Who among the following inaugurated IBA Women's World Boxing Championship, 2023 in New Delhi ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), Shri Anurag Singh Thakur. The 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing Championships, the thirteenth edition of the event, were held in New Delhi from 15 to 26 March 2023 at the K. D. Jadhav Indoor Hall in the Indira Gandhi Sports Complex, and were inaugurated on 15 March by Shri Anurag Singh Thakur, the Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports. The reasoning that gets a candidate there without recalling the ceremony is worth spelling out, because it applies to a whole family of questions: the inauguration of a sporting championship is a function of the sports ministry, so the person who performs it is normally the Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports, unless the event is of such scale that the Prime Minister or the President is invited. A world championship in a single discipline sits at the level where the sports minister presides. The opening ceremony was attended by the Union Minister Shri Sarbananda Sonowal, by the President of the International Boxing Association Umar Kremlev, by the President of the Boxing Federation of India Ajay Singh, and by the Russian sports minister Oleg Matytsin, with the six-time world champion M. C. Mary Kom as the tournament's brand ambassador. Three hundred and twenty-four boxers from sixty-five countries competed in twelve weight categories, and India topped the medal tally for the first time since 2006, with gold medals for Nitu Ghanghas in the minimumweight class, Nikhat Zareen in the light flyweight, Lovlina Borgohain in the middleweight and Saweety Boora in the light heavyweight. Option (1) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Prime Minister inaugurates sporting events of the highest order — an Olympic or Commonwealth Games hosted in India, a cricket World Cup, or the launch of a national programme such as Khelo India — but a single-discipline world championship is ordinarily opened by the sports minister. This option is offered because a candidate who cannot recall the ceremony will reason that a prestigious international event in the national capital must have drawn the Prime Minister, and because his name is the first that comes to mind for any inauguration. The useful correction is to think in terms of the ministry whose subject the event is, and then of the level of the event within that subject. Applied to sport, that rule assigns world championships and national games to the sports minister and reserves the Prime Minister for the events that are national occasions in their own right.  (c) Shri Amit Shah holds the Home portfolio, which has no connection with the conduct of a boxing championship. His name appears in the option set for the same reason as the Prime Minister's — as a senior and instantly recognisable figure who might plausibly be invited to a large public function — rather than because of any association with sport. This is the standard construction of a 'who inaugurated' question: one correct name and two or three prominent names from outside the relevant ministry. The discipline that defeats it is to identify the subject of the event first and the ministry that owns that subject second, and only then to ask who held the portfolio at the time. A candidate who works in that order will rarely be misled by the seniority of a name, which is what these options trade on.  (d) This is the only option printed with the honorific 'Smt.', and that is precisely what makes it work as a distractor in a question about a women's championship: a candidate who is guessing will feel that a women's world event ought to have been opened by a woman. No person of this name is associated with the inauguration of the 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing Championships, and no account of the opening ceremony names her; the identity behind the name could not be established from any source consulted, so nothing further is asserted about her here. What the option teaches is that the form of an option can be a lure. A name that fits the theme of the event, or an honorific that matches its subject, carries no evidential weight at all, and treating such a fit as a reason to choose is how guesses are engineered by an examiner.

Concept: The world championships of amateur boxing are run by the International Boxing Association, which the paper's option set and the event's own branding abbreviate to IBA. The women's world championships began in 2001 and have been held at intervals since, the 2023 edition in New Delhi being the thirteenth; India had hosted the event before, at New Delhi in 2006 and at Guwahati earlier, and Indian boxers have a long record in it, M. C. Mary Kom's six world titles being the most celebrated. The 2023 championships mattered domestically for two reasons beyond the medals. They came in the year before an Olympic Games, so they served as a marker of form for the boxers building towards Paris; and they were held while the International Boxing Association's own standing was under challenge from the International Olympic Committee over governance and finance, a dispute that eventually removed the association from the running of Olympic boxing. For an examination the relevant facts are the simpler ones: the edition, the host city, the dates, the minister who opened it, the scale of participation and the Indian medallists, of whom there were four gold winners in 2023 and whose names have recurred in current affairs papers since.

State PCS 2023 Q94 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q94 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer