Which of the following was NOT the outcome of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Atal Innovation Mission. Two independent tests both point at the same option. The first is chronology: the Atal Innovation Mission is NITI Aayog's flagship innovation and entrepreneurship programme and dates from 2016, four years before the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy document of December 2020. A programme that already existed cannot be an outcome of a later policy, whatever its subject matter. The second is parentage: AIM sits inside NITI Aayog, with its own verticals — Atal Tinkering Labs in schools, Atal Incubation Centres, Atal Community Innovation Centres, the Atal New India Challenge and ARISE — while the STI Policy is a document of the Department of Science and Technology under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Different institution, different instrument. The Commission's own disposal of objections gives exactly this reason: the Atal Innovation Mission of 2016 was brought by NITI Aayog, while the other two were brought by the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020. And the other two really do sit in the policy's own text, with section numbers you can point to: 'One Nation, One Subscription' is section 1.5, in Chapter 1 on Open Science, and 'Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks (RIEF)' is section 4.2.1 in Chapter 4 on Research, with a further reference at 10.2.5. One honest caveat that changes nothing about the key but should change how you revise: the document in circulation is STIP Doc 1.4 of December 2020, a draft policy, and we could not establish that it was ever formally notified in that form. 'Outcome' in this question therefore means 'a proposal that appears in the policy document' — which is how BPSC has used it, and on that reading the answer is unambiguous.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This IS a proposal of the STI Policy 2020, so it cannot be the item that was NOT an outcome. Section 1.5, in the Open Science chapter, says the Government will negotiate with journal publishers for a 'one nation, one subscription' arrangement under which a single centrally-negotiated payment gives every individual in India access to journal articles, replacing thousands of separate institutional subscriptions. It is also the proposal that travelled furthest: by the September-2025 exam ONOS was live, run through the INFLIBNET Centre at Gandhinagar.  (b) RIEF comes straight out of the same document, so it is not the odd one out either. Section 4.2.1, under the chapter on Research, proposes Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks to raise the quality of Indian research by widening the talent pool and benchmarking institutions internationally, and the policy returns to it at 10.2.5. Unlike ONOS it has stayed largely inside the document, which is precisely why candidates who go by news memory rather than by the text pick it as the 'unfamiliar' one and get the question wrong.  (d) This requires at least two of the three named items to fall outside the STI Policy 2020. Only the Atal Innovation Mission does. Both One Nation, One Subscription and RIEF are numbered sections of the policy, so neither can join the Atal Innovation Mission in the 'NOT an outcome' bucket. The reason this option tempts candidates is that RIEF is genuinely obscure — but obscure is not the same as absent, and the section number settles it.

Concept: India has restated its science policy roughly once a decade, and each statement carries the preoccupation of its era: the Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958 on building a scientific temper and a national research base, the Technology Policy Statement of 1983 on technological self-reliance, the Science and Technology Policy of 2003 on investment and international linkage, and the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of 2013 which first put innovation in the title. The Science, Technology and Innovation Policy of December 2020 — issued as Doc 1.4 by the Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology — is the successor to the 2013 policy. It is organised into chapters, each carrying numbered proposals, and the chapters that matter here are Chapter 1 on Open Science, which houses One Nation, One Subscription at 1.5, and Chapter 4 on Research, which houses the Research and Innovation Excellence Frameworks at 4.2.1. The thing to notice about a question of this shape is that it is not really about science at all: it asks whether you can separate a policy document's own proposals from pre-existing programmes that operate in the same space and use the same vocabulary. That distinction — document versus programme, proposal versus institution — is a recurring examinable idea across every ministry.

State PCS 2025 Q48 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q48 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer