Under the New Discovery track, projects at which Technology Readiness Levels are eligible to apply?

The correct answer is Rs 50 crore. The Department of Pharmaceuticals announced that the New Discovery track will provide financial assistance of up to this amount per company, per project or per portfolio of projects, subject to minimum co-funding of a quarter of the project cost from bona fide institutional investors. Option A is the ceiling of the Early Stage track, which supports start-ups and MSMEs at the lowest readiness levels, so it is a genuine figure but from a different track. Option D is the ceiling of the Later Stage track, which applies to projects at higher readiness levels and is capped at a share of the approved cost. Option B is not a ceiling under any of the three tracks. Learn the three ceilings as a set, since the paper setter swaps them between tracks.

The correct answer is Promotion of Research and Innovation in Pharma and MedTech. The scheme is run by the Department of Pharmaceuticals under the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, and it is designed to strengthen the country's pharmaceutical and medical technology research ecosystem by helping start-ups, MSMEs and large companies move up the innovation value chain. Options B, C and D are invented expansions built from similar vocabulary, and such near-miss acronyms are the standard way of setting a distractor. Note that the scheme covers both pharmaceuticals and medical devices, which is why MedTech appears in the name, and that its priority areas include novel medical devices alongside new medicines and complex generics. Candidates should also note that the scheme is meant to help start-ups, MSMEs and large companies alike move up the innovation value chain, so the applicant categories are as worth learning as the name itself.

The correct answer is Rs 5,000 crore. This is the outlay with which the scheme aims to strengthen India's pharmaceutical and medical technology research and development ecosystem. Option A is the amount already committed under the first call, when 41 projects were approved for roughly that sum, so it is a real figure from the announcement but not the outlay, and it is the distractor most likely to be picked. Options B and D are round figures that do not appear in the announcement at all. A useful way to hold this together is to remember that a little under a third of the outlay has been committed in the first round, with evaluation of the remaining first-round applications still going on and results expected over the following month.

The correct answer is New Medicines, which took 27 of the 41 approved projects. Option B, Complex Generics and Biosimilars, accounted for five projects, so it is the smallest of the three real categories rather than the largest. Option C, Novel Medical Devices, accounted for nine projects, which places it second but still well behind New Medicines. Option D, clinical trial infrastructure, is not one of the priority areas named in the announcement at all, and it is included to test whether a candidate recognises the three-way split the department actually uses. The same announcement gives two other splits worth remembering: 12 projects are at an early stage against 29 at a later stage, and 19 belong to startups and MSMEs against 22 to large companies.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, which houses the Department of Pharmaceuticals, and it is that department which announced the approvals under PRIP. Option A, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, handles public health, hospitals and drug regulation through its own bodies, and candidates often place pharmaceuticals there by instinct, but the industrial promotion of the sector is not its charge. Option B, the Ministry of Science and Technology, funds research through its departments and is a reasonable guess for a research scheme, yet PRIP is not its programme. Option D, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, deals with trade and industrial policy broadly rather than this scheme. Remember the pairing, since questions on drug price control, bulk drug parks and pharma production schemes all lead back to the same department.