When did World Health Organization officially declare the South-East Asia region Polio Free ?

The answer is A) 27th March, 2014. On that date WHO's South-East Asia Regional Certification Commission certified the SEA Region as polio-free, which covered India and the other member countries of the region. India's last wild poliovirus case was reported in January 2011 in West Bengal, and the region then completed three years without a case before certification.

The other options are wrong only in the date. Each is a day off from the certification date, so the question tests whether you remember the exact day, not just the year.

• B, C and D give 28, 29 and 30 March 2014. None of these is the date of the official declaration.

The core concept is certification after sustained zero transmission. A region is declared polio-free only after it has gone a required period without wild poliovirus and surveillance has been shown to be adequate. For the Mains, this links to the GS-II theme of global health governance and to how India's Pulse Polio model worked through the Universal Immunisation Programme. Note that polio remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and WHO certified the African Region in 2020, so the world is not yet fully polio-free.

Trap: aspirants often mix up the date of India's last case (2011) or the date of the African certification (2020) with the SEA Region declaration.