Mock paper 6 — The 2026 Update

A is true. Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (Act No. 22 of 2023) reads: "In section 8 of the Right to Information Act, 2005, in sub-section (1), for clause (j), the following clause shall be substituted, namely:— '(j) information which relates to personal information;'." India Code's updated RTI Act prints exactly that clause, with the footnote "Subs. by Act 22 of 2023, s. 44 for clause (j) (w.e.f. 13-11-2025)". Because the whole clause was substituted, the relevance test, the harm test and the larger-public-interest override held by the CPIO, SPIO or appellate authority all went with the old clause.

R is false, and the reason is that commencement of Section 44 is staggered. G.S.R. 843(E), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, dated 13 November 2025, brought into force a first tranche which names, of Section 44, only "sub-sections (1) and (3)". Sub-section (2) of Section 44 — which omits Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 — sits in the eighteen-month tranche and is not in force as of September 2026. So the RTI amendment is live while the rest of Section 44 is not.

(a) is where most candidates will land: A is familiar, R sounds like the same fact restated, and the tranche list in the commencement notification is the only thing that separates them. (b) also requires R to be true. (d) is for the candidate who believes the clause was stayed or read down; it was not — the Supreme Court issued notice, refused an interim stay and referred the challenge to a larger bench on 16 February 2026, and gave the Union two weeks to respond on 7 August 2026, so the clause is in force, challenged and unstayed. One further point the substitution does not carry: Section 8(2) survives verbatim and applies to any exemption in sub-section (1), clause (j) included, so a public authority may still allow access "if public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm to the protected interests". What the substitution removed was the override inside clause (j) itself, exercisable by the CPIO, SPIO or appellate authority; the surviving override is a discretion of the public authority, outside sub-section (1). "No public-interest test survives anywhere in Section 8 for personal information" is therefore false.

Trap: ch18 — if a stem does not say "as originally enacted", it is asking the position today; and the position today is that clause (j) is a bare exemption, Section 8(2) is intact, and Section 44(2) of the DPDP Act has still not commenced.

Statements 1, 3 and 4 reproduce the Convention. Article 12(2): "The child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body" — the participation right that summaries reduce to the slogan "respect for the views of the child". Article 42 obliges States Parties to make the principles and provisions of the Convention "widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike" — a dissemination duty, which is why displaying child rights in a school is a treaty obligation and not a courtesy. Article 28(1)(e) requires States Parties to "take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates", the treaty root of every retention and out-of-school-children drive.

Statement 2 reverses the pair. Article 31 recognises the right of the child to rest and leisure, to play and to recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child; Article 32(1) recognises the right "to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education". The reversal is built for the candidate who has memorised the Article 28/29 reversal and assumes that every adjacent pair in the Convention is examined the same way — which is what option (d) accepts. Option (c) accepts the reversal and also rejects statement 1, dropping the Article 12 duty to give the child the opportunity to be heard in proceedings that affect the child. Option (b) rejects statement 4 alone, on the belief that anything to do with attendance must sit with the aims of education; the aims are Article 29, but attendance and drop-out are Article 28(1)(e). The article texts here are those published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

A point of vocabulary that most textbooks get loosely: India did not ratify the Convention. It acceded to it, accession being the route open to a State that has not signed — OHCHR's own country record reads "Acceded to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on 11 December 1992".

Trap: ch06 — Article 28 is the right to education and carries the attendance and drop-out clause; Article 29 states the aims; Article 31 is rest, leisure and play; Article 32 is protection from economic exploitation.

A-2: APAAR, the Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry, is "a unique 12-digit student identification number linked to the ABC system", an initiative of the Ministry of Education carrying a lifelong record from pre-primary to higher education, with parental consent required for minors (PIB Factsheet on the Academic Bank of Credits and APAAR, 4 July 2026). B-3: the Academic Bank of Credits is described in the same factsheet as "a revolutionary initiative by the Ministry of Education" that "is regulated by the University Grants Commission (UGC)", a secure platform for storing, managing, transferring and redeeming credits. C-4: the National Credit Framework, the report of a High-Level Committee of April 2023, provides that "30 notional learning hours will be counted as one Credit", so that 1,200 hours a year yield 40 credits, across eight credit levels. D-1: PARAKH is an independent constituent unit set up at NCERT by NCERT Notification no. 1-4/2012-EC/101-164 dated 8 February 2023. The item turns on who owns what, which is the only stable axis in this cluster. Option (b) swaps APAAR and the Academic Bank of Credits — they are linked, not identical: one is a registry of learner identities under the Ministry, the other a credit platform regulated by the UGC. Option (a) exchanges the credit platform for the credit framework, the commonest confusion of the four. Option (c) hands PARAKH to the UGC; PARAKH sits under NCERT, does not conduct CUET, and is not a statutory regulator of school boards. The credit arithmetic in item 4 lets a candidate self-check: 30 multiplied by 40 is 1,200. No APAAR count is used, and none should be. Three official figures are live on three different bases — 26.35 crore verified IDs as on 2 July 2026 (PIB Factsheet, 4 July 2026), 33.74 crore registered on the Ministry's own APAAR portal, undated, and 4.79 crore created and mapped on the ABC platform. The corpus's teaching that a mid-30s-crore figure is "not the Ministry's verified count" is no longer a safe trap, because the Ministry's own portal now reads 33.74 crore and rising. Trap: ch17 — PARAKH is under NCERT, not the UGC and not the NTA; the Academic Bank of Credits is UGC-regulated while APAAR is a Ministry registry.