Jaipur was listed as 'World Heritage Site' by the UNESCO 'World Heritage Committee' in its 43rd Session held in the city

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Correct — A, Baku (Azerbaijan). The 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee met in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, from 30 June to 10 July 2019. It was at that session, on 6 July 2019, that the walled city of Jaipur in Rajasthan was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a cultural property. Jaipur became India's 38th World Heritage Site and only the second Indian city — after the historic city of Ahmedabad, inscribed in 2017 — to be listed as a whole urban ensemble rather than as a single monument. The citation rested on Jaipur's character as a planned eighteenth-century city: founded in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II, laid out on a grid of broad straight streets and chaupars, and exceptional as an exchange between Vedic town-planning ideas and Mughal and contemporary Western design.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Bishkek was in the news in 2019 for a different multilateral meeting altogether — it hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit of heads of state in June 2019, which the Indian Prime Minister attended. It was not the venue of the 43rd World Heritage Committee session.  (c) Istanbul has indeed hosted a World Heritage Committee session — but that was the 40th session, in 2016, three years and three sessions before Jaipur was inscribed. The intervening hosts were Krakow in Poland (41st, 2017) and Manama in Bahrain (42nd, 2018).  (d) Marrakesh was not the venue of the 43rd session. In competitive exams the city is associated with quite different agreements — the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994 that established the World Trade Organization, and the WIPO Marrakesh Treaty of 2013 that eases access to published works for the visually impaired.

Concept: The World Heritage Committee is the executive body of the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. It has 21 States Parties elected by the General Assembly of the Convention; the Convention provides a six-year term, although many members voluntarily limit their service to four years so that other countries get a turn. The Committee meets once a year, and it alone decides which nominated properties enter the World Heritage List, which properties go on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and how the World Heritage Fund is used. Because each session is hosted by a different member state, 'which city hosted which session' is a recurring current-affairs hook.

State PCS 2019 Q150 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q150 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer