UPSC Prelims 2016 · Question 88 of 98

UPSC Prelims 2016 question on SWAYAM Online Education

‘SWAYAM’, an initiative of the Government of India, aims at

  1. promoting the Self Help Groups in rural areas
  2. providing financial and technical assistance to young start-up entrepreneurs
  3. promoting the education and health of adolescent girls
  4. providing affordable and quality education to the citizens for free
Show answer

Answer: D. providing affordable and quality education to the citizens for free

Verdict

The answer is providing affordable and quality education to citizens for free. SWAYAM is India's massive open online course platform.

Analysis

Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds is a web portal hosting massive open online courses across subjects, proposing to offer courses from the school stage to the postgraduate stage on an interactive electronic platform, with capacity planned for around two thousand courses. It is an education delivery initiative of the human resource development ministry. The self help group, start up finance and adolescent girls options describe rural livelihood, entrepreneurship and adolescent health programmes respectively.

Source

Press Information Bureau material and press reporting on massive open online courses.

How to crack it

Expand the acronym, since Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds names its own subject, and the words study and learning fix the domain as education before any recall is needed. Government acronyms in this period were frequently constructed backwards from a desirable Hindi word, so expanding them is both possible and decisive. Note the second meaning too, that swayam means self, pointing to self paced learning.

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