From 11 September 2024, which group was brought under AB PM-JAY irrespective of income, with the Ayushman Vay Vandana card?

The correct answer is 23 September 2018. AB PM-JAY was launched on that date to move India towards universal health coverage, and the PIB backgrounder of 22 September 2026 marks its eighth anniversary. It gives eligible families cashless hospital cover of up to ₹5 lakh a year for secondary and tertiary care through more than 38,000 empanelled hospitals.

The other dates are distractors around well-known days: 15 August is Independence Day, 2 October is Gandhi Jayanti and 1 April is the start of the financial year. Two later dates matter for this scheme and are worth keeping separate: March 2024, when about 37 lakh families of ASHAs and anganwadi workers were added, and 11 September 2024, when all senior citizens aged 70 and above were brought in through the Ayushman Vay Vandana card.

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 New Delhi. Under the Viksit Bharat Challenge, participants climb through an Essay Challenge, District Championships and State or Union Territory level rounds, and the winners reach the national Viksit Bharat Young Leaders Dialogue held in the capital from 10 to 12 January 2027. The exercise began with the Viksit Bharat Quiz on 17 August 2026, which remains open until 30 September 2026 on the MY Bharat platform. Options A, C and D name other large Indian cities, none of which was announced as the venue of the national dialogue. Alongside the main challenge the dialogue carries five more tracks, namely the Cultural Track, Design for Bharat, Hack for Social Cause, Youth Entrepreneurs Challenge and Youth Parliament, and selected participants get to present their ideas before policymakers and, at the national stage, before the Prime Minister.

The correct answer is 31 October 2023. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Mera Yuva Bharat on that date, setting it up as a technology-enabled platform through which young Indians could join the country's development journey. At the launch he stressed the value of bringing the nation's youth on to a common platform. The growth since then is worth memorising along with the date: registrations crossed 2 crore in October 2025, went past 2.46 crore by August 2026, and have now crossed 3 crore. Option A is a date associated with National Youth Day observances rather than this launch. Option B and option D are national days that often appear as distractors in such questions but have no link to the platform's launch. The milestone was announced by the ministry on 23 September 2026.