What is the current profession of the young U. P. Woman, Arti, who was conferred the Amal Clooney Women’s Empowerment Award by the King Charles III in May 2024 ?

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Correct — C, E rickshaw driver. Arti, a nineteen-year-old from Bahraich district in Uttar Pradesh and the daughter of daily-wage labourers, drives a battery-operated rickshaw for a living. King's Trust International's own published case study records that she works as a self-employed e-rickshaw driver, on the road about six hours a day, and that she won the Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award in May 2024 at the awards ceremony held at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. She came to it through Project Lehar, run by the Aga Khan Foundation with support from Prince's Trust International, which gave her vocational training, entrepreneurship and life-skills courses after she had left school during class ten on marriage and returned home with her daughter when that marriage ended. The vehicle matters to the story: it is part of a Pink Rickshaw scheme, under which women drivers carry women passengers, so a single intervention creates a livelihood for a vulnerable woman and safer transport for others at the same time. Two details for accuracy. Project Lehar operates in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which is why a Bihar paper takes an interest in a story from Bahraich. And on the stem's own wording — the Trust's case study records the award being presented on stage at the ceremony rather than by the King in person, the royal association coming through the Trust the King founded and patronises — a small looseness in the question that does not touch the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is her family's background, not her occupation. Her parents are daily-wage labourers, and a candidate who half-remembers 'daughter of daily-wage workers' will read it into the answer — but the award recognised her for what she went on to do, which was to earn her own living driving.  (b) The default association for 'young woman from rural Uttar Pradesh recognised for empowerment work', because ASHA workers are the most visible women's cadre in rural India and have themselves won international recognition. But Arti was not a health worker; she was trained for self-employment in transport.  (d) Chikankari is Lucknow's celebrated hand embroidery, and a plausible-sounding livelihood for a young woman in Uttar Pradesh, which is exactly why it is here. It has nothing to do with this story — Arti's training was in driving and running her own vehicle, not in craft.

Concept: The e-rickshaw has changed the economics of last-mile transport in small-town north India over the past decade: it is cheap to buy relative to a car, cheap to run on electricity, needs no heavy licence infrastructure, and can be operated by someone with very little capital. That combination has made it one of the few motorised livelihoods genuinely open to women, and several state and civil-society schemes have used it as an instrument of women's economic participation, sometimes branded as pink rickshaw programmes in which women drive women. The Prince's Trust, founded by the then Prince of Wales and now operating internationally as King's Trust International, works with local partners on youth livelihoods and gives annual awards to young people it has supported; the Amal Clooney Women's Empowerment Award is one of them. Its Indian partner here is the Aga Khan Foundation, whose Project Lehar works on adolescent girls' education, skills and transitions to work in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — which places this apparently distant story squarely inside the development landscape a Bihar candidate is expected to know.

State PCS 2024 Q147 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q147 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer