Which of the following statements correctly reflect India's recent (2024)…

Concept: An investor–State dispute settlement clause fixes the conditions under which an investor may reach international arbitration, not merely whether arbitration exists. In India's treaty practice since the 2016 Model BIT that gateway is staged: the investor must first take the dispute to the host State's domestic judicial or administrative forums and pursue them for a prescribed period. A composite readiness index, by contrast, is scoped by two things — the set of entities it rates and the families of indicators it aggregates — so any claim that such an index rates one narrow programme alone is a claim about scope that must be tested against its launch document.

Application to this item:

1. Statement 1 concerns the India–Uzbekistan Bilateral Investment Treaty signed in 2024. Its dispute-resolution article makes recourse to domestic judicial or administrative remedies a precondition: the investor must pursue those remedies for at least five years before a claim may be submitted to arbitration, with a narrow carve-out where no domestic remedy could reasonably provide relief. Access is therefore staged and conditional, so describing it as unconditional misstates the treaty.

2. Statement 2 concerns the National Infrastructure Readiness Index (NIRI), launched in September 2024. It assesses States and Union Territories together with identified central infrastructure ministries and departments, so its rating universe reaches far beyond one urban programme. The word "solely" is what breaks the statement: a Smart-Cities-only ranking is not what the index was set up to produce.

3. Both statements therefore misdescribe their sources, so the combination consistent with the evidence is the one asserting that neither statement is accurate — "Neither 1 nor 2".

Cross-check:

• Treaty limb: read the signed India–Uzbekistan BIT text published by the Department of Economic Affairs — the arbitration article is drafted as a staged remedy with a domestic-remedies waiting period, not an open door.

• Index limb: read the NIRI launch announcement — it is presented as a readiness assessment covering States/UTs and central infrastructure ministries, which is incompatible with a Smart-Cities-only ranking.

• Exam technique: both statements carry absolute qualifiers ("unconditional", "solely … excludes"). Absolute wording is the first thing to test against the source, because a single counter-example defeats it — and here each limb has one.

Result: neither statement survives the check against its source document.