Please guide me on approching RCs quickly and solving in time, as am taking more than what i should be taking to solve RCs.

Hi Antara. I will try to underscore the problems you might be having and remedies for them:
1. Reading+Comprehending: You should read the RCs to identify the main point, the tone, and understanding the major points the author is making.
Ever read the entire passage and have no idea what the passage is about? This leads to the candidate wasting more time, reading the passage twice or thrice. While reading, you should have full concentration on what is in front of you. For this, try active reading. Take notes after reading each paragraph, which consists of the main point, the purpose and important highlights of the paragraph. If you reach an advanced stage in this, you could start taking mental notes, saving further time.
Please note that speed reading backfires. Our eyes can cover the whole passage in less than a minute. But absorbing the above-mentioned information will require more time, which varies from person to person. Even if you take 4-5 minutes to comprehend the passage completely, please do that. Try to reduce this time by practising, but do not rush.
2. Solving questions: Once you have grasped the passage, you have to answer the questions. The exam is not judging your ability to search for facts/information in the passage. They are judging your ability to understand what the author wants to convey. The notes that you have taken should come in handy now. Read the questions properly, and form an outline of the answer, what could the answer possibly be. Then move on to the options and start eliminating.
Elimination will save much time. Much of the time is wasted being confused between two options. When one starts looking for things in an option so that they could be rejected, the process becomes much clearer.
Using these strategies, your time on an RC should reduce considerably. By a conservative estimate, if you are taking 4-5 minutes on an RC, and around 1.5-2 minutes eliminating options for each question, you would be able to complete an RC in about 9-10 minutes. This is considering the questions and passages are very difficult. Even in that case. you should be able to complete 3 RCs. In CAT 2020, when there were easy-moderate questions that could be solved in lesser time, solving 3 RCs with 85-90% accuracy and 5 correct VAs would have fetched you around 99 percentile.
The paper is more about how you strategize. A good plan will elevate you above others who are more proficient in the section but have poor planning. All the best.

Hi,
Firstly thank you so very much for such an elaborative answer. It clarifies every inch of doubt.

I'll try to implement all of it, adn learn from my mistakes.