BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 26 of 150

Correct — A, 72 years. The UNDP Human Development Report 2025, titled 'A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI', puts India's life expectancy at birth at exactly 72.0 years for the reference year 2023. The figure sits in Table 1 of the report's statistical annex, the table headed 'Human Development Index and its components', in the row numbered 130 under the Medium human development band. Against 58.6 years in 1990 that is a gain of 13.4 years in a single generation, and the highest value India has recorded since the series began. The same row fixes the rest of India's profile in one line: HDI value 0.685, rank 130 out of 193 countries and territories, expected years of schooling 13.0, mean years of schooling 6.9, and gross national income per capita of 9,047 international dollars at 2021 purchasing power parity. India's HDI trajectory in the report's own time series runs 0.446 in 1990, 0.501 in 2000, 0.590 in 2010, 0.633 in 2015, 0.652 in 2020, then a COVID dip to 0.647 in 2021, and back up through 0.676 in 2022 to 0.685 in 2023. Why the number matters rather than being trivia: life expectancy at birth is one of the HDI's three constituent dimensions — it is the entire measure of 'a long and healthy life' — so India's longevity gain is doing much of the work in that 0.446-to-0.685 climb. Note also what the report defines it as: the years a newborn could expect to live if the age-specific mortality rates prevailing at birth held for its whole life. It is a snapshot of present mortality, not a forecast of any individual's lifespan.

• (b)73 years — This is the world's figure, not India's. The same Table 1 gives a World aggregate of 73.4 years alongside a world HDI of 0.756. A candidate who half-remembers that India is 'roughly at the global average' rounds to 73 and drops a third of a mark. India is in fact 1.4 years below the world average, and only 0.1 year above the South Asia regional aggregate of 71.9 years.
• (c)74 years — Closest to Bangladesh, which is the instructive trap in this table. Bangladesh shares India's exact HDI rank of 130 and its exact HDI value of 0.685, yet reaches 74.7 years of life expectancy — 2.7 years more than India, offset by weaker income (GNI per capita 8,498 against India's 9,047). A second route to a wrong 74 is India's female life expectancy, 73.6 years against 70.5 for males in the report's Gender Development Index table.
• (d)More than one of the above — BPSC's signature fifth option, and here it is logically impossible rather than merely unsupported. Life expectancy at birth for one country in one report-year is a single scalar quantity: India cannot be 72, 73 and 74 simultaneously in HDR 2025. This option only ever becomes live when the three named choices are separate qualifying items — people, schemes, states, languages — any number of which can be true at once, not competing values of the same measurement.

The Human Development Index is the UNDP's answer to the claim that national income alone measures development. Conceived by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen and first published in the Human Development Report of 1990, it insists that people, not GDP, are the real wealth of nations. It combines three dimensions through four indicators: a long and healthy life, measured solely by life expectancy at birth; knowledge, measured by expected years of schooling for a child entering school and mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 and above; and a decent standard of living, measured by gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity. Each indicator is rescaled to a 0-1 dimension index against fixed goalposts, and since the 2010 report the three dimension indices are combined as a geometric rather than arithmetic mean — a deliberate change that stops a very high income from compensating for a very short life. Countries are then sorted into four bands: very high (0.800 and above), high, medium and low human development. The annex carries companion measures too — the Inequality-adjusted HDI, which discounts each dimension for how unequally it is distributed, the Gender Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index and the Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI.

Two moves get you to (a) without recalling the number. First, use the stem: it hands you 58.6 for 1990 and asks for 2023. Global life expectancy has been rising roughly two to three years a decade, and India has run slightly faster than that, so a 33-year gap implies a gain in the low teens and a landing zone right around 72. Second, notice that (d) is dead on arrival. A country has exactly one life expectancy in one report-year, so 'more than one of the above' cannot be true of three mutually exclusive numbers — it would need the options to be distinct qualifying items, not rival readings of one quantity. That leaves 72, 73 and 74, and here the single discriminating fact is the Table 1 row itself: India 72.0, World 73.4, South Asia 71.9, Bangladesh 74.7. Every wrong option in this question is a real number from the very same table, attached to the wrong entity — 73 is the world, 74 is roughly Bangladesh and roughly India's female figure. That is the exam's whole method in miniature: it does not invent distractors, it borrows neighbouring rows. The defence is to memorise numbers with their owner attached, never as free-floating quantities.

• HDR 2025, Table 1: India's life expectancy at birth is 72.0 years (2023), up from 58.6 in 1990 — a gain of 13.4 years; India's HDI value is 0.685 and its rank 130 of 193 countries and territories, shared with Bangladesh, in the Medium human development band.
• India's other Table 1 components for 2023: expected years of schooling 13.0, mean years of schooling 6.9, and GNI per capita 9,047 at 2021 PPP dollars; the same table's 2022 column places India at rank 133.
• Comparators in the identical table: World 73.4 years and HDI 0.756; South Asia 71.9 and 0.672; the Medium human development group 69.3 and 0.656; the Very high human development group 80.0 and 0.914.
• India's inequality-adjusted HDI is 0.475 against an HDI of 0.685 — a loss of 30.7% to inequality; the Gender Development Index table gives female life expectancy 73.6 years and male 70.5.
• The HDI was launched in the first Human Development Report in 1990, designed by Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen; since the 2010 report the three dimension indices are aggregated as a geometric mean, and HDR 2025 is titled 'A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI'.

• Quoting an HDI rank without its report year — India is 130 of 193 in HDR 2025 and was placed differently in earlier editions; the rank moves both because India moves and because the country set and data vintages change
• Treating life expectancy at birth as a prediction of how long a newborn will actually live; it is a synthetic figure built from the mortality rates prevailing in the reference year
• Picking 'More than one of the above' on a question whose three options are competing values of a single quantity, where only one can be true by construction

BPSC asks the bare number from the newest report and expects recall — one line, one figure, ten seconds — which makes the current HDR annex worth reading as data rather than prose. UPSC has almost never asked a year's specific value; it goes after the construction and the comparison instead, asking in 1997 which third component joins literacy and life expectancy, in 2003 for the correct HDI ordering of South Asian countries, and in 1998 for the report year that introduced the Human Poverty Index.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  According to the UNDP Human Development Report 2025, India's rank on the Human Development Index was

  • (a)122
  • (b)130
  • (c)134
  • (d)142

  Answer(b) 130 — HDR 2025 places India at rank 130 of 193 countries and territories with an HDI value of 0.685, in the Medium human development band, sharing the rank with Bangladesh.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is NOT an indicator used in computing the UNDP Human Development Index?

  • (a)Life expectancy at birth
  • (b)Mean years of schooling
  • (c)Infant mortality rate
  • (d)Gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity

  Answer(c) Infant mortality rate — the HDI uses four indicators only: life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling and GNI per capita at PPP. Infant mortality is a separate health indicator that the HDI does not take.