two forms: the operation is named and the candidate must identify the event, or the event is described and the candidate must name the operation. Both are answered from the same preparation, which is a single list of operations with the year, the country, the reason and the agencies involved. Expect the wrong options to be drawn from the same semantic field as the right one, and expect at least one of them to be a genuine operation from a different year, since that is the option that separates a candidate who knows the list from one who recognises a word. The topic also connects outward: a question about Operation Dost can equally be set on the National Disaster Response Force's mandate, on India's strategic airlift, or on the seismicity of the Anatolian region, so the event repays being learnt with its context.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Indian operation evacuated Indian nationals from Sudan in April 2023 ?

  • (a)Operation Ganga
  • (b)Operation Kaveri
  • (c)Operation Dost
  • (d)Operation Maitri

  Answer(b) Operation Kaveri — mounted in April 2023 when fighting broke out in Sudan, it brought Indian nationals out through Port Sudan and Jeddah. Operation Ganga was the evacuation from Ukraine in 2022, Operation Dost the relief mission to Türkiye and Syria in February 2023, and Operation Maitri the relief mission to Nepal after the earthquake of 2015 — the four together illustrate the difference between bringing Indians home and sending help abroad.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which force provided the search and rescue teams deployed by India under Operation Dost ?

  • (a)The National Disaster Response Force
  • (b)The Central Reserve Police Force
  • (c)The Border Security Force
  • (d)The Indo-Tibetan Border Police

  Answer(a) The National Disaster Response Force — raised under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 as a specialist federal force for search and rescue, it sent three teams of a hundred and fifty-one personnel with dog squads and cutting and drilling equipment, which worked at thirty-five sites in Nurdağı and Antakya. The other three are armed police forces of the Union with border and internal security mandates rather than a disaster response role.