MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 97 of 100

Correct — option (4), Katra in Jammu and Kashmir. The 25th National Conference on e-Governance was held on 26 and 27 November 2022 at Katra, the town in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir that serves as the base for the pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi. It was organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, which belongs to the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, together with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in association with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir. The theme was 'Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer'. Dr Jitendra Singh, the Union Minister of State with independent charge of Science and Technology and Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office and for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, inaugurated it, and the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Shri Manoj Sinha, presided over the valedictory session on 27 November. More than sixteen hundred delegates attended, drawn from central ministries and departments and from twenty-eight States and eight Union Territories, and the National Awards for e-Governance were presented in five categories to eighteen initiatives at the central, State and district levels and in academic institutions and public sector undertakings, nine of them gold and nine silver. The choice of venue was itself part of the message: holding the country's principal e-governance conference in a Union Territory that had only recently been reorganised, and in a pilgrimage town rather than a metropolitan centre, was a deliberate signal about where digital administration was expected to reach. Option (4) is the answer.

• (1)Kollam - Kerala — Kollam in Kerala did not host this conference. Each option in this question is printed as a place paired with its State, which is a small kindness from the examiner — it means a candidate who remembers the State but not the town, or the town but not the State, can still answer, and it also means that a mismatched pair could in principle be eliminated on geography alone. Here the pairing is accurate, so nothing can be gained that way. A candidate who chooses this option is usually reasoning from Kerala's general reputation in literacy and citizen services rather than from anything about the twenty-fifth conference. That kind of reasoning is a poor guide for an event that moves from year to year, since the venue is chosen through an arrangement between the central departments and a host State government rather than awarded on performance.
• (2)Mumbai - Maharashtra — Mumbai in Maharashtra is the home-State option, included in a Maharashtra paper for the reason such options are always included: a candidate who does not know the answer will gravitate towards the familiar. Nothing connects the city to the 25th National Conference on e-Governance, which was held at Katra. It is worth naming this instinct so that it can be resisted, because MPSC papers place a Maharashtra option in a great many current affairs questions where the correct answer lies elsewhere, and answering from proximity rather than knowledge is a systematic way of losing marks with a quarter of the marks for the question deducted each time. Where the State genuinely is the answer, there is usually a specific reason that the candidate can name; where no such reason comes to mind, the familiarity of the option is not evidence.
• (3)Ahmedabad - Gujarat — Ahmedabad in Gujarat is the most plausible of the three wrong options, because a large metropolitan centre in a State with a substantial information technology and administrative reform presence is exactly the kind of place a candidate expects a national technology conference to be held. That expectation is what the option trades on, and it is what makes the real answer memorable: the conference went to Katra, a small pilgrimage town in a Union Territory, and not to a metropolis at all. Conferences of this kind rotate among host States, and the choice is a matter of arrangement between the organising central departments and the State or Union Territory government rather than of the host's size. A candidate who has registered that the 25th conference was held in Jammu and Kashmir will not be drawn by any of the metropolitan options offered.

The National Conference on e-Governance is the annual gathering at which the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology bring together central ministries, State governments, industry and academia to review the country's progress in digital administration and to confer the National Awards for e-Governance. Its subject matter has broadened as the field has: the earliest editions were about computerising records and putting services online, while recent ones have dealt with digital public infrastructure, interoperability between departments, data-driven decision making, grievance redress and the delivery of entitlements to the last mile. The policy background is a sequence of national programmes — the National e-Governance Plan approved in 2006, which built the common service centres, the State data centres and the State wide area networks; the e-Kranti component of Digital India, launched in 2015, which extended the approach across sectors; and the platforms that now carry much of the load, from Aadhaar-enabled authentication and the Unified Payments Interface to DigiLocker, UMANG and the government's e-marketplace. The conference's annual theme is a good short guide to where the emphasis lay in a given year, and 'Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer' places 2022 squarely in the phase of platform-based service delivery.

Conferences with an edition number are heavily used in current affairs questions because each year supplies a new answer without any change to the question's wording, and the candidate must therefore carry the edition together with the venue. This particular family — national conferences convened by central ministries in a host State — is worth preparing as a small table with the edition, the year, the host town and State, the organising department and the theme, since the Commission asks about all five. Notice that the options here are printed as place-and-State pairs joined by a dash, which is a format that can occasionally be exploited: if a pair is internally wrong, with a town placed in the wrong State, it can be eliminated without knowing anything about the event. In this question all four pairs are geographically sound, so the shortcut is unavailable and the fact itself is required. The other habit this question rewards is scepticism about the home-State option. Maharashtra appears among the choices in a large number of the current affairs questions in this paper, and it is right only when a specific reason can be named; familiarity is not such a reason, and with a quarter of the marks deducted for a wrong answer, a guess made on that basis is expensive.

• The 25th National Conference on e-Governance was held on 26 and 27 November 2022 at Katra in the Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, the base town for the Vaishno Devi pilgrimage.
• It was organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, together with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in association with the Government of Jammu and Kashmir.
• The theme was 'Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer', and the conference was inaugurated by Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State with independent charge of Science and Technology.
• More than sixteen hundred delegates attended from central ministries and departments and from twenty-eight States and eight Union Territories, and the valedictory session on 27 November was presided over by the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Shri Manoj Sinha.
• The National Awards for e-Governance were presented at the conference in five categories to eighteen initiatives — nine gold and nine silver — at the central, State and district levels and in academic institutions and public sector undertakings.

• Choosing the home-State option in a current affairs question without a specific reason for doing so, which is expensive when a quarter of the marks is deducted for a wrong answer
• Assuming a national technology conference must be held in a large metropolitan centre, when these conferences rotate among host States and Union Territories
• Remembering the conference but not its edition number, when the question names the twenty-fifth specifically and an annual event supplies a different answer for every edition
• Overlooking that options printed as place-and-State pairs can sometimes be eliminated on internal geography alone, before any recall is attempted

Annual national conferences convened by central ministries generate a steady supply of MPSC questions, and the venue is the attribute asked about most often, followed by the theme and the minister who inaugurated it. Because the name of the event stays constant while the answer changes each year, a candidate must store the edition number along with the venue; a note that says only 'the National Conference on e-Governance is held annually' answers nothing. Expect wrong options to be metropolitan cities, since the correct venue is often a smaller town chosen for a policy reason, and expect a Maharashtra option to be present in most such questions. The topic also opens outward: e-governance questions in this paper's syllabus run from the National e-Governance Plan and Digital India through the digital public infrastructure platforms to the State's own service delivery guarantees, and preparing the policy background makes the conference questions incidental rather than isolated.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The National Conference on e-Governance is organised jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and which other body ?

  • (a)The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances
  • (b)The National Informatics Centre
  • (c)NITI Aayog
  • (d)The Department of Telecommunications

  Answer(a) The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances — it belongs to the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and is the nodal department for administrative reform, so it convenes the conference and confers the National Awards for e-Governance. The National Informatics Centre, named in the second option, builds and runs much of the government's technology infrastructure but is not the conference's organiser.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The theme of the 25th National Conference on e-Governance held in November 2022 was

  • (a)Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer
  • (b)Digital India for a New India
  • (c)Technology for Transparent Governance
  • (d)Empowering the Citizen through Data

  Answer(a) Bringing Citizens, Industry and Government closer — the theme placed the 2022 conference in the phase of platform-based service delivery, in which the government's role is understood as providing digital public infrastructure on which industry and citizens both build. The conference was held at Katra in Jammu and Kashmir and drew more than sixteen hundred delegates from the central ministries and from every State and Union Territory.