MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 94 of 100

Correct — option (3), '(a) – (ii), (b) – (i), (c) – (iv), (d) – (iii)'. Take the four operations one at a time and the pairing settles itself. Operation Ajay was mounted in October 2023 to bring Indian nationals home from ISRAEL after the outbreak of the Gaza war; charter flights ran from Ben Gurion airport from 13 October, carrying more than a thousand Indians and some Nepalese nationals as well — so (a) pairs with (ii). Operation Ganga was the evacuation from UKRAINE after the Russian invasion of February 2022; several thousand Indians, most of them medical students, were moved overland to the borders of Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Moldova and flown home from there, with Union ministers sent as special envoys to coordinate — so (b) pairs with (i). Operation Devi Shakti was the airlift from AFGHANISTAN in August 2021, after the fall of Kabul, carried out by the Indian Air Force in extremely short order — so (c) pairs with (iv). Operation Kaveri was the evacuation from SUDAN between 24 April and 5 May 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces; about 3,862 Indians were brought home, with the Navy lifting people from Port Sudan and Air Force C-130J aircraft staging through Jeddah — so (d) pairs with (iii). Read the two printed columns as two separate lists, not as a table: the fact that 'Operation Ajay' is printed level with 'Ukraine' on the page is a consequence of the layout, and the pairing is whatever an option asserts, never what sits beside what. The simplest way to hold the set is chronologically: Devi Shakti in 2021 for Afghanistan, Ganga in 2022 for Ukraine, Kaveri in April 2023 for Sudan and Ajay in October 2023 for Israel.

• (1)(a) – (i), (b) – (ii), (c) – (iii), (d) – (iv) — This is the straight-through option that pairs the first item of each column with the first of the other, the second with the second, and so on — and every one of its four pairings is wrong. It sends Operation Ajay to Ukraine, Ganga to Israel, Devi Shakti to Sudan and Kaveri to Afghanistan. Its whole appeal is visual: it reproduces the order in which the two lists happen to be printed, which is exactly the mistake a matching question is designed to catch. An option that reads as a neat diagonal deserves more suspicion than any other, not less.
• (2)(a) – (ii), (b) – (iii), (c) – (iv), (d) – (i) — This is the near miss and the most dangerous option in the set. It gets two pairings right — Ajay with Israel and Devi Shakti with Afghanistan — and then swaps the remaining two, sending Ganga to Sudan and Kaveri to Ukraine. A candidate who is sure of the Israel and Afghanistan operations and hazy about the other two has a one-in-two chance of landing here. The fix is to anchor Ganga to Ukraine through the name itself, which was chosen when the first evacuation flights carried students out of a country with a large Indian medical-student population in early 2022, and to anchor Kaveri to Sudan through the naval element of that operation.
• (4)(a) – (iv), (b) – (ii), (c) – (iii), (d) – (i) — Every pairing here is wrong: Ajay to Afghanistan, Ganga to Israel, Devi Shakti to Sudan and Kaveri to Ukraine. It is built by rotating the correct answer, which is the standard way an examiner produces a fourth option once the answer and a near miss are fixed. Two anchors defeat it immediately — Devi Shakti belongs to the August 2021 fall of Kabul and Kaveri to the Sudan conflict of April 2023 — and in a four-pair matching question, settling any two pairs with certainty is normally enough to eliminate three of the four options.

India's evacuation operations are conducted by the Ministry of External Affairs with the Indian Air Force and, where a coastline allows, the Indian Navy, and each carries a codename that has become an examinable fact in its own right. The recent sequence is short enough to hold whole. Operation Devi Shakti, August 2021, brought Indian nationals and Afghan Sikhs and Hindus out of Kabul after the collapse of the Afghan government. Operation Ganga, February and March 2022, evacuated Indians from Ukraine after the Russian invasion, moving them overland to the western borders and flying them home from Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Moldova. Operation Kaveri, from 24 April to 5 May 2023, brought about 3,862 Indians out of Sudan after fighting broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, using naval ships from Port Sudan and air force transports staging through Jeddah. Operation Ajay, from October 2023, flew Indians out of Israel after the outbreak of the Gaza war. The pattern behind them is the size and dispersal of the Indian diaspora and the state's assumption of responsibility for it — a thread that runs back to the airlift of Indians from Kuwait in 1990, which remains the largest civilian evacuation by air ever conducted and which carried no Sanskrit codename at all.

Matching questions are worth a disproportionate share of marks because they can be solved partially: fix two pairs and the options usually collapse to one. The method is always the same. Work down the left column deciding each item on its own, write the Roman numeral against it, and only then look at the option grid — never read across the printed page, because the two columns are printed side by side for the reader's convenience and their adjacency asserts nothing. This question is a good example of why: the first item of column A, Operation Ajay, is printed level with the first item of column B, Ukraine, and that pairing is false. Note also a printing oddity in the stem, which announces 'the country and the Operations' while the columns are printed the other way round, operations first; nothing turns on it, but a candidate who reads the stem as a specification of column order can be briefly derailed. In this paper six questions are match-the-columns items, so the habit is worth drilling.

• Operation Ajay, October 2023 — evacuation of Indian nationals from Israel after the outbreak of the Gaza war, by charter flights from Ben Gurion airport.
• Operation Ganga, February-March 2022 — evacuation from Ukraine after the Russian invasion, with Indians moved overland to Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Moldova and flown home.
• Operation Devi Shakti, August 2021 — airlift of Indian nationals and Afghan minorities from Kabul after the fall of the Afghan government.
• Operation Kaveri, 24 April to 5 May 2023 — evacuation of about 3,862 Indians from Sudan during the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, using naval ships from Port Sudan and air force aircraft staging through Jeddah.
• These operations are run by the Ministry of External Affairs with the Indian Air Force and, where relevant, the Indian Navy.
• The 1990 airlift of Indians from Kuwait remains the largest civilian evacuation by air ever conducted and was carried out without a Sanskrit codename.

• Reading the two printed columns across the page as though adjacency were a pairing
• Choosing the option that reproduces the printed order of the lists, which here is wholly wrong
• Settling for the near-miss option that gets two pairs right and swaps the other two
• Confusing Operation Kaveri with Operation Ganga because both are named after Indian rivers

Evacuation operations are asked in MPSC papers either as a direct one-line item — which operation evacuated Indians from which country — or as a four-pair matching question of this kind. The distractor pattern is consistent: one option follows the printed order, one gets half the pairs right, and one is a rotation of the answer. Prepare by holding the operations in date order with the country and the triggering event attached, since the date is usually enough to settle a pair on its own.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Operation Kaveri was launched by the Government of India in 2023 to evacuate Indian nationals from which country ?

  • (a)Ukraine
  • (b)Sudan
  • (c)Israel
  • (d)Afghanistan

  Answer(b) Sudan — Operation Kaveri ran from 24 April to 5 May 2023 during the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and brought about 3,862 Indians home using naval ships from Port Sudan and air force aircraft staging through Jeddah.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Arrange the following Indian evacuation operations in chronological order, earliest first : 1. Operation Ganga 2. Operation Devi Shakti 3. Operation Ajay 4. Operation Kaveri

  • (a)2, 1, 4, 3
  • (b)1, 2, 3, 4
  • (c)2, 4, 1, 3
  • (d)1, 4, 2, 3

  Answer(a) 2, 1, 4, 3 — Operation Devi Shakti (Afghanistan, August 2021), Operation Ganga (Ukraine, February-March 2022), Operation Kaveri (Sudan, April-May 2023) and Operation Ajay (Israel, October 2023).