Rukhmabai (1864-1955) was the first practising female doctor in colonial India. Rukhmabai also made her mark in history due to the legal case she was involved in, which contributed to the enactment of the Age of Consent Act, 1891.

She was married off at the young age of eleven, while her husband, Dadaji Bhikaji was nineteen years old. He later got in touch with her, perhaps interested in the money she had inherited after her mother passed away. She refused to go, continued to live with her step-father and pursued her education, going against the norms of society. In 1885, after 12 years of marriage, Bhikaji sought “restitution of conjugal rights”.

The British precedents could not be implied in this case, as British law was meant to be applied in the case of consenting adults. Justice Pinhey found this limitation in British law and found no previous cases of such nature in Hindu law. Hence his judgement on the case stated that Rukhmabai had been wed as an innocent child, had no say in the matter and now couldn’t be forced.

In March 1887, Rukhmabai was ordered to go live with her husband or spend six months in jail. Determined about her decision to not to return to Dadaji and to continue her education, Rukhmabai bravely said that she would rather face maximum penalty than accept the verdict given.

Subsequently, after numerous hearings, the marriage was affirmed, where Rukhmabai wrote to Queen Victoria. The Queen overruled the court’s verdict and dissolved the marriage. In July of 1888, Dadaji accepted monetary compensation of two thousand rupees to dissolve the marriage.

It was a case that got a lot of attention in Britain too, where women’s magazines covered it. The ripples that the case created led to the influence on the passage of the Age of Consent Act, 1891, which made child marriages illegal across the British Empire.

Because of its high value as a trading commodity, indigo was often referred to as blue gold. It has been the foundation of textile export from India for centuries. As its demand increased during the industrialization in Britain (as it was most suitable for cotton and also required for navy uniforms), its production also increased and so did the oppression by white planters.

Although peasant resistance (Eg Indigo revolt) led to reduction in planters’ oppression. However, indigo plantation moved away from Bengal and into Bihar. That is where the Champaran satyagraha took place during Gandhian era. However, it was in reality its unprofitability in the world market because of new inventions that led to reduction in its production.

These inventions took place in Germany where the foundation of Industrial revolution was not the mechanization of process but the invention of scientific techniques like modern synthetic chemistry.

By the late 19th century nearly all indigo came from indigo bush plantations in India. The German chemist Adolf Baeyer succeeded in making it in the laboratory in 1878, but it took nearly three decades to find a method of making synthetic indigo on a large scale. The breakthrough came in 1890 when Karl Heumann in Zurich found a way of making indigo from aniline. A lucky accident at the German firm BASF involving a broken thermometer then revealed that mercury was a catalyst for a key part of the synthesis and BASF started the production of synthetic indigo in 1897. Johannes Pfleger then discovered a better route to synthetic indigo which was used by BASF’s competitor Hoechst.

Till the 1700s, the Company had paid little heed to training its employees. The ‘Indiamen’, as they were called, were drawn from a small pool of British families who were friends and relatives of those already involved with the Company, and there was little focus on their knowledge or abilities.

By the 1800s, the British territories in India had expanded greatly and there was an urgent need for a more thoroughly organised administration.

This required trained men who could not only communicate in the local languages but also understand the country and the people they were rapidly gaining control over. It was to train these British officials that Fort William College was established by Lord Richard Wellesley (Governor-General of Bengal from 1798 to 1805) in 1800. The college aimed to create civil servants who were familiar with Indian languages, history, culture and local laws. Alongside, they would also receive training in Western languages and the art of administration.

Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian who gave a comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology. Sanskrit was the classical literary language of the Indian Hindus and Panini is considered the founder of the language and literature. Panini was born in Shalatula, a town near to Attock on the Indus. The dates given for Panini are pure guesses. Experts give dates in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th century BC and there is also no agreement among historians. However, all these guesses are pre-Mauryan while Pushyamitra Shunga is a post-Mauryan king. Thus, statement (1) is not correct.

Amarasimha was one of the navaratnas of Gupta era. His book Amarkosh is a famous literary outcome of the Gupta era. While Harshavardhana is a post-Gupta king. Thus, statement (2) is not correct.

Although Kalidasa’s dates are also disputed by historians, according to tradition, he belonged to the court of Chandra Gupta Vikramaditya who is identified as Changra Gupta II. Thus, statement (3) is correct. Therefore, the correct answer is (c).

In pronuclear transfer, the mother’s egg is first fertilized with the father’s sperm, producing a zygote. The pro-nuclei of the egg and sperm are then removed from the zygote and inserted into a donor egg that has been fertilized and has had its own nucleus removed (a pronucleus is the nucleus of the egg or sperm at the stage of fertilization prior to nucleus fusion). The zygote derived from the donor egg is then implanted into the mother’s uterus. It is thus used in the process of three-parent baby.

Three-parent baby, human offspring produced from the genetic material of one man and two women through the use of assisted reproductive technologies, specifically mitochondrial manipulation (or replacement) technologies and three-person in vitro fertilization (IVF). In general, the reproductive technologies used to produce three-parent babies focus on replacing or otherwise reducing the effects of mutations that occur in the DNA of cellular organelles known as mitochondria, which reside in the cell cytoplasm. The various approaches could help women to overcome infertility and could prevent the transmission to their offspring of potentially debilitating mitochondrial diseases.

Efficiencies in the industrial sector in particular can be achieved in the following ways: Forecasting energy demand and managing the output accordingly. This can help to reduce reliance on fuel, or manage its consumption, thereby also reducing emissions. Hence, 1 is correct.

Artificial intelligence and music have long been intertwined. Alan Turing, the godfather of computer science, built a machine as early as 1951 that generated three simple melodies.

AI in the present stage is also capable of writing meaning short stories. Sunspring or It's No Game released in 2016 and 2017 respectively, these short films' screenplays were written by Benjamin, a self-named system-on-chip running a long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network. The idea of filmmaker Oscar Sharp, the process behind Sunspring was a relatively simple one of imitation; feed a text-recognition engine a load of sci-fi movie scripts – including Interstellar and The Fifth Element – and allow it to dissect them until it could predict the words and phrases that most often appear together. The resulting neural network then wrote a screenplay, and even the lyrics to the theme song using a database of 30,000 folk songs. Hence, 2 is correct.

A study published by The Lancet Digital Health compared the performance of deep learning—a form of artificial intelligence (AI)—in detecting diseases from medical imaging versus that of healthcare professionals, using a sample of studies carried out between 2012 and 2019.The study found that, in the past few years, AI has become more accurate of identifying disease diagnosis in these images and has become a more viable source of diagnostic information. Hence, 3 is correct

Language processing is another area of their services where the tech has been implemented. Google Assistant speech recognition AI uses deep neural networks to learn how to better understand spoken commands and questions as well as for text-to-speech conversion. Hence, 4 is correct.

In wireless power transfer, in order to efficiently charge the power receivers, online prediction of the receiver positions is necessary, and for this purpose AI is used. The prediction accuracy of AI is very high. Hence, 5 is correct.

Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems employ visible light for communication that occupy the spectrum from 380 nm to 750 nm. The technology uses fluorescent lamps (ordinary lamps, not special communications devices) to transmit signals at 10 kbit/s, or LEDs for up to 500 Mbit/s over short distances.

The Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an emerging technology, which provides distinct facilities such as fast data communication, secure data communication, high data rate wireless communication, .Instead of radio frequency, VLC uses light, to transfer data. The visible light spectrum is unlicensed and 10,000 times larger than the range of radio frequencies. It can be used as an alternate to the existing radio based wireless communication technologies or in hybrid. Moreover, Integrated VLC resolves issue of load balancing in existing wireless networks. Light Fidelity is a recent technology under VLC, which can be used for wireless communication as it has many advantages such as no electromagnetic interference, low cost and high data rate, much higher than traditional bluetooth.

Blockchain can be defined as a distributed ledger technology that can record transactions between parties in a secure and permanent way. By ‘sharing’ databases between multiple parties, blockchain essentially removes the need for intermediaries who were previously required to act as trusted third parties to verify record and coordinate transactions.

 

It is a foundational technology or a platform that allows designing a secure way to record transactions and circulate it among signatories, or any kind of target group with an Internet connection. At its core it is an extremely democratic ledger that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated and easily shareable. Hence, statement 1 is correct.

 

The structure of block chain to eliminate intermediary and enhance authentication such that it supports wide range of applications in health, education, governance, diamond industry, financial sector, etc. Hence, statement 2 is not correct.

Most of the applications using block chain technology do not fulfil the criteria of patent filing in Blockchain Technology. 

 

Distributed ledger in peer to peer network is used for recording the transactions which does not generate much confidence in getting the patent as it is like getting a patent for an algorithm/Computer Program and as per Indian Patent Act, 1970, Section 3(k) which states that “a mathematical or Business method or a computer program per se or Algorithms” are not patentable. As per the ruling of Delhi High Court in the 2014 case of Ericson Vs Intex, the court stated that any invention which has a technical contribution or has a technical effect and is not merely a computer program per se as alleged by the defendant and the same is patentable…..”. Hence, statement 3 is correct.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon, made of graphite and constructed in cylindrical tubes with nanometer in diameter and several millimeters in length. Their impressive structural, mechanical, and electronic properties are due to their small size and mass, their strong mechanical potency, and their high electrical and thermal conductivity. CNTs have been successfully applied in pharmacy and medicine due to their high surface area that is capable of adsorbing or conjugating with a wide variety of therapeutic and diagnostic agents (drugs, genes, vaccines, antibodies, biosensors, etc.). They have been first proven to be an excellent vehicle for drug delivery directly into cells without metabolism by the body. Then other applications of CNTs have been extensively performed not only for drug and gene therapies but also for tissue regeneration, biosensor diagnosis, enantiomer separation of chiral drugs, extraction and analysis of drugs and pollutants. Hence, statements 1 and 3 are true.

CNTs are used in various biomedical applications like biosensors, diagnostic agents to visualize cancer cells. A multiwalled carbon nanotube–polyurethane nanocomposite (MWCNT-PU) can be used as vascular graft or blood capillaries. The disruption of red blood cells by PU and MWCNT-PU has been studied by measuring the absorbance of free hemoglobin. It has been found that the MWCNTs with an oxygen-containing functional group are well dispersed in polyurethane matrix. The number of platelets adhered to the MWCNT-PU nanocomposite surface was remarkably reduced in comparison to that of the PU surface. Investigation of platelet activation was done by the analysis of conformational changes in glycoprotein measured via flow cytometry.

It is expected that this enabling technology would facilitate the making of nanodevices using these blood-compatible nanomaterials as building blocks for biomedical application such as artificial implants, including structural tissue replacements, that is, artificial blood vessels, or functional devices such as drug delivery matrixes. Hence, statement 2 is true.

Multiple types of microbes including bacteria and fungi have the ability to degrade carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene (GRA), and their derivatives and in the future more species with this ability will be found. Hence, CNTs are biodegradable. Therefore, statement 4 is true.