Which of the following schemes of Government of India aims to support…

Government of India runs several higher-education research-support schemes, each with its own distinct charter — international academic collaboration, social-science policy research, translational science grants, or cross-disciplinary capacity-building research. Identifying which scheme a description belongs to requires matching the description against that scheme's own founding objective statement, not just a general “research funding” theme.

The stem's wording — “research projects that are socially relevant, locally need-based, nationally important and globally significant” — is the University Grants Commission's own objective statement for the Scheme for Trans-disciplinary Research for India's Developing Economy (STRIDE), approved by the UGC in 2019. STRIDE builds research capability among university and college faculty and students through capacity-building grants, individual research projects, and multidisciplinary/trans-disciplinary research clusters, explicitly aimed at work that is need-based at the local level while being nationally and globally significant.

• SPARC (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) funds joint research between Indian institutions and top-ranked foreign universities — an international academic-partnership charter.

• IMPRESS (Impactful Policy Research in Social Sciences) funds social-science research proposals chosen for their potential to inform government policy-making, implementation, and evaluation across specific thematic areas.

• STARS (Scheme for Transformational and Advanced Research in Sciences) funds translational and basic-science research projects proposed by university and college faculty and PhD scholars in designated science disciplines.

None of these three matches the stem's local-need-based/nationally-important/globally-significant framing; that framing is STRIDE's own charter, so STRIDE is the scheme described.