Narendra Bhooshan Assumes Charge as MoEFCC Secretary

The correct answer is Narendra Bhooshan. He has taken over as Secretary of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the ministry that handles forests, wildlife, pollution control and climate policy for the country. He is an Indian Administrative Service officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre and reached this post after serving as Secretary of the Department of Land Resources in the Ministry of Rural Development. Option A, Keshav Chandra, is the Secretary in the Ministry of Mines and not in the environment ministry. Option C, Ashok K. K. Meena, heads the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the Ministry of Jal Shakti. Option D, Kamal Kishore Soan, is Additional Secretary and Mission Director of the National Jal Jeevan Mission, again a water sector post rather than an environment one. So only option B names the new environment Secretary correctly.

The correct answer is Uttar Pradesh. Narendra Bhooshan is an Indian Administrative Service officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, and he belongs to the batch of the year 1992. His long list of state assignments confirms the cadre: he served as Additional Chief Secretary for Energy, Additional Energy Sources and Technical Education, as Principal Secretary in departments such as Public Works, Industries Development, Information Technology and Electronics, Science and Technology and Panchayati Raj, and as Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Noida Authority. He was also District Magistrate of Mathura and of Firozabad, both districts of Uttar Pradesh. Options A, B and D name Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, and none of these states figures among his cadre postings, so each of them is wrong. Only option C matches the cadre of the officer.

The correct answer is the Department of Land Resources. His appointment as Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change followed his tenure as Secretary of the Department of Land Resources, which works under the Ministry of Rural Development. Option B, the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, sits in the Ministry of Jal Shakti and is not a post he held. Option C, the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, is the department that drives governance reform campaigns across ministries, and it has no link to his career record. Option D, the Department of Science and Technology, is a Union department, but his science and technology charge was in the Uttar Pradesh government as Principal Secretary, not at the Centre. Hence option A alone is correct.

The correct answer is Duke University, which is in the United States. Narendra Bhooshan is a graduate in Electronics, and he went on to earn a Master’s degree in International Development Policy from Duke University. His professional training has also included programmes on public finance, on infrastructure and on preparedness for a changing climate, subjects that fit the work of the environment ministry he now heads as Secretary. Options A and D name the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, both in the United Kingdom, and neither awarded him this degree. Option B names Harvard University, which is in the United States like Duke but is not the university named in his academic record. Therefore option C is the only correct choice here.