According to the Union Health Minister, out-of-pocket expenditure on health in India has declined to what level?

The correct answer is Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission, shortened to PM-ABHIM. The Union Health Minister said the mission was framed after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of strengthening the ability of the health system to answer future pandemics and public health emergencies while routine healthcare continues without disruption. Option A, the National Health Mission, is an older umbrella programme for health services and is not the scheme under which these blocks and laboratories were sanctioned. Option C, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, deals with digital health records and identifiers rather than physical infrastructure. Option D, Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, is the health assurance arm of Ayushman Bharat that pays for treatment, not the arm that builds critical care blocks. Candidates should keep the three Ayushman Bharat limbs apart in memory: insurance cover, digital records and health infrastructure.

The correct answer is 631. The Union Health Minister said that under PM-ABHIM the Government of India has sanctioned this many Critical Care Blocks across the States and Union Territories, creating a nationwide network of critical-care capacity. He contrasted this with an older way of thinking in which a hospital was measured only by its number of beds, and said a resilient health system needs critical-care capacity, oxygen and medical-gas systems, isolation facilities, trained staff, laboratory capacity and early outbreak detection. The other options are close neighbours of the right figure and are the sort of distractors a paper setter uses when the answer is a round-sounding number. For Andhra Pradesh in particular, 24 Critical Care Blocks have been sanctioned at an estimated investment of about Rs 606 crore, and 10 of them were inaugurated on the day of this announcement.

The correct answer is Andhra Pradesh, 41 parameters. Speaking at the inauguration of the new health facilities in the state, the Union Health Minister praised the Sanjeevani programme for carrying healthcare to people's doorsteps and making testing available for this many health parameters. He appreciated the state's approach of bringing screening closer to communities, said such initiatives are valuable models for strengthening primary healthcare, and expressed interest in examining whether the model could be replicated at the national level. Options A, C and D pair a neighbouring state with a different count of parameters, and each is plausible enough to catch a candidate who remembers the name of the programme but not the state or the number. The safe way to hold this fact is to attach Sanjeevani to Andhra Pradesh, the same state where the Critical Care Blocks and laboratories were opened on the same day.

The correct answer is 1 per cent. The Plan uses NABARD's special refinance facility to lighten the burden on participating cooperatives, and when that is combined with the 3 per cent interest subvention available under the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund, the effective loan interest rate for a PACS comes down to 1 per cent. Option B is the strongest distractor, since 3 per cent is the subvention itself rather than the rate the society finally pays. Options C and D do not appear in the document. Two related financial measures are worth remembering with this: the subsidy under the Agricultural Marketing Infrastructure scheme was raised from 25 per cent to 33.33 per cent, and the margin money requirement was reduced to 10 per cent, while cost norms for godown construction were revised. Together these steps were taken to improve the viability of storage projects and draw more societies in.

The correct answer is 313. The backgrounder reports that as of July 2026 godown construction had been completed in that many PACS across the country, creating more than 1.80 lakh metric tonnes of storage capacity. Option D is the trap most candidates fall into, because 1012 is also a July 2026 figure, but it counts the PACS or cooperative societies identified under the Plan, not those where construction was finished. Option A belongs to the pilot phase, in which godowns were completed in 11 PACS across 11 states with 9,750 MT of capacity, the pilot being rolled out on 31 May 2023. Option C is invented. The distinction between identified and completed is exactly the sort of thing an examiner tests, so keep the three figures in order: 11 in the pilot, 1012 identified, 313 completed.