Macaulay’s Minute is dated 2 February 1835 — option 3.

The dispute it settled. The Charter Act of 1813 had set aside one lakh of rupees a year for education, but the Committee of Public Instruction was deadlocked between two parties — the Orientalists, who wished to spend it on Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian learning, and the Anglicists, who wanted English and Western science. Thomas Babington Macaulay, as law member of the Governor-General’s Council and president of the Committee, wrote his Minute to settle it, and Governor-General Lord William Bentinck approved it on 7 March 1835.

What it argued. Macaulay dismissed Indian learning in a passage that has been quoted against him ever since, and proposed that the object of education should be to form “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” — a class that would in turn carry Western knowledge to the mass of the people. That is the downward filtration theory, and it governed policy for the next twenty years.

Its consequences. English became the language of administration, of the higher courts and of higher education. That produced the English-educated professional class from which the national movement drew its leadership — so the Minute’s long-run effect was very far from what its author intended. It also left India with a lasting divide between English and vernacular education.

On the distractors : three of the four options are within days of each other in 1835, so the day matters as much as the year, and 2 February is the date to remember.

Hence, the answer is 02 February 1835.