MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 29 of 100

Correct — option (4), All of the above. Three statements are printed here, labelled (a) to (c), and each is true of BhoomiRashi, so the option that accepts all three is the answer. BhoomiRashi is a web-based portal of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, which is statement (b), and it became operational on the first of April 2018, which is statement (a). Its purpose, which is statement (c), is to take the entire process of acquiring land for national highway projects out of paper files and into a single online system. Understanding why such a portal was needed makes all three easy to remember. Land for a national highway is acquired under the National Highways Act of 1956 rather than under the general land acquisition law, and the procedure it lays down is a sequence of notifications and orders that must be published in the Gazette and served on the persons affected. Before the portal, each of those steps travelled as a physical file between the project authority, the competent authority appointed for the acquisition, the state administration and the ministry, and a proposal could sit for weeks at any desk in that chain; the ministry has said that processing which previously took weeks or months now takes less than a fortnight in most cases and a few days in some. Two features of the system explain that change. The first is that the whole proposal is prepared, checked and moved online, so a defect can be identified and returned at once instead of after a file has completed a journey, and the ministry has reported that hundreds of acquisition proposals were processed through the portal within a few months of its becoming operational. The second is that the portal was integrated with the Public Financial Management System, so that compensation can be deposited in the account of the affected or interested person on a real-time basis rather than through a separate and slower payment chain. That integration is what makes the word fully in statement (c) defensible, because a system that digitised the paperwork but left the money to travel by another route would have automated only half of the process. Note the wording of the stem, which asks which statement or statements is or are applicable — a formula that leaves the number of correct statements open and gives no hint either way. With all three applicable, option (4) is the answer.

• (1)Only (a) and (b) — This option accepts (a) and (b) — the launch date and the ministry — but rejects (c), the description of what the portal was introduced to do. That is the least defensible of the three exclusions, because the purpose of BhoomiRashi is the one thing about it that can be inferred from its existence: a web-based utility built for land acquisition by the highways ministry exists in order to digitise and automate land acquisition. A candidate who hesitates here is usually hesitating over the word fully, on the reasonable ground that the claim to have digitised an entire process is a strong one. In this case it is justified, since the portal handles the proposal from preparation to approval and is linked to the Public Financial Management System so that the compensation payment is made through the same system rather than outside it.
• (2)Only (b) and (c) — This option accepts (b) and (c) — the ministry and the purpose — and rejects only the launch date of the first of April 2018. It is the most tempting of the three wrong options, because dates are the detail a candidate is least likely to be sure of and because there is a general instinct that a specific date in a statement list is where the examiner will have planted an error. That instinct is a poor guide, and it costs marks in exactly this format: a date one cannot personally confirm is not thereby a false date. The portal did become operational on the first of April 2018, and the ministry's own reporting of the system's early performance is dated from that day. If a date must be judged without certain recall, the question to ask is whether it is consistent with everything else on the page, and here it is.
• (3)Only (a) and (c) — This option accepts (a) and (c) — the date and the purpose — while rejecting (b), the statement that the portal was launched by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. The rejection has no basis. BhoomiRashi is the highways ministry's own system, built for the acquisition of land for national highway projects, and the acquisition of that land is a function of that ministry and of the National Highways Authority of India working under it. A candidate may go wrong here by associating land records and land acquisition with a different department — the Ministry of Rural Development administers the general land acquisition law, and land records are a state subject maintained by revenue departments — and concluding that a highways ministry would not run a land portal. The point to hold is that national highway land is acquired under the National Highways Act of 1956 by the highways ministry's own machinery, which is precisely why that ministry built the portal.

Land acquisition is the single most common cause of delay in Indian road projects, and BhoomiRashi is an attempt to attack the administrative half of that problem. The legal setting matters. Land for a national highway is not acquired under the general land acquisition statute but under the National Highways Act of 1956, which lays down its own sequence: a notification of intention to acquire, an opportunity for objections, a declaration of acquisition, the determination of compensation by a competent authority appointed for the purpose, and the vesting of the land in the Union. Each of those steps produces a document that must be published in the Gazette and communicated to the people whose land is being taken, and each was traditionally carried on a physical file passing between the National Highways Authority or other project authority, the competent authority, the district and state administration, and the ministry in Delhi. The delays were therefore not only legal but clerical, and they compounded: a proposal returned for a correction after weeks in transit began its journey again. BhoomiRashi replaces that file with an online workflow in which the proposal is created, examined, corrected and approved within one system, and links it to the Public Financial Management System so that compensation reaches the affected person's bank account directly and on a real-time basis. The wider lesson is about what electronic governance actually achieves when it works. The portal changes no rule of law, alters no entitlement and reduces no procedural safeguard; what it removes is the physical movement of paper and the discretion that hides in it, and the gain is speed and traceability. That is the pattern of most successful government portals, and it is the reason a question about one of them is really a question about the process it digitises.

MPSC's current affairs and governance questions favour named government portals and platforms, and they are set in a very predictable way: the name of the platform, the ministry that owns it, the year it was launched and the function it performs. This item is a compact example, since its three statements are precisely those four attributes minus the name, which is given in the stem. The preparation that pays is a running list of such platforms with four columns — name, ministry, year, function — because the same four facts answer every question that can be built from any of them, and because the commonest error is attaching a platform to the wrong ministry. Two features of this particular question are worth noticing as reading practice. First, only three statements are printed, labelled (a) to (c); this paper prints fewer than four statements on seventeen questions, so the labels have to be read rather than assumed. Second, the stem's formula — which statement or statements is or are applicable — is deliberately neutral about how many statements are correct, and a candidate should not read it as a hint that more than one or fewer than all are true. Where the stem gives no signal, every statement must be judged on its own, and a collective option accepted or rejected only after that judgement has been made.

• BhoomiRashi is a web-based portal of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways that became operational on the first of April 2018, built to digitise and automate the process of acquiring land for national highway projects.
• Land for national highways is acquired under the National Highways Act of 1956, which prescribes its own sequence of notifications, objections, declaration, determination of compensation by a competent authority and vesting, rather than under the general land acquisition law.
• The portal is integrated with the Public Financial Management System so that compensation can be deposited in the account of the affected or interested person on a real-time basis, which is what allows the process to be described as fully automated rather than merely digitised.
• The ministry has reported that processing which previously took weeks or months was reduced to under a fortnight in most cases, and that hundreds of acquisition proposals were handled through the portal within the first few months of its operation.
• The portal changes no rule of law and no entitlement of the landowner; what it removes is the physical movement of files between the project authority, the competent authority, the state administration and the ministry.

• Rejecting a statement because it carries a specific date that cannot be recalled with certainty, when an unverifiable date is not thereby a false one and this is the commonest way such a list question is lost
• Attaching a land-related portal to the Ministry of Rural Development or to a state revenue department, when national highway land is acquired by the highways ministry under its own statute
• Reasoning about a fourth statement in a question that prints only three, which this paper does on eighteen of its questions
• Treating the stem's neutral formula about which statement or statements are applicable as a hint that fewer than all of them are correct

Government portals, missions and platforms are a staple of the current affairs component of MPSC papers, and they are examined in four regular ways: name the ministry that owns it, name the year it was launched, describe what it does, and identify the statute or scheme it operates under. The list-of-statements format used here bundles three of those into a single question, which is why it is the Commission's preferred shape for the topic. The material dates quickly, so a candidate should prepare portals launched in the two or three years before the examination with particular care and treat older ones as settled general knowledge. The specific pairing of a portal with the correct ministry is the single most productive thing to memorise, because a wrong ministry is the easiest false statement for an examiner to construct and the hardest to detect by reasoning alone.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Land required for a national highway project in India is acquired under which statute, and by which ministry's machinery ?

  • (a)The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act of 2013, by the Ministry of Rural Development
  • (b)The National Highways Act of 1956, by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways
  • (c)The state revenue codes, by the district collector acting for the state government alone
  • (d)The Land Acquisition Act of 1894, which remains in force for all infrastructure projects

  Answer(b) The National Highways Act of 1956, by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. The Act provides its own sequence of notification, objection, declaration, determination of compensation by a competent authority and vesting, which is why the highways ministry rather than the rural development ministry built a portal to run the process. The 1894 Act was repealed and replaced by the 2013 legislation, which governs the general law of acquisition rather than acquisitions carried out under special statutes such as the highways Act.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Why is the integration of the BhoomiRashi portal with the Public Financial Management System significant for the land acquisition process ?

  • (a)It allows the Gazette notification to be issued without the approval of the competent authority
  • (b)It permits compensation to be deposited in the affected person's account on a real-time basis, so the payment stage is inside the same system as the paperwork
  • (c)It transfers the power to fix compensation from the competent authority to the Ministry of Finance
  • (d)It exempts national highway projects from the requirement to hear objections from landowners

  Answer(b) It permits compensation to be deposited in the affected person's account on a real-time basis, so the payment stage is inside the same system as the paperwork. A portal that digitised only the file movement would have left the slowest and most contentious step, the actual payment, running outside it. None of the other options is correct, because the portal changes no rule of law: the statutory requirements of notification, hearing objections and determination of compensation by the competent authority all continue exactly as before.