Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB PM-JAY) was launched on which date?

The correct answer is ₹5 lakh. AB PM-JAY provides cashless hospitalisation cover of up to ₹5 lakh per family per year, covering 1,961 procedures across 27 medical specialties at public and private empanelled hospitals. The cover is per family, not per person, and there is no cap on family size or age.

The other amounts are distractors. The scale of use is worth remembering: by its eighth anniversary the scheme had funded about 13.25 crore hospital admissions worth ₹2.03 lakh crore, and over 48.51 crore people, about 33% of the population, held Ayushman cards. The Union Budget for 2026-27 provides ₹9,500 crore for it. A typical example in the backgrounder is a 65-year-old woman from Haryana whose hip surgery costing ₹44,140 was done free under the scheme.

The correct answer is Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. Rural families qualify under six deprivation criteria of the SECC 2011, such as households with only one kucha room, no adult member between 16 and 59, female-headed households without an adult male, households with a disabled member, SC/ST households and landless households dependent on casual manual labour. Urban families qualify under 11 occupational categories, from rag pickers and domestic workers to construction workers and drivers.

Census 2011 is the tempting wrong answer: the SECC was a separate exercise from the population census. The National Family Health Survey is a health survey, not an eligibility list, and Aadhaar is an identity number, not a poverty database. Families once covered under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana are included too.

The correct answer is All senior citizens aged 70 and above. On 11 September 2024 the Government extended AB PM-JAY to everyone aged 70 and above, regardless of income, covering about 6 crore senior citizens. They receive the Ayushman Vay Vandana card, and more than 1.36 crore such cards had been issued by 21 September 2026.

ASHA workers are the distractor: about 37 lakh families of ASHAs, anganwadi workers and helpers were indeed added, but earlier, in March 2024, and through a separate decision. Construction workers join through the Building and Other Construction Workers boards, and students are not a category at all. The name is easy to place: "Vay" refers to age, so the Vay Vandana card is the one for the elderly.

The correct answer is NSKFDC, the National Safai Karamcharis Finance and Development Corporation. The Secretary of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said the scheme promotes sustainable livelihoods, capacity building, access to safety gear and mechanisation through interventions implemented by this corporation. The name itself carries the clue, because Safai Karamcharis are the very workers the scheme is built around. Option A is wrong because that corporation works for scheduled caste beneficiaries in general and is not named as the implementing body here. Option C is wrong because it serves backward classes and has no role stated in this release. Option D is wrong because it works for minority communities. Matching a scheme with its implementing corporation is a standard question pattern in general awareness papers.

The correct answer is Rs 34.16 crore. Under the capital subsidy intervention for mechanisation, routed through the Swachhta Udyami Yojana, the Ministry reported that 983 beneficiaries have been supported with this amount. The purpose of the subsidy is to help sanitation workers acquire machines so that hazardous manual work is replaced by mechanised cleaning, which is the central idea of the NAMASTE Scheme. The other three options are wrong simply because no such amount is reported for this intervention; they are plausible looking figures placed to test whether the aspirant recalls the exact number. A useful habit is to memorise the amount together with the beneficiary count, since examiners often pair the two in a single statement and change only one of them.