According to the Office of the PSA, the I-STEM portal lists more than how many scientific instruments?

The correct answer is January 2020. I-STEM, the Indian Science Technology and Engineering facilities Map, was conceived and supported by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser and launched by the Prime Minister in January 2020. Since then it has grown into a national resource with more than 31,000 scientific instruments across nearly 4,000 institutions and over 65,000 registered users.

The other dates are distractors. The portal came back into the news on 21 September 2026, when the Office of the PSA held the first State Governments Nodal Officers Meeting, chaired by Scientific Secretary Dr Parvinder Maini, with officers from 23 States and 4 UTs. The aim is to bring State universities and laboratories onto I-STEM so that expensive publicly funded instruments are shared rather than bought again by every institution.

The correct answer is Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser. The PSA's Office conceived and supports I-STEM, and it was this office that convened the first State Governments Nodal Officers Meeting for the portal on 21 September 2026. The meeting was chaired by Dr (Mrs) Parvinder Maini, Scientific Secretary in the Office of the PSA.

The other options are plausible because they are all part of India's science administration. NITI Aayog is the government's policy think tank. The Department of Science & Technology funds research and runs many science programmes. CSIR is a network of national laboratories, and its own ANALYTICS portal for instruments is now being integrated with I-STEM through API links, which makes it a particularly tempting wrong answer. But the portal itself belongs to the Office of the PSA.

The correct answer is Yashobhoomi, New Delhi. The fifth edition of SEMICON India ran there for three days, from 17 to 19 September 2026, on the theme "Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem", with more than 600 exhibiting companies, a Start-up Pavilion, a Workforce Development Pavilion, country and State pavilions and a hackathon.

Bharat Mandapam is the tempting wrong answer because it is Delhi's other big convention centre and hosted several 2026 events, including the India International Water Week that opened on 22 September. Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar hosts Vibrant Gujarat, and BIEC in Bengaluru hosts Aero India. Yashobhoomi, in Dwarka, is the India International Convention and Expo Centre in the capital's west. Keep the venue and theme together for this one.

The correct answer is ₹1,27,500 crore. Semicon 2.0 was approved by the Union Cabinet in July 2026 with this outlay. It builds on Semicon 1.0 and rests on six pillars: design; machines and materials; more fabs; advanced packaging; research and development; and talent development. The broader approach, covering the whole value chain rather than fabrication alone, was the point of the "Silicon to Systems" theme.

₹1.64 lakh crore is the trap: that is the investment commitment already made under the Semicon India Programme, across 12 approved projects in six States, three of which are in commercial production. ₹76,000 crore was the outlay of the original programme, and ₹1 lakh crore is a round-number distractor. Keep the two 2026 figures apart: ₹1,27,500 crore is the new government outlay, ₹1.64 lakh crore is investment committed by companies.

The correct answer is C-DAC. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing showcased its AUM HPC-AI processor and the RUDRA-AUM compute node, reflecting India's push to build indigenous capability in high-performance computing and AI at the system level, not just the chip level. C-DAC also displayed its indigenous 64-bit RISC-V processor, built on the open RISC-V architecture, which powers products such as Aheesa Technology's 1 Gbps connectivity device.

ISRO builds satellites and launch vehicles, DRDO develops defence systems and BEL is a defence electronics manufacturer; none of them made these processors. C-DAC, under the Ministry of Electronics and IT, is India's supercomputing agency, known for the PARAM series, which is why it leads the processor work. Other Indian names at the show included InCore Semiconductors for RISC-V processor IP and Netrasemi for AI surveillance chips.