BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 36 of 150

Correct — A, 1 and 2. The Capability Poverty Measure has a fixed three-item definition, so the safe route is to write that list down first and only then test the four statements against it. UNDP introduced the CPM in the Human Development Report 1996, where Technical Note 3 defines it as a simple index composed of three indicators reflecting the percentage of the population with capability shortfalls in three basic dimensions of human development — living a healthy, well-nourished life; having the capability of safe and healthy reproduction; and being literate and knowledgeable. The three matching indicators are the percentage of children under five who are underweight, the percentage of births unattended by trained health personnel, and the percentage of women aged 15 years and above who are illiterate. Statement 1 therefore stands: underweight children under five is exactly the health-and-nourishment proxy, and it was chosen because a small child's weight silently aggregates the mother's own nutrition, household food availability, the sanitation environment and the disease burden. Statement 2 stands as well: female illiteracy at ages 15 and above is the education-and-knowledge leg, and the phrase used in the statement is close to UNDP's own dimension label. Statement 3 fails — the variable is female illiteracy, and the choice was deliberate, UNDP's reasoning being that through female illiteracy a country is evaluated by its treatment of its most deprived group. Male illiteracy appears nowhere in the index. Statement 4 fails too — access to clean drinking water is not a CPM component; the 1996 report mentions potable water only as an example of an indicator of *potential* access and as one of the conditions that underweight status indirectly reflects. Two statements survive, so the code is (a). The Commission's own disposal of objections on 31-10-2025 says precisely this: the CPM does not consider male illiteracy or clean drinking water, so statements 1 and 2 are the correct ones.

• (b)1, 2 and 3 — Adds statement 3, the trap the whole question is built around. The CPM's literacy variable is specifically the illiteracy rate among women aged 15 and above, and UNDP picked the female rate on purpose so that a country is judged by how it treats its most deprived group. Male illiteracy is not a CPM indicator in any form, so every code containing statement 3 collapses. A candidate who has revised the index as generic 'adult illiteracy' cannot tell (a) from (b) and lands here.
• (c)Only 1 — Too narrow — this is the answer of someone who remembers the CPM as a health-and-nutrition measure and forgets it has a literacy leg. Female adult illiteracy is not an optional extra; it is one of three equally weighted components, and dropping it leaves you asserting a two-thirds index. The give-away sits inside statement 2 itself: 'deprivation in education and knowledge' echoes UNDP's own dimension label from Technical Note 3 almost word for word.
• (d)More than one of the above — BPSC attaches this catch-all to most statement questions on the 2025 paper, and here it can be eliminated on pure logic before any knowledge of the CPM is applied. Codes (a), (b) and (c) name three mutually inconsistent sets of statements — {1,2}, {1,2,3} and {1} — so at most one of them can be true of the same four statements. Once (a) is established, no second code can also be correct and the combined option has nothing left to combine.

The CPM grows out of Amartya Sen's capability approach, which recasts poverty as a shortfall in what a person is actually able to be and do rather than a shortage of money. UNDP built the index accordingly, from outcome indicators only, and three design choices define it. First, it counts shortfalls rather than averages: each component is the share of the population failing to clear a basic capability, which makes the CPM a deprivation-headcount style measure where the Human Development Index is an average-achievement one. Second, the three percentages carry equal weight and are averaged — UNDP's worked illustration is Viet Nam, where about 45 per cent of under-fives were underweight against only 5 per cent of births unattended, giving a CPM of roughly 20 per cent, a number no single indicator would have produced. Third, the CPM contains no income variable at all, which is exactly what separates it from the HDI, whose third dimension is GNI per capita at purchasing power parity. The measure is one link in a chain: CPM in HDR 1996, the Human Poverty Index in HDR 1997, and the Multidimensional Poverty Index that replaced the HPI in HDR 2010.

Treat this as a list-recall question wearing statement-question clothing. The four statements are not four independent facts to be weighed for plausibility; they are four probes at one fixed three-item list, and each becomes decidable the instant you can write that list down. So write it first — underweight under-fives, births unattended by trained personnel, women 15+ illiterate — and read the statements afterwards. Statements 1 and 2 map onto the first and third items. The single fact that discriminates is the gender attached to the illiteracy variable: female, not male. That one word kills statement 3 and with it option (b), and it is the only place in the question where knowledge, rather than logic, is doing the work. Statement 4 is a trap of a different species. 'Lack of access to clean drinking water' is a genuine deprivation indicator — it simply belongs to the Multidimensional Poverty Index's standard-of-living dimension, alongside sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, housing and assets, not to the CPM's three. Candidates who revise the UNDP indices as one undifferentiated blob import MPI indicators into the CPM and lose the mark. Notice finally what the paper never offers: unattended births, the third genuine component, appears in no statement at all. That omission tells you the examiner is testing recall of a fixed list, not reasoning from first principles — nothing in the phrase 'capability poverty' would ever tell you that drinking water is out.

• The Capability Poverty Measure was introduced by UNDP in the Human Development Report 1996; Technical Note 3 (pp. 108-110) defines it and tabulates it for 101 developing countries.
• Its three indicators are the percentage of children under five who are underweight, the percentage of births unattended by trained health personnel, and the percentage of women aged 15 years and above who are illiterate — mapping respectively to nourishment, safe reproduction, and literacy and knowledge.
• The three variables carry equal weight and are averaged; UNDP's illustration is Viet Nam, where 45 per cent underweight under-fives and 5 per cent unattended births yield a CPM of about 20 per cent.
• The CPM uses no income or consumption variable, unlike the Human Development Index whose third dimension is GNI per capita at purchasing power parity, and it measures capability shortfalls rather than average achievement.
• The UNDP sequence runs CPM (HDR 1996) to Human Poverty Index (HDR 1997, as HPI-1 for developing and HPI-2 for OECD countries) to Multidimensional Poverty Index (HDR 2010, built with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative); on the Indian version of that successor, NITI Aayog's National MPI progress review of 2023 put Bihar's headcount at 33.76 per cent in 2019-21 — the highest of any State — down from 51.89 per cent in 2015-16.

• Importing the Multidimensional Poverty Index's indicator list — which does include drinking water, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, housing and assets — into the much shorter CPM.
• Writing 'adult illiteracy' where the CPM specifies female illiteracy at ages 15 and above; that single word is what separates option (a) from option (b).
• Assuming that a poverty measure must contain an income or consumption variable — the CPM deliberately does not, and that is the cleanest way to tell it apart from the HDI.

BPSC hands you four statements and a code and expects each statement to be checked separately against a remembered list; across the 2025 paper it builds its wrong statements by swapping a single word ('female' becomes 'male') or by importing an indicator from a neighbouring index, so half-knowledge scores worse than none under the one-third negative marking. UPSC almost never names the CPM itself, but it drills the identical list-discipline on the siblings — in 2012 it asked which deprivations the Multidimensional Poverty Index actually covers and rejected macro variables that merely sounded relevant, and in 1998 it asked which Human Development Report first carried the Human Poverty Index. Learn each UNDP index as a fixed set of components plus its report year and both styles fall to the same preparation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is NOT a component of the UNDP's Capability Poverty Measure?

  • (a)Percentage of children under five who are underweight
  • (b)Percentage of births unattended by trained health personnel
  • (c)Percentage of women aged 15 and above who are illiterate
  • (d)Per capita income at purchasing power parity

  Answer(d) Per capita income at purchasing power parity — the CPM deliberately carries no income variable; per capita income at PPP is the third dimension of the Human Development Index, not of the CPM.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Capability Poverty Measure was introduced by the UNDP in the Human Development Report of which year ?

  • (a)1990
  • (b)1994
  • (c)1996
  • (d)1997

  Answer(c) 1996 — the CPM appeared in HDR 1996; the Human Poverty Index followed in HDR 1997 and the Multidimensional Poverty Index in HDR 2010. 1990 is the year of the first Human Development Report and of the HDI itself.