SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 24 September 2024, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 23 of 98

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

When was the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) established?

(a)1920
(b)1926
(c)1924
(d)1928

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920 at Bombay, with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president and Dewan Chaman Lall as its first general secretary. It is India's oldest trade union federation.

The immediate push was the need to send genuine representatives of Indian workers to the International Labour Organisation, established the year before — option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
1926 — 1926 is the year of the Trade Unions Act, which gave registered unions legal recognition and immunities. The law came six years after the federation, not with it.
(c)
1924 — 1924 is four years after the founding, by which point AITUC had already been holding annual sessions. Nothing in its establishment falls in this year.
(d)
1928 — 1928 comes after the founding and even after the Trade Unions Act, 1926. It belongs to the later years of labour agitation, not to the birth of the federation.

Concept

AITUC, 1920 is the first all-India labour federation, and the national movement ran straight through it — its early presidents came from politics rather than from the factory floor.

Keep two dates apart. The federation is 1920. The Trade Unions Act is 1926, and that Act is what let a registered union hold property, sue and be sued, and claim protection in certain civil and criminal proceedings.

A later split took the moderates out of AITUC, which is why the labour movement enters the 1930s with more than one national centre.

All four options are plausible-looking years from the same decade, so the discriminator has to be an anchor event rather than a memory of the number itself.

Key facts

The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920 at Bombay.
Lala Lajpat Rai was its first president.
The Trade Unions Act, 1926 gave registered trade unions legal status and statutory protections.
AITUC was formed partly so that India's workers' delegate to the International Labour Organisation would be genuinely representative.

Study next

The Trade Unions Act, 1926 and what registration confers on a unionLabour and left politics through the 1920s, including the split in AITUCLala Lajpat Rai beyond the Punjab, from the Lal-Bal-Pal trio to the Simon Commission protest

Common traps

Answering 1926 because the Trade Unions Act is the more heavily memorised date.
Assuming the federation came after the Non-Cooperation Movement. AITUC was founded in the same year that movement began.
Attaching the founding to a leader from the labour left rather than to Lala Lajpat Rai.

The same period is worked at 24 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q25, which asks what caused the Non-Cooperation Movement to be called off (the Chauri Chaura incident).

It is also worked at 11 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q5, which asks what took place in the United Provinces in February 1922.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: History — all 137 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.