Immediately before becoming Secretary of the environment ministry, Narendra Bhooshan was Secretary of which department?

The correct answer is Narendra Bhooshan. He has taken over as Secretary of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, the ministry that handles forests, wildlife, pollution control and climate policy for the country. He is an Indian Administrative Service officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre and reached this post after serving as Secretary of the Department of Land Resources in the Ministry of Rural Development. Option A, Keshav Chandra, is the Secretary in the Ministry of Mines and not in the environment ministry. Option C, Ashok K. K. Meena, heads the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the Ministry of Jal Shakti. Option D, Kamal Kishore Soan, is Additional Secretary and Mission Director of the National Jal Jeevan Mission, again a water sector post rather than an environment one. So only option B names the new environment Secretary correctly.

The correct answer is Uttar Pradesh. Narendra Bhooshan is an Indian Administrative Service officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, and he belongs to the batch of the year 1992. His long list of state assignments confirms the cadre: he served as Additional Chief Secretary for Energy, Additional Energy Sources and Technical Education, as Principal Secretary in departments such as Public Works, Industries Development, Information Technology and Electronics, Science and Technology and Panchayati Raj, and as Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Noida Authority. He was also District Magistrate of Mathura and of Firozabad, both districts of Uttar Pradesh. Options A, B and D name Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, and none of these states figures among his cadre postings, so each of them is wrong. Only option C matches the cadre of the officer.

The correct answer is Duke University, which is in the United States. Narendra Bhooshan is a graduate in Electronics, and he went on to earn a Master’s degree in International Development Policy from Duke University. His professional training has also included programmes on public finance, on infrastructure and on preparedness for a changing climate, subjects that fit the work of the environment ministry he now heads as Secretary. Options A and D name the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, both in the United Kingdom, and neither awarded him this degree. Option B names Harvard University, which is in the United States like Duke but is not the university named in his academic record. Therefore option C is the only correct choice here.

The answer is the President, after consulting the Chief Justice of India. The release is explicit on both halves: the power is one the Constitution confers on the President, and it is exercised after consultation with the Chief Justice of India. The order of those two steps matters, because a question will sometimes reverse them.

Option C does exactly that reversal and is the strongest distractor. The Prime Minister and the Law Minister have no constitutional role in the appointment itself, which rules out option A. A Governor does figure in consultation for High Court appointments under the constitutional scheme, but the appointing authority is not the Governor, so option D fails on the same point. Hold the pair as consultation first, warrant afterwards.

The answer is fourteen. The Ministry of Law and Justice announced the elevation of fourteen serving judicial officers, spread over four High Courts. The largest share went to Delhi, which took seven of them, two as Judges and five as Additional Judges. Jharkhand received three as Judges, Karnataka three as Additional Judges, and one officer was appointed a Judge of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

Adding those up is the safest way to hold the figure: seven and three and three and one. Candidates who remember only the number of courts, which is four, or only the Delhi share, which is seven, will miss this. The other options are round numbers close enough to be tempting but none of them matches the announcement.