Vice-President Opens 4th IN-STEP with 22 Nations Taking Part

The correct answer is 22. The fourth edition of the International Strategic Engagement Programme has 38 delegates in all, and of these 25 are international delegates who have come from 22 countries, among them Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Mongolia, Nepal, Mauritius, Maldives, Oman, Guyana, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Thailand, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Myanmar, Uzbekistan and Brazil. Option C gives the number of international delegates rather than the number of countries, and option D gives the total strength of the programme including participants from India, so both are true figures attached to the wrong question. Option A does not belong to this programme at all. Three numbers travel together in this story and an examiner can ask for any one of them, so fix in mind that 38 is the total, 25 the international delegates and 22 the countries.

The correct answer is the National Security Council Secretariat. The programme is put together by the two ministries along with that secretariat, and it is conducted in association with the National Defence College, which is where such strategic courses are run. NITI Aayog is the government's policy think tank and works on development planning, not on a strategic engagement programme of this kind, so option A is wrong. The Indian Council of World Affairs is a research body on international relations and is not named among the organisers, which rules out option C. The Ministry of Home Affairs handles internal security and has no part in convening this programme, so option D is wrong as well. The Vice-President specifically thanked the secretariat and the two ministries for bringing the delegates together.

The correct answer is think globally, engage strategically, act in cohesion. The Vice-President offered these three ideas as the philosophy behind the programme while urging countries of the Global South to respond together to challenges that cut across technology, cyberspace, artificial intelligence, energy and maritime security, climate change and supply chains. The other options are slogans associated with other contexts and were not the message delivered here, so they are wrong. In the same address he described corruption as a major challenge before Global South countries and asked delegates to build corruption-free systems at every level, and he recalled Vaccine Maitri while saying that scientific advances should benefit all of humanity, in the spirit of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. Questions on this story usually ask either for the motto or for the participation figures.