MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 45 of 100

Correct — option (3), 22 January 2015. Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was launched on that date by the Prime Minister at Panipat in Haryana, and the choice of place was itself part of the message: Haryana had among the worst child sex ratios in the country, and the launch was deliberately staged in the region where the problem was sharpest rather than in the capital. The 'last revised statistics of child sex Ratio' the stem refers to is the 2011 Census, which recorded 918 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group — down from 945 in 1991 and 927 in 2001, a continuous fall across two decades even as overall literacy, income and the adult sex ratio improved. That divergence is what made the figure alarming: it could not be explained by poverty or by neglect alone, because it was worst in some of the richest districts, which pointed at prenatal sex determination and sex-selective elimination. The scheme was designed as a tri-ministerial effort, run jointly by the Ministry of Women and Child Development with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the ministry responsible for school education, and it began in one hundred districts selected for their low child sex ratio. Its three declared objectives are to prevent gender-biased sex-selective elimination, to ensure the survival and protection of the girl child, and to ensure her education and participation. The date is worth fixing precisely, because three of the four printed choices differ from it by only a year or by three days.

• (1)22 January 2016 — This gives the right day and month but the wrong year. By January 2016 the scheme was already a year old and moving into its expansion phase, with additional districts being added to the original hundred low-child-sex-ratio districts chosen at launch. The trap is built for a candidate who has memorised '22 January' as the anniversary but not fixed the year to it, and the paper offers two such year-shifted choices so that recalling only the day is not enough to answer.
• (2)22 January 2018 — This is the same day and month with the year moved three years forward. 2018 is a real landmark in the scheme's history — that is the year Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was widened from its district-selective coverage to a pan-India programme running in every district of the country — so a candidate who has read about the expansion may attach the launch date to it. But expansion is not launch: the scheme had been running for three years by then, and the question asks when it was launched.
• (4)25 January 2015 — This keeps the correct year and moves the date three days later, which is the sharpest of the three traps because the last week of January is crowded with related observances: 24 January is National Girl Child Day, marked annually for precisely this cause, and 25 January is National Voters' Day. A candidate who remembers that the launch sat in that cluster of dates but not which day it fell on is exactly who this choice is written for. The launch itself was on 22 January 2015.

The child sex ratio, defined in Indian censuses as the number of girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, is a more sensitive indicator of discrimination against girls than the overall sex ratio, because it is measured over a short and recent span of births and is not blurred by differences in adult mortality or migration. Its fall from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001 and 918 in 2011 coincided with the spread of ultrasound technology, and the pattern across districts made the mechanism plain: the ratio was often worst in prosperous, well-served districts, which is the signature of deliberate prenatal selection rather than of poverty. The legal response came first, in the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which prohibits sex determination and regulates the use of diagnostic equipment; Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was designed as the social and administrative complement to it, combining enforcement of that law with a mass communication campaign and with district-level convergence between health, education and child development staff. It carries no large cash entitlement of its own; its budget is dominated by advocacy and communication, and the outcome it is judged against is the sex ratio at birth reported by district civil registration.

MPSC's current-affairs and social-schemes questions reward a candidate who has fixed the launch date, launch place, implementing ministry and target group of each flagship scheme, because that is the level at which the options are distinguished — three of the four choices here differ from the answer only in a digit. The habit worth building is to store each scheme as a five-part record: year, place, ministry, objective, and the statistic that provoked it. That last element is what this stem is testing indirectly, since it ties the launch to the child sex ratio figure from the census rather than asking for the figure itself. Schemes concerning women and children recur particularly often in Maharashtra's papers, and Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao is now administered as a component of the umbrella Mission Shakti programme, so a question may test either the scheme's own history or its present administrative home.

• Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was launched on 22 January 2015 at Panipat, Haryana, a state then reporting one of the country's lowest child sex ratios, and began in one hundred districts selected for that indicator.
• The 2011 Census recorded a child sex ratio of 918 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, down from 945 in 1991 and 927 in 2001 — a fall sustained across two decades of otherwise improving social indicators.
• The scheme is a tri-ministerial initiative of the Ministry of Women and Child Development together with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the ministry responsible for school education, run through district-level convergence.
• Its three objectives are to prevent gender-biased sex-selective elimination, to ensure the survival and protection of the girl child, and to ensure the education and participation of the girl child.
• It was expanded in 2018 from its original selected districts to cover all districts of the country, and it is now implemented as a component of the umbrella Mission Shakti programme for women's safety and empowerment.

• Remembering the day and month of a scheme's launch but not the year, when a paper offers the same date under two or three different years
• Confusing the launch of a scheme with the date of its later expansion or its rebranding under an umbrella programme
• Mixing up the cluster of late-January observances — 22 January as this launch date, 24 January as National Girl Child Day, 25 January as National Voters' Day
• Treating Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao as a cash-transfer scheme, when its own budget is dominated by advocacy, communication and district-level convergence rather than by an entitlement

Flagship schemes appear in MPSC papers as single-fact recall — launch date, launch place, nodal ministry, first district or state covered, target beneficiary — and the distractors are usually built by moving one digit or one word. The Commission also links a scheme to the statistic that prompted it, as this stem does with the census child sex ratio, so a candidate who has stored the provoking data along with the scheme can answer either half of such a pairing. Expect questions that ask which ministries jointly run a scheme, or which umbrella programme a once-standalone scheme now sits inside, since both have changed for several women-and-child programmes in recent years.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign was launched in January 2015 from which of the following places ?

  • (a)Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan
  • (b)Panipat, Haryana
  • (c)Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
  • (d)Ahmedabad, Gujarat

  Answer(b) Panipat, Haryana — the launch was deliberately staged in a state then recording one of the country's lowest child sex ratios, and the scheme began in one hundred districts selected on that same indicator. Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan is associated with the scheme's later nationwide expansion rather than with its launch.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The child sex ratio recorded by the 2011 Census of India, which provided the statistical justification for the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign, was closest to which of the following ?

  • (a)945 girls per 1,000 boys
  • (b)927 girls per 1,000 boys
  • (c)918 girls per 1,000 boys
  • (d)940 girls per 1,000 boys

  Answer(c) 918 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group. The figure had fallen from 945 in 1991 and 927 in 2001, a continuous decline over two decades; 940 is the overall sex ratio of the whole population recorded in the same census, which is a different measure and should not be substituted for the child figure.