IPPB Marks 9th Foundation Day, Launches DakPay Sound Box

The correct answer is the 9th Foundation Day, observed as IPPB Day 2026. The arithmetic is easy to hold if the launch date is remembered: India Post Payments Bank was launched on 1 September 2018, so the same date in 2026 completes nine years of working. The release itself says the bank has emerged over the past nine years as an important platform connecting citizens with banking, digital payments and government benefits. The other options are near misses of the kind a paper setter likes, and each is wrong only by a year or two, so the safer method is to anchor the launch year and count forward rather than to memorise the ordinal alone. Note also that the bank is set up under the Department of Posts in the Ministry of Communications, with the whole of its equity held by the Government of India.

The correct answer is the DakPay Sound Box. The release describes it as a launch for merchants, designed to simplify and strengthen the acceptance of everyday digital payments at their end. The other three options are real products of the bank, which is what makes this question worth attempting carefully. The Digital Mutual Fund Platform and the Digital Insurance Technology Platform were indeed launched on the same Foundation Day, but both are meant for customers rather than merchants: one opens a digital route to investment, the other connects customers to life, health and general insurance. The Surakshit Savings Account belongs to an earlier set of three account variants rolled out during the year, along with the SHG Savings Account and the Sampoorna Savings Account, and it carries cyber insurance of ₹25,000 against phishing, spoofing and SIM jacking.

The correct answer is 13.25 crore. The release gives this as the pan-India customer base as on 31 March 2026, and adds two shares worth remembering: 77 per cent of these customers are in rural areas and 49 per cent are women. Their deposits with the bank stood at ₹29,104 crore. Every wrong option here is another genuine figure from the same list, which is exactly the trap. The 6.5 crore in option A is the number of direct benefit transfer beneficiaries who received about ₹1.55 lakh crore. The 9.47 crore in option B counts Aadhaar mobile updates done by the bank, alongside 1.35 crore Bal Aadhaar enrolments. The 12.06 crore in option C counts Aadhaar enabled payment system transactions, through which ₹36,140 crore was disbursed. Read the label before the number in such tables.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Communications. India Post Payments Bank has been established under the Department of Posts, which sits in that ministry, and the entire equity of the bank is owned by the Government of India. This is a point aspirants often get wrong, because a bank feels as though it should belong to the Ministry of Finance, and option A is placed there for that reason. The postal link is the whole design of the institution: its reach rests on about 1,65,000 post offices, of which roughly 1,40,000 are in rural areas, and around 3,00,000 postal employees, so the doorstep model works through postal staff rather than branches. Its services are built on India Stack, delivered through a smartphone linked to the core banking system with a biometric device, and offered in 13 languages across 5.57 lakh villages and towns.