Under which initiative of NITI Aayog was the National Workshop on SDG Budgeting at Kolkata organised?

The correct answer is thirty-two. Alongside these participants, the workshop drew senior officials from NITI Aayog, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Controller General of Accounts, the Department of Public Enterprises and the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, as well as the United Nations Resident Coordinator Office and development partners. Representatives of FICCI, CII, SEBI, the Tata Steel Foundation, Intellecap and GIZ were also present, which is why the organisers described the gathering as a whole of government and whole of society approach to localising the Goals. The other options are plausible counts of Indian states and union territories, which is exactly the trap: the figure asked for is the number that took part, not the number that exists.

The correct answer is NITI Aayog, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the United Nations Development Programme. The guide was taken up at the workshop as a working framework for aligning state budgets with the Goals, and the presence of the national auditor among its authors is the detail that gives the question its edge: tagging expenditure is not only a planning exercise but also one that must stand up to reconciliation, quality assurance, reporting and performance audit. Option B replaces the auditor and the development programme with a commission, the central bank and a multilateral lender, none of which authored it. Option C swaps in the statistics ministry and the markets regulator, both of which merely attended. Option D names the wrong United Nations agency, since UNESCO deals with education, science and culture rather than development budgeting.

The correct answer is Haryana, Odisha, Meghalaya and West Bengal, the four states whose government representatives described how they have implemented and institutionalised SDG budgeting. The host state added a specific claim worth remembering: its Additional Chief Secretary for Finance said West Bengal has for the first time mapped its budget to the goal level of the Goals and has built the exercise into its Integrated Financial Management System. The other three options are lists of states that did not present at this workshop. In questions of this kind the host state is almost always on the correct list, which gives a candidate a useful first filter, and the remaining names then have to be recalled as a set rather than guessed one by one.

The correct answer is Yogesh Kathuniya, described in the announcement as a Paralympic silver medallist whose discus is part of the collection and stands for sporting achievement and perseverance. Option A, Sumit Antil, is a Paralympic athlete of the javelin and not the owner of the discus in this auction. Option C, Devendra Jhajharia, is also a javelin thrower with a long Paralympic record, so his name is a plausible distractor, but the item named here is a discus. Option D, Neeraj Chopra, is an Olympic javelin thrower and not a Paralympic competitor at all. The detail to carry away is the pairing of the implement with the athlete: a discus, belonging to Yogesh Kathuniya, among gifts presented to the Prime Minister and now open to public bidding, with the proceeds going to the Namami Gange project.

The correct answer is Delhi. The edition puts up thirty mementos chosen to show the many dimensions of the capital, and the lots bear this out: a framed artwork of St. Stephen's College, a crystal memento of the Old Secretariat building, a textile artwork of the New Parliament Building, two Delhi Metro models, a painting of Saint Dada Dev from Palam village, and a pencil portrait of the Prime Minister drawn by a student from Rohini. Options A, B and D name cities that do not figure as the theme of this edition. The surest way to answer such an item is to look at the lots themselves, since the landmarks named in them, from the Legislative Assembly to the Metro, all belong to one city. Pair the edition number with the theme while revising, because both are asked together.