As of September 2026, what was the combined capacity of the supercomputers deployed in India under NSM?

The correct answer is 2015. India started the National Supercomputing Mission in April 2015 to build up the country's computing strength, and it was given an outlay of roughly Rs 4,500 crore. The Mission is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, while the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Pune and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru put it into practice. Option A, 2010, is wrong because nothing of this Mission existed then; India's indigenous supercomputing story had begun much earlier with PARAM 8000 in 1991, but that was a single machine and not a national mission. Option C, 2018, is wrong: by that time the Mission was already working towards its goal of self-reliance in supercomputing. Option D, 2022, is wrong as well, since the figures reported for the Mission, such as 40 supercomputers delivering 68 PF as of September 2026, describe several years of work that followed the 2015 launch.

The correct answer is C-DAC, Pune and IISc, Bengaluru. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing at Pune and the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru are the two bodies that implement the Mission, while the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology steer it. C-DAC is also the house that built PARAM 8000 in 1991 and has designed the Rudra series of servers on which the PARAM Rudra supercomputers run. Option A is wrong: neither space nor defence research laboratories are named as implementing agencies for this Mission. Option C is wrong because no individual IIT or atomic research centre has that role, even though research institutions across the country use the Mission's machines. Option D mixes in a genuine name from the story in a wrong place, as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research organises the ESTIC-2026 conclave but does not implement the supercomputing Mission.

The correct answer is 1991. PARAM 8000 was developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and unveiled in 1991 with a speed of 1 gigaflop, and it marked India's entry into indigenous supercomputing. It laid the base for the PARAM series, which moved on to far more powerful machines such as PARAM Yuva at 54 teraflops, supporting work like weather forecasting and computational fluid dynamics, and later to the PARAM Rudra systems built on Rudra servers designed in India. Option A, 1985, comes before the machine existed. Option C, 1998, and option D, 2005, fall after the unveiling; by then the PARAM line was already growing through newer and faster systems. A useful way to hold the timeline is PARAM 8000 in the early 1990s, the national mission from 2015, and 40 machines at 68 PF by September 2026.

The correct answer is Vedic Kavach, the post-quantum cryptography platform built by BISAG-N. The keys produced by the quantum link were integrated with it, and test messages were then encrypted and decrypted from end to end. Option A is a trap worth noticing: Armos is also part of this story, but it is QNu Labs' hardware QKD device that generates the keys over the free-space optical channel, not the software platform that consumes them. Keeping the two names apart is the main thing this question tests. Option C is wrong because no platform of that name features in the demonstration. Option D is wrong as well and is simply a plausible sounding invention. Remember the division of labour: Armos is hardware and makes the keys, Vedic Kavach is software, adds post-quantum cryptography and quantum random number generation, and uses them.

The correct answer is 230 to 260 bits per second, with the Quantum Bit Error Rate held below 5%. Both numbers describe the quality of the link: the key rate is how fast fresh secret material can be produced for encryption, and the error rate measures how often a photon is read wrongly, which in quantum key distribution also signals whether anyone has interfered with the channel. Options B, C and D each pair figures that were not those recorded, and a candidate who remembers only one of the two values can still be caught by a mismatched pair, so the two should be learnt together. The keys produced at this rate were handed to the Vedic Kavach platform, where post-quantum cryptography completed the encryption and decryption of test messages from end to end.