CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 76 of 120

Correct — C, A long-term strategy to support sustainable growth in the marine and maritime sectors. Blue growth is the ocean-economy vocabulary that India adopted from international usage, and 'blue' in it always means the sea. The European Commission's 2012 Communication that popularised the term set it out as an effort to harness the untapped potential of Europe's oceans, seas and coasts for jobs and growth, and named five focus areas — offshore renewable energy, aquaculture, coastal and cruise tourism, marine mineral resources and blue biotechnology. The Food and Agriculture Organization uses the same phrase for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture. In India the label covers the same ground: fisheries and aquaculture, ports and shipping, coastal tourism, offshore energy, marine biotechnology and deep-sea resources, pursued so that the resource base survives the growth. Every part of the option — long-term, strategy, marine and maritime — is doing work here.

• (a)Upgradation of Indian Air Force — Colour-word bait. The Indian Air Force's own colour associations have nothing to do with the term; blue growth is an ocean-economy idea and no defence programme carries the name.
• (b)Discouraging farmers from using pesticides — That is the territory of organic and natural farming programmes. The green family of terms covers land and crops; blue covers water and the sea.
• (d)Socio-economic empowerment of India's blue collar workers in the unorganized sector — The most attractive wrong answer, because 'blue collar' is the one other familiar use of the word. Blue growth is not a labour-welfare term at all; the workers it is about are fishers and seafarers, and only incidentally.

The blue economy is the sum of economic activity drawn from the ocean — fisheries and aquaculture, shipping and ports, coastal and cruise tourism, offshore energy, seabed minerals and marine biotechnology — measured together with the health of the ocean that supports it. Blue growth is the policy version of that idea: growing those sectors on terms that do not exhaust them. India's interest is large by geography, with a mainland coastline of about 7,500 kilometres including islands and an exclusive economic zone of roughly 2.02 million square kilometres.

This is a definition question dressed up as a scheme question, and the trick is the adjective. Three of the four options attach 'blue' to something other than the sea — an air force, a farming practice, a category of worker — and only one attaches it to water. Note that the stem puts 'Blue growth' in quotation marks and calls it India's, which invites a hunt for a specific named Indian scheme; there is no need to find one, because the term is used in India in its ordinary international sense. Related Indian instruments a candidate may meet under this heading are the fisheries development programmes that carry the Blue Revolution label and the later work on a blue-economy policy framework by the Ministry of Earth Sciences.

• Blue growth refers to sustainable growth in the marine and maritime sectors taken as a whole, not to any single scheme.
• The European Commission's 2012 Blue Growth Communication named five focus areas: blue energy, aquaculture, maritime and coastal tourism, marine mineral resources and blue biotechnology.
• The Food and Agriculture Organization uses blue growth for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture development.
• India's exclusive economic zone is about 2.02 million square kilometres, which is what gives the idea its weight here.
• The colour vocabulary is worth learning as a set — green for land and forests, blue for oceans, white for dairy, yellow for oilseeds, pink for prawn and meat processing.

• Reading 'blue' as blue collar, which is the strongest distractor here.
• Assuming blue growth must be one named central scheme; it is a policy idea covering several.
• Confusing the Blue Revolution, a fisheries production programme, with blue growth, the broader ocean-economy strategy.

Usually as a one-line 'what does the term refer to' item, with the other options built on rival uses of the same colour word.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'Blue Revolution' in India refers to development in which one of the following sectors?

  • (a)Dairy
  • (b)Fisheries and aquaculture
  • (c)Oilseeds
  • (d)Poultry

  Answer(b) Fisheries and aquaculture — the blue colour code in India's sectoral vocabulary always points to water and fish.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is not usually counted as part of the blue economy?

  • (a)Coastal and cruise tourism
  • (b)Offshore wind energy
  • (c)Marine biotechnology
  • (d)Inland coal mining

  Answer(d) Inland coal mining — it is a land-based extractive activity with no maritime component, unlike the other three.