In which year, the Nalanda University was re-established in Bihar?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, 2014. The revived Nalanda University began its first academic session on 1 September 2014, admitting just 15 students into two schools — the School of Historical Studies and the School of Ecology and Environment Studies — from temporary premises at Rajgir in Nalanda district, with a Bihar State Tourism Development Corporation hotel serving as the first hostel. The Commission said exactly this when it disposed of objections to the item: 'The University started functioning in 2014.' Getting to 2014 rather than to an earlier year needs care, because the revival ran through four distinct milestones and each carries its own date. President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam proposed reviving Nalanda on 28 March 2006, addressing a joint session of the Bihar Vidhan Mandal. In 2007 the Bihar Legislative Assembly passed a bill of its own for the new university, and the second East Asia Summit at Cebu in January that year carried the project into the East Asia Summit process, with the Nalanda Mentor Group under Amartya Sen taking shape in the same phase. Parliament then passed the Nalanda University Bill, 2010 — Rajya Sabha on 21 August 2010, Lok Sabha on 26 August 2010 — and it received Presidential assent on 21 September 2010 and was brought into force on 25 November 2010. Teaching began in 2014, and the permanent 455-acre Rajgir campus was inaugurated only on 19 June 2024. Notice what the option set itself does: it offers neither 2010 nor 2024, which removes the statutory reading and the campus reading, and leaves the year the university actually opened its doors.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No step in the documented revival falls in 2005. The earliest event on record is 28 March 2006, when President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam put the idea of reviving Nalanda to a joint session of the Bihar Vidhan Mandal. This option is there for the candidate who remembers only that the proposal belongs to 'the mid-2000s' and rounds down; the year carries no Act, no summit decision and no admission.  (b) The most defensible wrong answer, and the one to beat. 2007 is a genuine landmark year: the Bihar Legislative Assembly passed its own bill for the new university, the second East Asia Summit at Cebu in January 2007 brought the revival into the East Asia Summit process, and the Nalanda Mentor Group chaired by Amartya Sen belongs to this phase. But a state bill and a summit endorsement produce a plan, not a university — the institution itself was created by a Central Act three years later and admitted its first students seven years later.  (c) The split-the-difference decoy, parked between the proposal years and the Act. No milestone in the university's own account of its founding is dated 2008 — no statute, no admission, no inauguration. The Mentor Group was still deliberating through this period; the enabling legislation came only in 2010 and the first academic session in 2014, so 2008 is the year in which nothing that mattered happened.

Concept: Two different institutions share the name Nalanda, and this question turns on recognising that the second one is a modern creation. The ancient Nalanda Mahavihara was a Buddhist monastic university in Magadha, built under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I around 427 CE, which ran for roughly eight centuries until it was ransacked around 1200 CE — the attack traditionally attributed to Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji. Xuanzang studied there under Shilabhadra in the 630s and 640s, Yijing spent about a decade there a generation later, and Harsha is recorded as endowing it with the revenue of 100 villages. Its excavated remains, roughly 12 hectares of brick monasteries, stupas and temples, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 as the 'Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar'. The modern Nalanda University is not that institution's legal continuation: it is a new central body created by the Nalanda University Act, 2010, declared an Institution of National Importance, placed under the Ministry of External Affairs rather than the education ministry, with the President of India as its Visitor and with backing from the member countries of the East Asia Summit. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was its first Chancellor, followed by Singapore's former foreign minister George Yeo. 'Re-establishment' therefore describes an intent, not a legal continuity — which is precisely why the examinable date is the date on which the new body began to work.

State PCS 2025 Q116 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q116 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer