According to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, olympiads and…

Concept

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promotes holistic, competency-based education. Alongside academic reforms, it calls for more avenues through which students can benchmark their own progress — subject Olympiads and competitions are one such avenue, meant to be organised more widely so students can evaluate themselves and work toward further improvement.

Application

NEP 2020 (Ministry of Education, Government of India) states that Olympiads and competitions in various subjects will be organised and supported more widely across the country. Among the given options, "strengthened" is the term that captures this expansionary intent, and it matches the option confirmed in the official CTET August 2023 Paper I answer key for this item.

Cross-check

The remaining options describe the opposite direction of change:

• "made easier" would describe a change in the difficulty of competitions, not in how widely they are organised — NEP 2020 does not frame this provision as reducing how challenging these competitions are.

• "discouraged" would describe official policy working against such events, the opposite of NEP 2020's stated intent to expand assessment opportunities.

• "reduced" would describe a smaller scale or fewer such events, again the opposite of the policy's expansionary language.