Which Article of the Constitution declares Hindi in the Devanagari script to be the official language of the Union?

The correct answer is B, Article 345. It allows the legislature of a state to adopt by law any one or more of the languages in use in that state, or Hindi, as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that state, and until it does so English continues to be used. Option A, Article 344, provides for the Official Language Commission appointed by the President and for a Committee of Parliament on official language. Option C, Article 347, lets the President, on a demand being made, direct that a language spoken by a substantial proportion of the population of a state be officially recognised in the whole state or a part of it. Option D, Article 350, gives a person the right to submit a representation for the redress of a grievance in any language used in the Union or in the state.

The correct answer is C, 22. The Eighth Schedule began with fourteen languages in 1950, and three amendments took the list to twenty-two: Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali by the Ninety-second Amendment passed in 2003. Option A, 14, is the original number and is correct only for 1950. Option B, 18, was the number between 1992 and the Ninety-second Amendment, which is why it appears so often as a distractor. Option D, 28, is not a figure the schedule has ever held, though several more languages have been demanded for inclusion. Two further points help in the examination: a language in the schedule need not be the official language of any state, as the cases of Sanskrit and Sindhi show, and candidates may write many public examinations in these languages.

The correct answer is C, the Ninety-second Amendment, passed in 2003, which took the Eighth Schedule from eighteen languages to twenty-two by adding Bodo of Assam, Dogri of the Jammu region, Maithili of Bihar and Santhali, the language of the Santhal people spread over Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. Option A, the Twenty-first Amendment of 1967, added Sindhi, the language of a community that came to India at Partition without a state of its own. Option B, the Seventy-first Amendment of 1992, added Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali together. Option D, the One Hundred and First Amendment, brought in the Goods and Services Tax and has nothing to do with language. A simple way to hold the sequence is fourteen in 1950, fifteen in 1967, eighteen in 1992 and twenty-two from the amendment of 2003.

The correct answer is A, Nagaland. The state has many tribal languages and no single dominant tongue, so English, already the language of administration and of education through the churches and schools, was adopted as the official language; Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have done the same, Meghalaya using Khasi and Garo as associate languages. Option B, Manipur, has Manipuri, also called Meiteilon, as its official language, and Manipuri is in the Eighth Schedule. Option C, Tripura, uses Bengali and Kokborok along with English. Option D, Assam, has Assamese, with Bengali used in the Barak valley districts and Bodo in the Bodoland region. The north-eastern states are a favourite of paper setters precisely because the answers differ from state to state, so learn them as a short list rather than by guessing.

The correct answer is C, Konkani in the Devanagari script. The Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act of 1987 made Konkani the official language, and the same year Goa became a full state; the script is specified because Konkani is written in more than one script. Option A, Marathi, is wrong as the official language, although the Act allows Marathi to be used for official purposes as well, and much official correspondence in Goa does take place in Marathi. Option B, Portuguese, was the language of the colonial administration until the liberation of Goa in 1961, but it has no official status now. Option D, Kannada, is the official language of neighbouring Karnataka. Konkani was added to the Eighth Schedule in 1992 by the Seventy-first Amendment, which is the fact most often paired with this question.