In which city was the G20 Summit 2023 held in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, New Delhi. India held the G20 presidency through 2023, and the eighteenth G20 Heads of State and Government Summit — the leaders' summit that crowns each presidency — met in New Delhi on 9 and 10 September 2023, at the newly built Bharat Mandapam within the redeveloped Pragati Maidan complex. Two outcomes from those two days are the ones examiners return to. First, the African Union was admitted as a permanent member of the G20, the grouping's first enlargement since it was founded, taking its membership to twenty-one and giving a fifty-five-country continental bloc a seat alongside the European Union. Second, the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration was adopted by consensus — an outcome widely regarded as difficult, since the Bali summit of the previous year had shown how far apart the members were on the war in Ukraine, and a G20 declaration requires unanimity or it is not issued at all. The summit also launched the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor and the Global Biofuels Alliance. The other three cities on the paper are not wrong by accident. India's presidency was deliberately spread across the country, with more than two hundred meetings of ministers, working groups and engagement groups held in some sixty cities, and Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru all hosted such meetings. What none of them hosted was the leaders' summit, which is what the stem means by 'the G20 Summit'. India handed the presidency to Brazil at the end of 2023.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A genuine venue of the presidency but not of the summit. Mumbai, as India's financial capital, hosted meetings in the finance track during 2023, and its selection for such meetings is exactly why the option is plausible. The Leaders' Summit itself, the only event a stem calls 'the G20 Summit', was in New Delhi.  (c) Another of the roughly sixty Indian cities that hosted G20 working-group and ministerial meetings during the presidency. Spreading the calendar across the country was a deliberate feature of India's approach, and it is what makes this question harder than it looks — several cities can truthfully say they hosted G20 events in 2023.  (d) Bengaluru hosted G20 meetings in 2023, including in the finance track, as India's technology capital. The distinction the question turns on is between a sherpa or ministerial meeting and the Leaders' Summit, and only one city in each presidency hosts the latter.

Concept: The G20 was created in 1999 as a forum of finance ministers and central bank governors, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, on the reasoning that the G7 was too small a table to manage a globalised financial system. It was raised to leaders' level in 2008 during the global financial crisis, and has met at that level annually since. Its members are nineteen countries plus the European Union and, since New Delhi in 2023, the African Union — together accounting for the great bulk of world output and trade and about two-thirds of the world's population. Like the G7 it has no charter, no treaty and no permanent secretariat; the presidency rotates annually, and the holder runs the agenda through a troika of the previous, current and next presidencies to give continuity. Work is organised in two tracks — a finance track led by finance ministries and central banks, and a sherpa track covering everything else — supported by engagement groups for business, labour, civil society, women, youth and think tanks.

State PCS 2025 Q35 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q35 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer