MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 36 of 100

Correct — option (4), which says statements (a) and (b) only are correct. The Three Year Action Agenda is a NITI Aayog document recommending policy changes and programmes for action from 2017-18 to 2019-20, described in its own preface as the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission period. Statement (a) is in it plainly: the Agenda's agriculture chapter is headed 'Agriculture: Doubling Farmers' Incomes' and opens by recording that the Prime Minister has called for doubling farmers' incomes by 2022, restating the target elsewhere as doubling farmers' income by 2022-23 over the level of 2015-16; the chapter then sets out how to get there, through market reform so that farmers receive remunerative prices, higher productivity from irrigation, faster seed replacement and precision agriculture. Statement (b) is in it too: the energy chapter records that India has already committed to bring electricity to every village by May 2018 and to every household by 2022, and proposes the more ambitious goal of supplying all households on a twenty-four-hour basis. Statement (c) is not in it. The document contains no target of establishing central universities in all states; its higher education agenda is a different programme altogether — designating twenty world class universities, ten public and ten private, that would be moved out of the ordinary regulatory system, granting autonomy to the best colleges and universities, reforming regulation into a tiered system, creating project-specific research grants and expanding vocational and profession-led education. With (a) and (b) standing and (c) failing, the row that names the first two and no others is the answer, and that is option (4).

• (1)(a) only is correct. — This row accepts only the farm income target and rejects the electricity one, but the Agenda carries both. Its energy chapter states directly that India has already committed to bring electricity to every village by May 2018 and to every household by 2022, and then goes further, proposing that the country aim at electricity for all households on a twenty-four-hour basis. The same chapter carries the related household energy targets of the period — LPG connections under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana and the elimination of black carbon by 2022. A candidate lands here by recalling the agriculture target, which was the most publicised element of the document, and treating the rest as unfamiliar; a row that accepts a single statement should always be checked against the possibility that a second one also holds.
• (2)(b) and (c) only are correct. — This row accepts the electricity target and the central universities target and rejects the farm income one, so it gets both of its judgements wrong. Doubling farmers' incomes by 2022 is not merely present in the Agenda, it is the title of an entire chapter and one of the document's best-known commitments. The central universities claim, by contrast, appears nowhere in it: the phrase does not occur in the document, and its higher education proposals run in a quite different direction, towards autonomy for a small number of designated world class universities rather than towards new central institutions in every state. A row that pairs a real target with an invented one is the standard way of building a distractor, and it is defeated by testing each statement separately rather than judging the pair.
• (3)(a) and (c) only are correct. — This row accepts the farm income target, which is correct, and the establishment of central universities in all states by 2022, which is not. The Agenda's education chapter identifies the problem in higher education as quality rather than the number of institutions — it notes that the gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education had risen from 20.8 per cent in 2011-12 to 24.5 per cent in 2015-16, and that an assessment of 150,000 engineering graduates in 2016 found only eighteen per cent employable in software services in a functional role — and its proposals are for less regulation, more autonomous governance and outcome-based oversight, including the identification of twenty world class universities. Nothing in that programme involves creating central universities across the states, and this is the row that a candidate reaches by assuming that any plausible-sounding target belongs to a document they have not read.

NITI Aayog, the National Institution for Transforming India, came into existence on 1 January 2015 as the government's principal policy think tank, replacing the Planning Commission. Its arrival ended the five-year plan process — the twelfth plan, which ran to 2016-17, was the last — and in May 2016 the Prime Minister's Office asked NITI Aayog to prepare instead a Fifteen Year Vision, a Seven Year Strategy and a Three Year Action Agenda. The Action Agenda was released first, because it was of immediate relevance to policy, and it covers 2017-18 to 2019-20, the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission's award period. It is a wide document, running across agriculture, industry, urban and rural development, infrastructure, energy, education, health, governance and the environment, and it is deliberately written as a list of action points rather than as an argument. Two of its most quoted commitments are the doubling of farmers' incomes by 2022 and electricity for every household by 2022, both of which the document treats as goals already adopted by the government rather than as its own inventions. Unlike a five-year plan, the Agenda does not allocate money; it recommends, and it explicitly includes actions for states to take alongside the Centre.

MPSC examines NITI Aayog on two fronts: what it is, meaning its composition, its status as a non-statutory body and how it differs from the Planning Commission it replaced, and what it has produced, meaning its documents, indices and flagship recommendations. This question belongs to the second. Its construction is the ordinary one for a three-statement item — two real targets and one plausible invention — and the invention is chosen carefully: establishing central universities in all states sounds like the kind of thing a national planning document might say, and it can only be rejected by someone who has some sense of what the document actually contains. That is worth noting as a general principle. A statement in a policy question is not true because it sounds like good policy; it is true only if the named document or scheme actually contains it. The other habit to carry away is precision about periods. The stem says 2017-2020 while the document covers the financial years 2017-18 to 2019-20, and questions sometimes turn on exactly that kind of difference.

• NITI Aayog came into existence on 1 January 2015, replacing the Planning Commission, and in May 2016 the Prime Minister's Office asked it to prepare a Fifteen Year Vision, a Seven Year Strategy and a Three Year Action Agenda.
• The Three Year Action Agenda covers 2017-18 to 2019-20, described in its preface as the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission period, and marks the end of the five-year plan process, the twelfth plan having been the last.
• The Agenda's agriculture chapter is titled 'Agriculture: Doubling Farmers' Incomes' and records the goal of doubling farmers' income by 2022-23 over the level of 2015-16.
• Its energy chapter states that India has committed to bring electricity to every village by May 2018 and to every household by 2022, and proposes the further goal of supplying all households on a twenty-four-hour basis.
• Its higher education proposals are the designation of twenty world class universities, ten public and ten private, autonomy for the best institutions, a tiered regulatory system, project-specific research grants and expanded vocational education — not the creation of central universities in every state.

• Accepting a statement because it sounds like sensible policy; a document contains what it contains, and the invented statement in this question is designed to sound entirely plausible
• Confusing the periods — the Agenda covers the financial years 2017-18 to 2019-20 even though the stem compresses this to 2017-2020, and the farm income target is measured against 2015-16 and reached by 2022-23
• Treating NITI Aayog's documents as plans that allocate resources; the Agenda recommends actions and has no allocative function, unlike the five-year plans it replaced
• Attributing to the Agenda targets that belong to other schemes, or attributing to the government targets that the Agenda merely proposes; the document distinguishes between commitments already made and its own recommendations

NITI Aayog appears in MPSC papers as institutional questions about its status, composition and difference from the Planning Commission, and as content questions about its documents, indices and targets. The statement-cluster form used here is the commonest way of testing content, and it usually mixes two real elements with one invented one. A second recurring form is the matching question pairing an index or report with the body that publishes it, where NITI Aayog's outputs have to be separated from those of ministries, the Reserve Bank and international agencies. Preparation is a one-page note on the institution itself and a list of its major documents and indices with their years and their headline findings, updated each year, since this is a topic where the Commission expects current knowledge.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Three Year Action Agenda of NITI Aayog covers which period, and what replaced the Five Year Plans?

  • (a)2015-16 to 2017-18; it was replaced by the Fourteenth Finance Commission award
  • (b)2017-18 to 2019-20; the Five Year Plans were replaced by a Fifteen Year Vision, a Seven Year Strategy and a Three Year Action Agenda
  • (c)2019-20 to 2021-22; the Five Year Plans were replaced by annual budgets alone
  • (d)2016-17 to 2018-19; the Five Year Plans were replaced by the Aspirational Districts Programme

  Answer(b) 2017-18 to 2019-20; the Five Year Plans were replaced by a Fifteen Year Vision, a Seven Year Strategy and a Three Year Action Agenda. The Agenda's own preface describes its period as the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission, and records that the Prime Minister's Office asked NITI Aayog in May 2016 to prepare the three documents. The twelfth plan, which ran to 2016-17, was the last of the five-year plans.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was proposed in the higher education section of NITI Aayog's Three Year Action Agenda?

  • (a)establishing a central university in every state by 2022
  • (b)designating twenty world class universities, ten public and ten private, and moving them out of the ordinary regulatory system
  • (c)raising the gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education to fifty per cent by 2020
  • (d)converting all state universities into deemed universities

  Answer(b) designating twenty world class universities, ten public and ten private, and moving them out of the ordinary regulatory system — the Agenda's higher education proposals are autonomy, a tiered regulatory system, project-specific research grants and vocational education, on the argument that the problem is quality rather than the number of institutions. The document notes that the tertiary gross enrolment ratio rose from 20.8 per cent in 2011-12 to 24.5 per cent in 2015-16, and it contains no target for central universities in the states.