Which of the following statements are true about Akashteer?

Question

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Correct — D, More than one of the above. Every one of the three statements is true, so no single-statement option can stand and the combined code is forced. Akashteer is India's fully indigenous, automated Air Defence Control and Reporting system, designed and built by Bharat Electronics Limited for the Indian Army's Corps of Army Air Defence; the Ministry of Defence signed the ₹1,982-crore 'Project Akashteer' contract with BEL on 29 March 2023 — one of two BEL contracts worth about ₹2,400 crore signed that day — and the first batch of control centres was flagged off from BEL's Ghaziabad unit in April 2024. Now take the statements one at a time, which is the only safe way to work this format. Statement (a): the Government's own May-2025 feature on the system describes Akashteer in exactly those words, as the core of the Indian Army's Air Defence system — it is the layer that fuses the Tactical Control Radar REPORTER, the 3D Tactical Control Radars, the Low-Level Lightweight Radar and the Akash Weapon System's own radar into a single track picture and then controls the guns and missiles that actually shoot. Statement (b): the same document records that its seamless integration with India's larger C4ISR ecosystem lets the Army, Navy and Air Force operate with unmatched synergy; in practice Akashteer links laterally to the Air Force's IACCS and the Navy's TRIGUN, so all three services read one sky rather than three. Statement (c): it further states that the system marks a clear shift in India's strategic principle, from passive defence to proactive retaliation — because automated detect-track-engage replaces the older sequence in which a low-level unit reported a contact upward and waited for manual clearance before firing. Three statements, three verified as true, therefore (d). The Commission disposed of every objection filed against this question in a single line — that all the options are correct — which is BPSC's own way of saying the same thing: (a), (b) and (c) are each accurate, and precisely because they are, none of them alone can be the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) True in itself, and that is exactly what makes it the trap. Akashteer really does sit at the centre of Army Air Defence — AAD here expands to Army Air Defence, the arm that operates the ground-based guns, shoulder-fired missiles and Akash batteries, and Akashteer is the control-and-reporting layer above all of them. But truth is not sufficiency in this format. Because (b) and (c) are equally true, marking (a) alone reports less than the paper asked for, and the code 'More than one of the above' is what fits.  (b) Also true, and also incomplete. C4ISR expands to Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and Akashteer plugs the Army's air-defence picture into that wider architecture while linking to the Air Force's IACCS and the Navy's TRIGUN. A shared picture is what makes a tri-service engagement possible and is the standard answer to the friendly-fire problem, where one service's aircraft appears as an unidentified contact on another's screen. Correct — but one of three correct lines, not the answer.  (c) True as well. Under the older manual arrangement a track had to be reported up the chain, identified and cleared before a battery could engage, which in effect confined an air-defence unit to reacting after the fact. Akashteer's automated detection, identification and engagement pushes that decision down to the lowest unit working off a live common picture — the doctrinal change the statement names, and the capability demonstrated against the drone and missile barrage of the night of 9–10 May 2025 during Operation Sindoor. Being true is still not the same as being the only true statement.

Concept: An air-defence 'control and reporting' system is not a weapon and shoots nothing down. It is the command-and-control brain sitting between sensors and shooters: it takes raw returns from many radars, correlates them into one track picture, decides which track is hostile and which is a friendly aircraft, and then assigns the right weapon to the right target. That middle layer is where air defence is actually won or lost. A country can own excellent radars and excellent missiles and still fail if the two are joined only by voice reports over a radio net — in that arrangement each battery sees a single slice of sky, the same intruder gets tracked as three different contacts by three different units, and clearance to fire eats minutes that a low-flying drone will not give you. Akashteer replaces that with an automated, vehicle-mounted network, and being vehicle-mounted matters as much as the software: the control centres move with the formation instead of sitting in a fixed hardened bunker, which is what lets air-defence cover advance with an army rather than wait behind it. Two larger ideas travel with this question. C4ISR is the umbrella term for that whole military nervous system, and 'network-centric warfare' is the doctrine holding that an army's advantage comes from how well its sensors, decision-makers and shooters are connected rather than from the quality of any one platform. Akashteer is the Army's expression of both; its siblings are IACCS in the Air Force and TRIGUN in the Navy.

State PCS 2025 Q31 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q31 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer