RDI Fund of ₹1 Lakh Crore Needs Wider Awareness: Minister

The correct answer is ₹1 lakh crore. The release refers throughout to the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund, and it is the size of that corpus that makes the Minister's appeal for outreach necessary: thousands of applications are arriving, some from applicants who do not appear to understand what the fund is for. He cautioned against treating it as merely another source of finance or as a conventional loan facility, and said its purpose is to support technology development and research in a manner that contributes to scientific progress and to the growth of the national economy. The wrong options are round figures of the kind that attach to individual schemes, but the number to remember for this fund is one lakh crore rupees. Note also that the fund extends support at a later stage, described as TRL4 level.

The correct answer is the Technology Development Board, usually shortened to TDB, whose 30th Foundation Day was the occasion for the address. The board was created so that technologies would not remain confined to laboratories but would be translated into products, solutions and enterprises that bring ease of living, provide livelihoods and add to the economy of the country. The Minister praised its record in carrying work from laboratory to market, and named Skyroot and BotLab as examples of firms it has supported beyond narrowly defined domains. He also said TDB was the first to roll out proposals under the RDI Fund, and that it should now support technology development in the early phase as well as at the later stage. The other options are genuine institutions in the science ecosystem but none is named in this release as the host of the event.

The correct answer is more than half. The Minister said start-ups are not confined to Bengaluru or Hyderabad and that more than 50 per cent of them come from smaller towns, a figure he used while asking for prevailing myths about entrepreneurship to be dispelled. He added a second myth to the list, that entrepreneurship belongs to the young, and pointed to the participation of women in the ecosystem as well. The other options understate the share and would leave a candidate with the opposite impression of where Indian enterprise is now being built. The same passage of the address carries a related point worth remembering: openness to private participation has been followed in sectors including space, biotechnology and the nuclear sector, and the pooling of resources across institutions and stakeholders is treated as important for strengthening the ecosystem.

The correct answer is TRL4. Speaking about what lies ahead, the Minister noted that the RDI Fund is offering support at a later stage, at the TRL4 level, and that the Technology Development Board was the first to roll out its proposals under the fund. He argued that the board should support technology development both in the early phase and at this later stage, so that promising work is not left without backing at either end. The other options are levels on the same technology readiness scale and are placed there to test whether the specific level was read carefully rather than guessed. Two more sentences from the address are worth carrying with this fact: TDB has set up a model of public-private transition and technology self-reliance, and the Minister linked strengthening India's technological capability to the country's standing in the Global South.