MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 88 of 100

Correct — option (3), which nominates statements A, C and D. The campaign the question calls the 'Nutrition Promotion Campaign' of the United Nations is the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, usually written SUN, and every statement in the list can be checked against it. Statement A is correct. On 20 February 2023 the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, announced the appointment of Afshan Khan of Canada as Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement with the rank of Assistant Secretary-General; she took up the post in mid-May 2023 and succeeded Gerda Verburg of the Netherlands. Statement C is correct. The movement's declared mission is to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030, a horizon it shares with the Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular with Goal 2 on ending hunger and achieving food security and improved nutrition. Statement D is correct as a description of how the movement works. SUN is country-led rather than run from a single headquarters: countries carrying a heavy burden of malnutrition join it, appoint a government focal point, and are supported by networks of donors, civil society, business and the United Nations agencies; its membership runs to sixty-five countries together with four Indian States. That leaves statement B, which fails at once. Antony Blinken is the Secretary of State of the United States and has nothing to do with the coordination of this movement; the name has been dropped in as a familiar figure from the international news of the same period. Statements A and B are also mutually exclusive, since both claim the same single post for different people, so at most one of them can stand — and A is the one that does. With A, C and D correct and B false, option (3) is the answer.

• (1)A and B are correct — 'A and B are correct' fails on a point of logic before it fails on a point of fact. The two statements name different people for the same office — Afshan Khan in statement A and Antony Blinken in statement B are each said to have been nominated as the coordinator of this campaign — and a single coordinator's post cannot be held by two people at once. Any option admitting both is therefore self-defeating, and a candidate who notices this can strike it out without knowing who either person is. On the facts, statement A is the true one: the Secretary-General announced Afshan Khan's appointment as Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement in February 2023. Antony Blinken is the United States Secretary of State, an office concerned with American foreign policy and not with a United Nations nutrition movement. This option also discards statements C and D, both of which are accurate descriptions of the movement's aim and method.
• (2)C and D are correct — 'C and D are correct' admits two true statements and rejects a third. Statements C and D do describe the movement accurately — its aim is to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030, and it works through countries that carry a heavy malnutrition burden and choose to join. But statement A is equally true, and no correct combination can leave it out: Afshan Khan's appointment as Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement was announced by the Secretary-General on 20 February 2023. A candidate arrives at this option by reasoning that the two general statements about aims and coverage are safe while the two statements naming individuals are risky, and then rejecting both names together. That is understandable but wrong: where two statements name different people for one post, the correct response is to work out which name belongs there, not to discard both.
• (4)A, B and D are correct — 'A, B and D are correct' is the option that comes closest to the answer and misses it in the most costly way, since it retains the one false statement and drops one of the true ones. Statement B is the false item: Antony Blinken, the United States Secretary of State, was not nominated coordinator of this campaign, and the post in question went to Afshan Khan. Statement C, which this option discards, is a straightforward statement of the movement's purpose — the elimination of all forms of malnutrition by 2030 — and is not in doubt. The pattern is worth noting for its own sake: an examiner who wants a statement question to discriminate will often build one option that is correct but for a single planted item, so that a candidate who has verified three statements and stopped will choose it. Verify all four before choosing any combination.

The Scaling Up Nutrition Movement was launched in 2010 and rests on a simple organising idea: malnutrition is not solved by any one ministry or any one sector, so the response has to be assembled within each country rather than delivered to it. A member country appoints a government focal point and builds a multi-stakeholder platform; around it sit the movement's global networks of donors, civil society organisations, business and the United Nations agencies. A small secretariat, led by a Coordinator who holds the rank of Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, supports the whole and is answerable to the Secretary-General. The movement's target, ending all forms of malnutrition by 2030, deliberately tracks the Sustainable Development Goals, and the phrase 'all forms' matters: undernutrition, stunting and wasting in children, micronutrient deficiencies such as anaemia, and increasingly overweight and obesity are treated as parts of one problem rather than as separate ones. India's own nutrition effort runs on a parallel logic through POSHAN Abhiyaan, launched on 8 March 2018 at Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, which sets targets for the reduction of stunting, undernutrition, anaemia and low birth weight and tries to converge the work of several departments on the first thousand days of a child's life.

International organisations and their office-holders form a small but dependable share of the MPSC current affairs block, and the questions are usually built the same way: a campaign or agency is named, a set of statements is written about who leads it, what it aims at and where it operates, and one statement is falsified by substituting a familiar name. The substituted name is chosen to be recognisable rather than plausible — here the Secretary of State of the United States, a figure from the same year's headlines and from an entirely different institution. Two habits handle this reliably. The first is to check statements against one another before checking them against memory: two statements claiming the same office for different people cannot both be true, which halves the option set immediately. The second is to attach each name in the news to its institution as well as to its story, because a name without an institution is exactly what a distractor exploits. It is also worth reading the campaign's stated aim carefully: 'to eradicate malnutrition by 2030' is a target year that matches the Sustainable Development Goals, and target years are a favourite thing for examiners to move by five or ten years in a later paper.

• The United Nations Secretary-General announced on 20 February 2023 the appointment of Afshan Khan of Canada as Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, with the rank of Assistant Secretary-General; she took office in mid-May 2023.
• She succeeded Gerda Verburg of the Netherlands, who had led the movement before her; the Coordinator heads the SUN Movement Secretariat and works with the government focal points of the member countries.
• The Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, launched in 2010, is a country-led initiative whose declared mission is to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals and particularly Goal 2.
• Membership runs to sixty-five countries together with four Indian States, each appointing a government focal point and building a multi-stakeholder platform supported by the movement's donor, civil society, business and United Nations networks.
• Antony Blinken, named in the false statement of this question, is the Secretary of State of the United States and holds no office in this movement.

• Failing to notice that two statements claim the same single office for different people, which makes any option admitting both self-defeating
• Recognising a name from the year's headlines and admitting it without asking which institution the person actually belongs to
• Verifying three statements, finding them true, and choosing a combination without testing the fourth, which is the most expensive error available in this format because the candidate has already done the work needed to answer correctly
• Misremembering the target year of an international campaign, since 2030 is shared with the Sustainable Development Goals and is easily displaced to 2025 or 2035

International initiatives reach MPSC papers as statement sets far more often than as single-fact questions, because a movement or agency naturally carries several examinable attributes at once — who heads it, when it was founded, what it targets, which countries belong to it and which body it reports to. The examiner writes three of these faithfully and falsifies the fourth, usually by substituting a name, a year or a number. Preparation that consists of recognising campaign names will fail such questions; preparation that stores each campaign as a short record of founding year, parent body, head, target and target year will answer nearly all of them. Nutrition in particular is examined from two directions in this paper's syllabus, the international movement on one side and India's own POSHAN Abhiyaan and the National Family Health Survey indicators on the other, and a question that looks international can turn on the Indian counterpart.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, whose coordinator holds the rank of United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, aims to end all forms of malnutrition by which year ?

  • (a)2025
  • (b)2030
  • (c)2035
  • (d)2040

  Answer(b) 2030 — the movement's target year is deliberately aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, and with Goal 2 in particular, which concerns ending hunger and achieving food security and improved nutrition. The alignment is worth remembering because a great many international targets share the 2030 horizon, and an examiner testing the date is usually testing whether the candidate has confused it with a nearer or further year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following best describes the working method of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement ?

  • (a)It is a specialised agency of the United Nations that implements nutrition projects directly
  • (b)It is a country-led movement in which member countries appoint focal points and build multi-stakeholder platforms
  • (c)It is a financing institution that lends to governments for nutrition programmes
  • (d)It is a treaty body that monitors compliance with a binding convention on nutrition

  Answer(b) It is a country-led movement in which member countries appoint focal points and build multi-stakeholder platforms — the movement's premise is that malnutrition cuts across sectors and must be tackled from within each country, with global networks of donors, civil society, business and United Nations agencies supporting the national effort rather than replacing it. It is neither a specialised agency, nor a lender, nor a treaty body.