MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 36 of 100

Correct — option (1), Human. The sentence is a compressed statement of the oldest dilemma in energy policy: generating power damages the environment, and the reason societies accept that damage is that energy is a direct input into people's lives. The term of art for that value is human development — the expansion of people's capabilities and choices, conventionally measured on three dimensions of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living, and expressed in the Human Development Index that the United Nations Development Programme has published since 1990. Energy connects to every one of those three dimensions in a way no other kind of development does. Electricity lets a child study after dark and a clinic refrigerate vaccines; a clean cooking fuel replaces the biomass whose smoke is a leading cause of respiratory illness among women and children in poor households; reliable power underpins the irrigation, small industry and services from which a decent standard of living is earned. That is why access to affordable, reliable and modern energy for all was made a Sustainable Development Goal in its own right rather than being folded into an economic target. Set against that, environmental degradation — mined land, dammed rivers, drowned forests, emissions from coal combustion — is a real cost that a developing country has historically been willing to bear, on the argument that human development takes priority. The blank in this sentence is asking for the noun that names that priority, and none of the other three options fills it: cultural, political and social development are all genuine concepts in their own fields, but none of them is the value conventionally weighed against environmental damage when a country decides to build a power station. Note that the whole debate exists in order to be superseded: sustainable development, as defined in the Brundtland Report of 1987, is precisely the attempt to stop treating human development and environmental protection as a trade-off at all.

• (2)Cultural — Cultural development refers to the growth and transmission of a society's arts, languages, heritage, beliefs and traditions, and to the institutions that sustain them. It is a real field with real policy content — heritage conservation, language promotion, support for the performing arts — but it has no standing in the argument about whether to accept environmental damage in order to generate power. No one builds a thermal station or a dam for the sake of cultural development, and the environmental cost of energy is never justified in those terms.
• (3)Political — Political development is a concept from political science describing the growth of state capacity, the strengthening of institutions, the widening of participation and the consolidation of democratic practice. It has nothing to do with the trade-off the sentence describes. Energy projects certainly have politics attached to them — over land acquisition, displacement and the siting of plants — but the presence of political conflict around a project is not the same as political development being the goal for which environmental damage is accepted.
• (4)Social — This is the closest of the three wrong options and the one that costs candidates the question. Social development, meaning improvement in health, education, equity and social institutions, overlaps substantially with human development in ordinary usage, and a candidate who reads the sentence loosely will find it acceptable. But human development is the established technical term in exactly this debate: it is the concept the Human Development Index measures, the concept the annual Human Development Reports are written about, and the concept conventionally set against environmental degradation in the development-versus-environment argument. Where a precise term exists for the idea being tested, the broader near-synonym is the distractor.

Human development is the idea that the purpose of development is the enlargement of people's choices and capabilities, not the growth of national income for its own sake. It was given institutional form by the United Nations Development Programme, whose first Human Development Report appeared in 1990 under the direction of Mahbub ul Haq, drawing on Amartya Sen's argument that well-being should be judged by what people are actually able to do and to be rather than by what they own. The Human Development Index that accompanies the reports combines three dimensions — life expectancy at birth for a long and healthy life, schooling for access to knowledge, and gross national income per head for a decent standard of living — precisely so that a country cannot score well on income alone. Energy sits at the base of all three, which is why access to modern energy is treated as a development objective rather than merely as an industrial input, and why the seventh Sustainable Development Goal commits to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. The tension with the environment is unavoidable at the level of any single project, since every method of generating power imposes some cost on land, water, air or ecosystems; sustainable development, as the Brundtland Report defined it in 1987, is the attempt to meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.

This is a one-line fill-in-the-blank of the sort MPSC uses to test whether a candidate knows the standard vocabulary of a debate rather than its details, and the whole question turns on distinguishing a precise term from a looser one that means something similar in everyday speech. The stem itself is compressed to the point of terseness, so the safe reading is to ask which of the four adjectives forms a recognised, established phrase with 'development' in the context of energy and the environment — and 'human development' is the only one of the four that does so as a standing term of art with an index, an annual report series and a large literature behind it. The transferable habit is to prefer the option that names an established concept over the option that merely makes a grammatical sentence, because examiners construct blanks around fixed technical phrases.

• Human development is the expansion of people's capabilities and choices, judged by what people are able to do and to be rather than by income alone.
• The United Nations Development Programme has published the Human Development Report annually since 1990; the first was directed by Mahbub ul Haq, drawing on Amartya Sen's capability approach.
• The Human Development Index combines three dimensions: life expectancy at birth, access to knowledge through schooling, and gross national income per head.
• Access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all is the seventh Sustainable Development Goal, reflecting energy's role as an input to health, education and livelihoods.
• Sustainable development was defined in the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, in 1987 as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

• Choosing 'social' because it reads naturally in the sentence; human development is the established term in the development-versus-environment debate and the one an index actually measures
• Treating the four adjectives as interchangeable synonyms for progress, when each names a distinct field with its own literature and its own indicators
• Confusing human development with economic growth; the whole point of the concept is that income alone is an inadequate measure of development
• Reading the sentence as a claim about what ought to happen rather than as a question about which technical term completes a standing phrase

MPSC uses one-line fill-in-the-blank questions to test vocabulary that a candidate either has or has not encountered in its technical sense, and the wrong options are almost always adjacent terms from neighbouring fields. On development topics the recurring family is human, social, economic, cultural and political development, along with sustainable and inclusive development, and the Commission expects each to be attached to its own definition, its own index where one exists and its own institutional home. The best preparation is to be able to say, for each term, who measures it and how.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Human Development Index published by the United Nations Development Programme combines which three dimensions ?

  • (a)Life expectancy, access to knowledge, and gross national income per head
  • (b)Literacy, employment, and industrial output
  • (c)Infant mortality, sex ratio, and urbanisation
  • (d)Poverty ratio, calorie intake, and housing quality

  Answer(a) Life expectancy, access to knowledge, and gross national income per head — standing respectively for a long and healthy life, education, and a decent standard of living. The index was designed so that a country cannot score well on income alone, which is the central claim of the human development approach.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The definition of sustainable development as 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' comes from which document ?

  • (a)The first Human Development Report, 1990
  • (b)The Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, 1987
  • (c)The Stockholm Declaration, 1972
  • (d)The Kyoto Protocol, 1997

  Answer(b) The Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, 1987 — produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development, it supplied the definition that has framed the environment-and-development debate ever since. The first Human Development Report of 1990 introduced the Human Development Index, a related but separate contribution.