In April, 2020 the Bihar Education Department started the following program through DD Bihar

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, the telecast of e-content for class IX-X students. Read the stem's two constraints together: the department is the Education Department, and the month is April 2020, three weeks into a nationwide lockdown that had shut every school in the country. What an education department does in that situation is push school teaching out over whatever medium still reaches children who have no computer and no reliable data connection — and in April 2020 that medium was the state Doordarshan channel. Two of the four options are not education-department work at all, which reduces the question at once to a choice between two class ranges, and the derived answer takes the secondary cohort. One honest caution belongs on this card: the class range in option (c) could not be confirmed against a retrievable Bihar government page or a contemporaneous official notification, so this answer rests on eliminating the alternatives and on the ordinary priority of a board-going cohort in a year when Classes X and XII examinations were the immediate crisis, rather than on a document that can be quoted back. Treat the elimination as solid and the choice between (c) and (d) as the part of this question that carries real risk. The national frame around it is firmer: the Centre declared DIKSHA — the school-education platform the Ministry of Education and NCERT had launched on 5 September 2017 — as India's 'One Nation, One Digital Platform' in May 2020 under the PM e-Vidya programme, precisely because state-level telecast and digital delivery had become the only channel left.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A farmers' extension broadcast — the kind of programme an agriculture department or a Krishi Vigyan Kendra runs to carry advice on sowing, seed and crop protection to cultivators. Whatever its merits, it is not a programme of the Education Department, and the stem names the department, so this option fails on the face of the question.  (b) Cultural preservation belongs to an art and culture department or an academy, not to the school-education machinery, and nothing about April 2020 makes a heritage telecast the urgent business of the moment. The option is built to attract a candidate who associates Doordarshan with cultural programming rather than with classroom teaching.  (d) The genuinely close alternative, and the only one that cannot be dismissed on the department's remit — it differs from the correct option in nothing but the class range. The reason to prefer Classes IX and X is that the secondary and board-going cohort was the segment under the tightest examination pressure in 2020, and primary-grade telecast is the harder format to make work without an adult present. That is a judgement about priorities, not a sourced fact, and a student should know which part of this answer is which.

Concept: The COVID-19 lockdown closed schools across India from March 2020, and the response split into three layers. At the top, the Union government's PM e-Vidya programme of May 2020 designated DIKSHA — launched by NCERT and the Ministry of Education on 5 September 2017 — as the country's single digital platform for school education, and added television and radio channels so that children without internet were not excluded. At the state level, education departments used their regional Doordarshan channels and All India Radio stations to broadcast recorded lessons on a fixed timetable, because a television set was the device most likely to be present in a rural household. At the school level, teachers used whatever messaging tools reached parents. Bihar's use of DD Bihar from April 2020 sits in that middle layer. The design problem it addresses is the one every education question about this period turns on: reach versus interaction. Broadcast reaches nearly everybody but cannot answer a question, while an online class can answer questions but excludes anyone without a device.

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