Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : In April 2024, India delivered the BrahMos Supersonic Cruise Missile to Philippines.
Reaso

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : In April 2024, India delivered the BrahMos Supersonic Cruise Missile to Philippines.
Reason (R) : The Missile has a range of 490 kilometres.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, (A) is true, but (R) is false. The Assertion is a fact of April 2024: on 19 April 2024 an Indian Air Force heavy-lift transport flew the first battery of the BrahMos shore-based anti-ship missile system to the Philippines, handing it to the Philippine Marine Corps. That delivery closed the contract signed on 28 January 2022 — about US $375 million for three batteries — and it was India's first export of the missile to a foreign navy, which is exactly why it was in every current-affairs compilation of 2024. The Reason fails on a number. The BrahMos supplied for export flies to 290 km, not 490 km. That 290 km figure is not an accident of design: it is the ceiling India observed for a transferable system under the Missile Technology Control Regime, whose Category-I rule discourages export of systems able to carry a 500 kg payload beyond 300 km. Longer-legged variants exist — after India joined the MTCR in June 2016 the extended-range BrahMos was tested for Indian service — but the Philippine package is the 290 km version. So (A) stands and (R) falls, which is option (d). One more habit worth building here: even if the Reason had carried a correct range, a range figure could never *explain* a delivery. Assertion–Reason marking rewards checking each statement on its own truth first, and only then asking whether the second is the cause of the first.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This needs both statements to be true, and the Reason is not. The export BrahMos has a range of 290 km; 490 km is not the figure for the system sold to the Philippines. Note that the rest of this option — that a range figure would not be the correct explanation of a delivery — is sound reasoning; it is the truth of (R) that sinks it.  (b) Inverts the item completely. The Assertion is the well-documented half: the first BrahMos battery reached the Philippine Marine Corps on 19 April 2024, flown in by the Indian Air Force under the January 2022 contract. It is the Reason, not the Assertion, that carries the wrong number.  (c) Fails twice over. The Reason is false on the range (290 km, not 490 km), and even a true range would not be the reason India delivered the missile to Manila — that came from a government-to-government defence sale concluded in January 2022, not from any property of the missile's reach.

Concept: BrahMos is a supersonic cruise missile built by BrahMos Aerospace, the India–Russia joint venture set up in 1998 whose name fuses the Brahmaputra and the Moskva. Being a cruise missile, it is air-breathing and flies inside the atmosphere on a low, guided path: a solid-propellant booster gets it moving, then a liquid-fuelled ramjet sustains it at close to three times the speed of sound. That is a different animal from a ballistic missile, which is rocket-powered only in its boost phase and then coasts on a ballistic arc. BrahMos is also 'universal' — it has been fired from land launchers, warships, submarines and the Su-30MKI — which is why the same name turns up in naval, army and air-force news items.

State PCS 2024 Q82 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q82 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer