Which of these was launched by IPPB on its 9th Foundation Day for merchants?

The correct answer is the 9th Foundation Day, observed as IPPB Day 2026. The arithmetic is easy to hold if the launch date is remembered: India Post Payments Bank was launched on 1 September 2018, so the same date in 2026 completes nine years of working. The release itself says the bank has emerged over the past nine years as an important platform connecting citizens with banking, digital payments and government benefits. The other options are near misses of the kind a paper setter likes, and each is wrong only by a year or two, so the safer method is to anchor the launch year and count forward rather than to memorise the ordinal alone. Note also that the bank is set up under the Department of Posts in the Ministry of Communications, with the whole of its equity held by the Government of India.

The correct answer is 13.25 crore. The release gives this as the pan-India customer base as on 31 March 2026, and adds two shares worth remembering: 77 per cent of these customers are in rural areas and 49 per cent are women. Their deposits with the bank stood at ₹29,104 crore. Every wrong option here is another genuine figure from the same list, which is exactly the trap. The 6.5 crore in option A is the number of direct benefit transfer beneficiaries who received about ₹1.55 lakh crore. The 9.47 crore in option B counts Aadhaar mobile updates done by the bank, alongside 1.35 crore Bal Aadhaar enrolments. The 12.06 crore in option C counts Aadhaar enabled payment system transactions, through which ₹36,140 crore was disbursed. Read the label before the number in such tables.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Communications. India Post Payments Bank has been established under the Department of Posts, which sits in that ministry, and the entire equity of the bank is owned by the Government of India. This is a point aspirants often get wrong, because a bank feels as though it should belong to the Ministry of Finance, and option A is placed there for that reason. The postal link is the whole design of the institution: its reach rests on about 1,65,000 post offices, of which roughly 1,40,000 are in rural areas, and around 3,00,000 postal employees, so the doorstep model works through postal staff rather than branches. Its services are built on India Stack, delivered through a smartphone linked to the core banking system with a biometric device, and offered in 13 languages across 5.57 lakh villages and towns.

The correct answer is USD 11.12 billion. Indian banks raised that amount through bond listings on IFSC exchanges over the five months from April to August 2026. Option A, USD 9.17 billion, is the part of that total listed in July and August alone, so it is a subset rather than the whole. Option C, USD 11.62 billion, belongs to a different channel entirely: it is the value of External Commercial Borrowings disbursed by IBUs in the same period, with monthly flows rising from USD 1.54 billion in April to USD 3.54 billion in August. The two numbers are close enough that they are easily swapped, so pair each with its channel when revising. Option D appears nowhere in the release. Together the three channels, swap mobilisation, ECB financing and bond issuance, are what the release presents as evidence of a deepening international banking ecosystem at GIFT-IFSC.

The correct answer is USD 54.02 billion. That is the figure twenty IFSC Banking Units had sanctioned under the Reserve Bank's special swap facility for FCNR(B) deposits as on 31 August 2026, and about USD 52.82 billion of it had already been disbursed. Options A and B are real numbers from the same release but from earlier dates in the same month: sanctions stood at USD 28.60 billion on 14 August and USD 37.26 billion on 21 August. The question is a test of whether the candidate tracks the date attached to each figure, because the amount nearly doubled inside a fortnight. Option D does not appear in the release at all. A useful way to hold the story together is the pair of figures that bracket it: USD 54.02 billion sanctioned and USD 52.82 billion disbursed, the small gap between them being the part not yet drawn down.