What is the primary objective of Bihar's Mission Daksh?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, "To offer personalised mentoring for lagging students to reach grade-level competencies." The Commission settled this one itself. When BPSC disposed of the candidate objections and published its final revised key on 31 October 2025, the Remarks column against this question stated that Mission Daksh started in 2023 to help nearly 25 lakh academically weak students of classes 3 to 8 in government schools through remedial classes. Every clause of that sentence maps onto option (c) and onto nothing else. The beneficiary is the academically weak child, not the unenrolled one. The stage is classes 3 to 8, that is elementary, not senior-secondary. The instrument is the remedial class — extra, targeted teaching for children who have fallen behind — not a training course, not a scholarship, not an infrastructure grant. And the entire point of a remedial class is what option (c) calls reaching "grade-level competencies": closing the distance between the class a child is sitting in and the competencies that class assumes the child already has. The scale is the clinching detail. Twenty-five lakh children of classes 3 to 8 are by definition already on a school roll — no administration can identify a child as academically weak in class 6 unless that child is attending class 6 and being assessed there. A mission built around that target group therefore cannot be an enrolment drive; it is a learning-recovery drive, which is exactly how option (c) describes it. One honest limit on this card, because it changes how you should revise the topic: Mission Daksh does not appear anywhere in the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, the 638-page volume tabled on 28 February 2025, whose school-education chapter discusses NIPUN teaching-learning-material kits and similar programmes instead. The Commission's own published reasoning is therefore the authoritative statement of the scheme's purpose available for this question, and this card asserts nothing beyond it. An expanded form of the name, a precise launch date, a fixed number of students per mentoring teacher and a subject list all circulate in press and coaching write-ups; none of them is confirmed by a government document, and none of them is repeated here.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The right shape of answer for the 1990s, which is exactly why it tempts. Bihar's enrolment machinery is a separate and older apparatus: Article 21-A, inserted by the Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002 and brought into force on 1 April 2010 alongside the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, already makes schooling for ages 6 to 14 an enforceable Fundamental Right, and Samagra Shiksha finances the access side of it. A scheme whose named target group is 25 lakh academically weak children of classes 3 to 8 is aimed at children who are already enrolled and already being taught.  (b) Wrong on both the beneficiary and the stage. The Commission's remark names students of classes 3 to 8; this option names teachers at senior-secondary level — a different person at a different rung of the school system. Teacher capability in India also runs through an entirely separate statutory channel: under Section 23 of the RTE Act the National Council for Teacher Education prescribes the minimum qualification for appointment as a teacher, and its 2010 notification requires a Teacher Eligibility Test for teaching the primary classes. 'Vocational training' is not a recognised description of any part of that.  (d) BPSC's standard fourth option, and it is a real trap because it punishes nothing except loose reading. It can be marked only if at least two of (a), (b) and (c) are independently true. Here (a) fails the beneficiary test — the scheme's target children are already in school — and (b) fails on both beneficiary and stage. Exactly one of the three statements survives, so the compound option collapses. Treat every 'more than one of the above' as a hidden multiple-select and score each statement separately before looking at the codes.

Concept: Indian school education is usually taught as three problems tackled in sequence. The first is access — getting every child onto a roll — which Article 21-A and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 turned into a legal entitlement for ages 6 to 14 with effect from 1 April 2010, and which Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and its successor Samagra Shiksha financed. The second is retention: keeping the child there to the end of the elementary stage. The third, and the one that dominates policy today, is learning — a child can be enrolled, present and promoted and still be reading and calculating several grades below the class printed on the register. The standard remedy is remedial or catch-up teaching, often described as teaching at the right level: group or mentor children by the competency they actually possess rather than by the class they sit in, run short intensive cycles on the missing foundational skills, and return them to the regular class once the gap closes. The National Education Policy 2020 made foundational literacy and numeracy the school system's highest and most urgent priority, and NIPUN Bharat — the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy — was launched on 5 July 2021 under Samagra Shiksha to deliver foundational literacy and numeracy to every child by the end of Grade 3, with 2026-27 as the target year. Mission Daksh sits one rung above that mission: classes 3 to 8, the children who missed foundational competency early and have carried the deficit upward with them.

State PCS 2025 Q51 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q51 — Economy PYQ with Answer