UPPSC 2022 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 101 of 150

Correct — B, A-3, B-4, C-2, D-1. On the commission's key, Talar is the officer of night guards, Pattakola the village tax collector, Sahsadhipati the officer for cases of dacoity, and Baladhip the guard of octroi. This card has to be honest about what stands behind that. These four designations, in the spellings the paper uses, could not be traced to any standard reference work — not to a published administrative history, not to an epigraphic glossary — so the pairings are given here as the key marks them and not as verified scholarship. One of them is worth flagging even so: bala in Sanskrit means force or army, and titles built on it are ordinarily read as military commands, which sits awkwardly with 'guard of octroi'. Treat this item as a recall question keyed to a particular textbook rather than as a piece of settled history, learn the mapping as the commission marked it, and put your study time into the officer titles that are properly documented — the Vedic and Sultanate designations listed below, which UPPSC asks far more often and which can actually be checked.

• (a)A-2, B-1, C-4, D-3 — It disagrees with the key on all four pairs: it makes Talar the officer for dacoity cases and Sahsadhipati the village tax collector, exactly swapping the two the key separates. It also moves Talar away from the watch-and-ward duty that this family of titles is usually glossed with.
• (c)A-1, B-2, C-3, D-4 — The plain 1-2-3-4 sequence. Matching questions almost never resolve into the straight serial order, and this one does not either — the key marks 3-4-2-1. It is the option to discard first in any match-the-list item, not the one to fall back on.
• (d)A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2 — It sends Talar to village tax collection and Pattakola to the night watch, reversing the two duties the key assigns them, and it moves Sahsadhipati to octroi. None of its four pairings agrees with the key.

UPPSC regularly sets one item that simply asks you to match an administrative designation from an early Indian or medieval Indian office to the duty attached to it. The titles come from inscriptions, land-grant charters and court manuals, and the exam usually draws them from a standard Hindi-medium history textbook. That matters practically: the transliteration used in the paper is often not the form found in academic writing, so the safest preparation is the small set of titles that appear repeatedly across papers, learnt with their functions, rather than an attempt to cover every designation that ever existed.

This particular item is the weakest-sourced question in the paper. Four titles, four duties, and no reference work that confirms any one of the pairings in these spellings. There is therefore no reasoning route to it — no etymology to lean on, no elimination that works — and a candidate who did not have the source textbook could only guess. When you meet an item like this in a real paper, the correct exam behaviour is to spend no time on it and move on; when you meet it in revision, the correct behaviour is to note the key's mapping and then move your attention to the officer titles that are well documented and repeatedly examined.

• The official key marks (b): Talar – officer of night guards; Pattakola – village tax collector; Sahsadhipati – officer of cases of dacoity; Baladhip – guard of octroi
• No standard reference work could be found confirming these four pairings in the spellings the paper uses; the card reports the key, not verified scholarship
• In Sanskrit, bala means force or army — which is why 'Baladhip = guard of octroi' is the pairing most open to challenge
• Officer-title questions UPPSC has asked with properly documented answers: 'Bhagadugha' (revenue collector in Vedic administration, 2023) and 'Khareetadar' (despatcher of royal decrees, 2023)
• Octroi was a tax levied on goods entering a town or municipal area — the duty the key attaches to Baladhip

• Guessing a duty from the sound of a title — the transliterations in this paper are non-standard and several of them do not carry their usual sense
• Choosing the neat 1-2-3-4 sequence because nothing else can be worked out; matching items rarely resolve into serial order
• Assuming every match-the-list item is solvable — a few, like this one, are pure recall from one textbook and are best skipped in the hall

UPPSC asks administrative designations in two shapes — a four-by-four match of officer to duty, and a single 'who was X?' item — and it draws on Vedic, Sultanate and Mughal offices far more often than on obscure regional titles. UPSC prefers statement sets that test whether a specific office existed under a specific dynasty, such as whether Mir Bakhshi belongs to the Khaljis or the Mughals.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the revenue administration of the Delhi Sultanate, the officer in charge of revenue collection was known as

  • (a)Amil
  • (b)Mir Bakhshi
  • (c)Waqia-navis
  • (d)Muhtasib

  Answer(a) Amil — the amil (or amalguzar) was the local revenue collector under the Delhi Sultanate; Mir Bakhshi was a later Mughal military-pay office, the Waqia-navis a news and record writer, and the Muhtasib a censor of public morals and market conduct.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In medieval Indian administration, the officer who maintained the record of important events and royal farmans was known as

  • (a)Mustaufi
  • (b)Mushrif
  • (c)Waqia-navis
  • (d)Diwan-i-Tan

  Answer(c) Waqia-navis — the waqia-navis kept the register of notable events and imperial orders; the Mustaufi audited income and expenditure, the Mushrif looked after the office establishment, and the Diwan-i-Tan dealt with jagirs and salaries.