NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 117 of 150

Correct — A, 1 only. The theme quoted in statement 1 is the one the festival ran under — a celebration of the spirit of tribal culture, cuisine and commerce — and the official key marks that statement correct. Statement 2 attaches the festival to the wrong ministry. Tribal affairs in the Union government are the responsibility of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and the marketing arm that puts tribal produce and handicrafts in front of urban buyers is TRIFED, the tribal cooperative marketing federation, which is an agency under that ministry. The Ministry of Tourism runs India's tourism promotion and its own set of cultural events; it is not the organiser of a tribal commerce and culture festival.

• (b)2 only — This gets both halves wrong — it discards a theme the key certifies as correct and keeps the ministry attribution that is false.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — The most tempting option, because the theme is right and 'a festival in Delhi with crafts and food' sounds like tourism. The word 'commerce' in the theme is the clue that this is a livelihoods and marketing exercise for tribal producers, not a tourism campaign.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Statement 1 is correct, so rejecting both goes too far. Candidates who have never met the festival sometimes pick this out of caution.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is the Union government's nodal ministry for the welfare of Scheduled Tribes — UPSC has tested this directly, asking which ministry is the nodal agency for the Forest Rights Act of 2006 and marking the answer as tribal affairs. Under it sits TRIFED, whose job is to improve the incomes of tribal producers by taking their handicrafts and forest produce to market. A national festival that brings tribal artisans and their goods to a metropolitan venue is a marketing instrument of that ministry, which is what the word 'commerce' in the theme signals.

Anchor this to its date. The stem's word 'recently' refers to the edition held shortly before the April 2018 exam, and the ministry-attribution error is the whole content of the question. The habit that pays across the whole current-affairs section is to store a scheme or an event together with its ministry, because that pairing is the single most tested attribute and the easiest one to falsify in a statement. On the present-day picture, the responsibilities have not moved — tribal welfare and the marketing of tribal produce remain with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and TRIFED, and tourism has never been the organiser — but the festival's venue, dates and scale have varied from edition to edition, so any specific detail about a later edition should be checked against the ministry's own announcement for that year rather than carried over from 2018.

• The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is the Union government's nodal ministry for Scheduled Tribes.
• TRIFED, the tribal cooperative marketing federation, is an agency under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and markets tribal handicrafts and forest produce.
• The festival's theme, as certified by the official key, was a celebration of the spirit of tribal culture, cuisine and commerce.
• The Ministry of Tourism handles tourism promotion and is not the organiser of this festival.

• Assigning a cultural festival to the Ministry of Tourism or the Ministry of Culture by default.
• Accepting both statements because one of them is plainly right.
• Carrying a 2018 detail about the event forward as though nothing had changed since.

NDA sets two-statement current-affairs items in which one statement is a correct description and the other misattributes the ministry, the venue or the year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  TRIFED, which markets tribal handicrafts and forest produce, functions under which Union Ministry?

  • (a)Ministry of Commerce and Industry
  • (b)Ministry of Tribal Affairs
  • (c)Ministry of Textiles
  • (d)Ministry of Rural Development

  Answer(b) Ministry of Tribal Affairs — TRIFED is an agency under it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The nodal Union Ministry for the welfare of Scheduled Tribes is the Ministry of

  • (a)Social Justice and Empowerment
  • (b)Panchayati Raj
  • (c)Tribal Affairs
  • (d)Home Affairs

  Answer(c) Tribal Affairs — it is also the nodal ministry for the Forest Rights Act of 2006.