BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 93 of 142

Correct — B, Kerala. The edition the stem means is the SDG India Index 2023-24, the fourth, released by NITI Aayog on 12 July 2024. Its own chart of state performance puts two states level at the top with a composite score of 79 — Uttarakhand and Kerala — followed by Tamil Nadu at 78, then Goa and Himachal Pradesh at 77, Punjab and Sikkim at 76, and Karnataka at 75. Uttarakhand is not among the options, so Kerala is the only state on this list that shares the top place. The other three are placed and not close: Tamil Nadu 78, Gujarat 74 alongside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and Maharashtra 73. Kerala's claim does not rest on this edition alone. In the third edition, the SDG India Index 2020-21, the report states in terms that 'Kerala retained its rank as the top State with a score of 75', with Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh sharing second place — the word 'retained' recording that Kerala had led the 2019-20 edition as well. So Kerala is the only one of the four options that has ever headed the table in any edition, which is what makes the answer safe even if a reader is unsure which edition 'the SDG India Index 2023' names. For a Bihar candidate the number that matters most is at the other end of the same chart: Bihar scored 57, the lowest of any state, though up from 52 in 2020-21 against an all-India composite that rose from 66 to 71.

• (a)Tamil Nadu — The near miss, and the reason this question is not free. Tamil Nadu scored 78 in the SDG India Index 2023-24 — one point behind the joint leaders and ahead of every other state — and it had shared second place with Himachal Pradesh in 2020-21. It also tops individual goals, sharing the Goal 13 (Climate Action) lead in this edition. Consistently near the top is not the same as topping the table, which Tamil Nadu has not done.
• (c)Maharashtra — Twelfth among the states at 73, below Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and it has never led any edition of the Index. Maharashtra is India's largest state economy by gross state domestic product, which is exactly why it looks like a plausible answer — but the SDG India Index measures outcomes across sixteen goals, from nutrition and gender to sanitation and clean energy, not the size of output.
• (d)Gujarat — Ninth at 74, level with Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and six behind the leaders, and again never a chart-topper on this Index. Gujarat does lead a single goal in this edition — Goal 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, jointly with Ladakh — and goal-wise leadership is the most common source of the belief that a state topped the whole Index.

The SDG India Index is NITI Aayog's instrument for measuring how far each state and union territory has travelled towards the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015 for the 2030 Agenda. The fourth edition tracks 113 indicators aligned to the National Indicator Framework maintained by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. For each of sixteen goals a state receives a score from 0 to 100, where 100 means the 2030 target has been met, and the composite score is the arithmetic mean of the goal scores. Goal 14, Life Below Water, is excluded from the composite because it applies only to the nine coastal states, so leaving it in would penalise the landlocked ones. States are then placed in four categories: Aspirant for 0 to 49, Performer for 50 to 64, Front Runner for 65 to 99, and Achiever for a perfect 100. The design is deliberately competitive — NITI Aayog's stated purpose is to promote what it calls collaborative competition among states — and the index is published with a public dashboard so that any state can see which of its goal scores is dragging the composite down.

Two things settle a question of this shape. The first is to know the top of the table rather than a vague sense of which states are 'developed', because the Index rewards human-development outcomes and not output: Maharashtra and Gujarat, the two biggest state economies among the options, sit twelfth and ninth. The second is to check whether the state you remember topped the Index or merely topped a goal within it, since NITI Aayog publishes a goal-wise leaderboard alongside the composite, and Gujarat, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, West Bengal and others each lead one goal or another. Note also that the stem's 'SDG India Index 2023' is loose — the edition is styled 2023-24 and was released in July 2024 — but the looseness is harmless here because Kerala is the only option that has led any edition. What has changed since 2020-21 is that Kerala no longer leads alone: Uttarakhand caught up, and improved its score by 19 points from the 2018 baseline, the third-largest gain in the country after Uttar Pradesh's 25 and Jammu and Kashmir's 21.

• SDG India Index 2023-24, the fourth edition, was released by NITI Aayog on 12 July 2024 and measures 113 indicators aligned to MoSPI's National Indicator Framework across 16 goals.
• State composite scores at the top: Uttarakhand 79 and Kerala 79 joint first, Tamil Nadu 78, Goa 77, Himachal Pradesh 77, Punjab 76, Sikkim 76, Karnataka 75; among union territories Chandigarh led with 77.
• India's composite score rose from 57 in the 2018 baseline to 60 in 2019-20, 66 in 2020-21 and 71 in 2023-24; the state range widened from 42–69 in 2018 to 57–79 in 2023-24.
• Bihar recorded the lowest state score in 2023-24 at 57, up from 52 in 2020-21; Jharkhand at 62 was next lowest, and 32 states and union territories are now in the Front Runner category, up from 22.
• Goal 14 (Life Below Water) is left out of the composite because it applies only to the nine coastal states; the categories are Aspirant 0–49, Performer 50–64, Front Runner 65–99 and Achiever 100.

• Confusing a goal-wise leader with the overall leader. Gujarat leads Goal 16 and Goa leads Goals 9 and 10 in this edition, but neither is anywhere near the top of the composite table.
• Equating economic size with SDG performance. Maharashtra and Gujarat are large economies and finish twelfth and ninth; the Index measures outcomes in health, education, gender, sanitation and energy.
• Assuming Kerala leads alone. It did in 2020-21 with 75, but in 2023-24 Uttarakhand drew level at 79 — a question that offered both would not have a single answer.

BPSC asks the current-affairs index question as a bare superlative — who topped it — and offers four large, familiar states, so the mark goes to whoever has actually read the year's release rather than reasoned about development. UPSC almost never asks who topped an index; it tests what the index is, who publishes it and what it does not cover, as in its 2015 question on the body NITI Aayog replaced and its 2016 question on when the Sustainable Development Goals are to be achieved.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which State recorded the lowest composite score among all States in NITI Aayog's SDG India Index 2023-24 ?

  • (a)Jharkhand
  • (b)Nagaland
  • (c)Bihar
  • (d)Meghalaya

  Answer(c) Bihar — 57, the lowest of any State, ahead of Jharkhand at 62 and Meghalaya and Nagaland at 63. Bihar has improved from 52 in the 2020-21 edition but remains last.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In NITI Aayog's SDG India Index, a State with a composite score between 65 and 99 is placed in which category ?

  • (a)Aspirant
  • (b)Performer
  • (c)Front Runner
  • (d)Achiever

  Answer(c) Front Runner — the bands are Aspirant 0–49, Performer 50–64, Front Runner 65–99 and Achiever 100, and 32 States and UTs were in the Front Runner category in 2023-24, up from 22 in 2020-21.