NITI Aayog Holds SDG Budgeting Workshop in Kolkata

The correct answer is the State Support Mission, the initiative under which NITI Aayog works with states on planning and budgeting, and under which this workshop was held with the Government of West Bengal and technical support from the United Nations Development Programme. Option A names the programme that tracks development indicators in selected districts, a different vehicle altogether. Option C is the innovation and entrepreneurship arm of NITI Aayog and has no part in budget tagging. Option D is the evaluation office within the body, which assesses programmes rather than running state support engagements. Candidates should remember the three-part arrangement here: NITI Aayog as organiser, the state government as host and partner, and UNDP as the source of technical support. The venue was Kolkata and the date was the twenty-ninth of September in the year 2026.

The correct answer is thirty-two. Alongside these participants, the workshop drew senior officials from NITI Aayog, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Controller General of Accounts, the Department of Public Enterprises and the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, as well as the United Nations Resident Coordinator Office and development partners. Representatives of FICCI, CII, SEBI, the Tata Steel Foundation, Intellecap and GIZ were also present, which is why the organisers described the gathering as a whole of government and whole of society approach to localising the Goals. The other options are plausible counts of Indian states and union territories, which is exactly the trap: the figure asked for is the number that took part, not the number that exists.

The correct answer is NITI Aayog, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the United Nations Development Programme. The guide was taken up at the workshop as a working framework for aligning state budgets with the Goals, and the presence of the national auditor among its authors is the detail that gives the question its edge: tagging expenditure is not only a planning exercise but also one that must stand up to reconciliation, quality assurance, reporting and performance audit. Option B replaces the auditor and the development programme with a commission, the central bank and a multilateral lender, none of which authored it. Option C swaps in the statistics ministry and the markets regulator, both of which merely attended. Option D names the wrong United Nations agency, since UNESCO deals with education, science and culture rather than development budgeting.

The correct answer is Haryana, Odisha, Meghalaya and West Bengal, the four states whose government representatives described how they have implemented and institutionalised SDG budgeting. The host state added a specific claim worth remembering: its Additional Chief Secretary for Finance said West Bengal has for the first time mapped its budget to the goal level of the Goals and has built the exercise into its Integrated Financial Management System. The other three options are lists of states that did not present at this workshop. In questions of this kind the host state is almost always on the correct list, which gives a candidate a useful first filter, and the remaining names then have to be recalled as a set rather than guessed one by one.