MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 41 of 100

Correct — option (1), six categories. The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–12) was built on the proposition that the growth of GDP is a means and not an end, and the Plan document turned that proposition into a list of things that could actually be counted. Chapter 1 of Volume I, 'Inclusive Growth: Vision and Strategy', states it at paragraph 1.150: 'Following this approach, 27 monitorable targets have been identified at the national level of which 13 can be disaggregated at the level of individual States.' Those 27 targets are then printed under six numbered heads, and the heads are exactly what this question asks for — (i) Income and Poverty, (ii) Education, (iii) Health, (iv) Women and Children, (v) Infrastructure and (vi) Environment. Income and Poverty carries the figures most often quoted from the Plan: average GDP growth of 9 per cent a year, agricultural GDP growth of 4 per cent, the generation of 58 million new work opportunities, unemployment among the educated brought below 5 per cent, a 20 per cent rise in the real wage rate of unskilled workers, and a ten percentage-point cut in the head-count ratio of consumption poverty. Education carries the reduction of the elementary dropout rate from 52.2 per cent in 2003–04 to 20 per cent by 2011–12, literacy of 85 per cent for persons aged seven and above, a gender literacy gap of ten percentage points, and a rise in the share of each cohort going on to higher education from 10 to 15 per cent. Health carries an infant mortality rate of 28, a maternal mortality ratio of 1 per 1,000 live births, a total fertility rate of 2.1, clean drinking water for all, and the halving of child malnutrition and of anaemia among women and girls. Women and Children carries a 0–6 sex ratio of 935 by 2011–12 and 950 by 2016–17, a third of the beneficiaries of government schemes being women and girl children, and a safe childhood free of compulsion to work. Infrastructure carries electricity for every village and BPL household, all-weather roads, a telephone in every village with broadband by 2012, and homestead sites for all by 2012. Environment carries five percentage points more forest and tree cover, WHO air-quality standards in the major cities, the treatment of all urban waste water, and a 20 per cent gain in energy efficiency. Three separate numbers live in that one passage — 27 targets, six heads, 13 targets disaggregated to the States — and the question asks only for the second of the three.

• (2)5 categories — Five is a genuine number in this part of the Plan, but it counts something else. The Education head lists exactly five monitorable targets — the elementary dropout rate, minimum standards of educational attainment, 85 per cent literacy, the ten-point gender literacy gap and the higher-education cohort rising from 10 to 15 per cent — so a candidate who has actually read the chapter may carry away a five and attach it to the wrong noun. Five is also where a reader lands who folds Women and Children into Health, which feels natural because several of the child targets are health targets. The Plan does not do that: it prints the two as separate numbered heads, and separating them was a deliberate signal about what inclusive growth was meant to mean. The question asks how the Commission's source document divided the targets, not how a reader might reasonably group them.
• (3)4 categories — Four is a live figure in the very same passage — 4 per cent a year is the Eleventh Plan's target for agricultural GDP growth, one of the six targets sitting under Income and Poverty — and numbers of that kind migrate easily to a neighbouring question under examination pressure. As a count of heads it is too small, and it is too small in a diagnosable way: a candidate who reduces the list to four is usually remembering the familiar quartet of growth, education, health and infrastructure and dropping the two heads that made the Eleventh Plan distinctive as a planning document, namely Women and Children, and Environment. Those two are precisely the heads the Plan added to make the word 'inclusive' in its title mean something measurable, so losing them loses the point of the exercise as well as the count.
• (4)9 categories — Nine is the most tempting of the three wrong numbers, because it is the headline figure of the Eleventh Plan itself: an average GDP growth rate of 9 per cent a year is the first monitorable target printed under Income and Poverty, and it is the number that every summary of the Plan leads with. A candidate who has revised the Plan through its growth target rather than through its structure will have a nine ready to hand and no head-count at all. There is a second route to the same error — the Ninth Plan is a real plan in the same sequence, and a candidate juggling the Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth under time pressure can slide an ordinal into a slot meant for a count. Neither route touches what the question asks, which is how many heads the 27 targets were printed under.

India's Five Year Plans were drawn up by the Planning Commission, which was set up by a Cabinet resolution in 1950 and replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015; the Twelfth Plan (2012–17) was the last of the series. The Eleventh Plan, running from 2007 to 2012, was titled 'Towards Faster and More Inclusive Growth', and the second half of that title is what the monitorable targets were invented to police. The Plan's own argument was that a headline growth rate can rise while literacy, child nutrition, the sex ratio and the air of the major cities all stay where they are, so growth had to be tied to outcomes that could be counted separately from it. That produced 27 national targets under six heads — Income and Poverty, Education, Health, Women and Children, Infrastructure and Environment — covering everything from the head-count ratio of consumption poverty to the treatment of urban waste water. A second device made the targets bite: 13 of the 27 were disaggregated into targets for individual States, because most of the programmes that could move them are run by State governments rather than by the Union. Reading the six heads in order is a compact way of seeing what Indian planning had come to mean by the end of its life — an income head that still leads, three social heads that had grown to outnumber it, and an environment head that had arrived last.

MPSC's economy section returns to the Five Year Plans because they are finite, documented and countable, and a question can be built from any of their numbers. This one is built from a structural number rather than a substantive one: it does not ask what any target was, only how the target list was organised. That is a deliberate test of whether a candidate has opened the Plan's own chapter or has read a summary of it, because a summary reproduces the growth rate and the poverty target and almost never reproduces the six headings. The safe preparation is to hold a plan-by-plan card carrying, for each Plan, its period, its title or stated theme, its growth target and any structural fact of this kind, and then to read the Eleventh and Twelfth Plans one level deeper because they are recent enough to be asked about in detail. Note also the shape of the option set here: all four choices are bare numbers with the same noun after them, so there is nothing in the wording to reason from and nothing to eliminate by plausibility. When a question offers four naked numbers, it is asking for recall and nothing else, and the honest response in the hall is to answer it if you hold the number and to weigh the quarter-mark penalty if you do not.

• The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–12), titled 'Towards Faster and More Inclusive Growth', identified 27 monitorable targets at the national level, and paragraph 1.150 of Volume I records that 13 of the 27 can be disaggregated to the level of individual States.
• The 27 targets are printed under six heads: (i) Income and Poverty, (ii) Education, (iii) Health, (iv) Women and Children, (v) Infrastructure and (vi) Environment — the six that this question is asking for.
• Under Income and Poverty the Plan set average GDP growth of 9 per cent a year, agricultural GDP growth of 4 per cent, 58 million new work opportunities, educated unemployment below 5 per cent, a 20 per cent rise in the real wage of unskilled workers, and a ten-point cut in the head-count poverty ratio.
• Under Education it set the elementary dropout rate down from 52.2 per cent in 2003–04 to 20 per cent by 2011–12, literacy of 85 per cent for those aged seven and above, a gender literacy gap of ten percentage points, and the higher-education cohort up from 10 to 15 per cent.
• Under Health it set an infant mortality rate of 28 and a maternal mortality ratio of 1 per 1,000 live births, a total fertility rate of 2.1, clean drinking water for all by 2009, and the halving of child malnutrition and of anaemia among women and girls.
• The Planning Commission was replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015 and the Twelfth Plan (2012–17) was the last Five Year Plan, so the Eleventh Plan's target framework belongs to the closing phase of Indian planning.

• Confusing the three numbers that sit in one paragraph of the same chapter — 27 national targets, six heads, and 13 targets disaggregated to the States — which is the whole of this question
• Carrying a number away from the Plan without the noun it belongs to, so that the 9 per cent growth target or the 4 per cent agriculture target answers a question about how many heads there were
• Merging Women and Children into Health, or Environment into Infrastructure, and arriving at a smaller count that is a reasonable grouping but not the Plan's
• Reading a summary of a Plan instead of its first chapter, which reliably supplies the growth rate and reliably omits the structure the question is built on
• Mixing the Plan's ordinal with one of its figures, so that the Ninth Plan lends a nine to a question about the Eleventh

The Five Year Plans reach MPSC papers in four recognisable shapes. The first is a theme-to-Plan match, in which the titles or the underlying models — the Harrod-Domar arithmetic of the First, the Mahalanobis strategy of the Second, 'Garibi Hatao' of the Fifth — are set against the Plan numbers. The second is a target question of the present kind, which quotes a figure from a Plan's target list and asks for its Plan, or quotes a Plan and asks for a figure. The third is an institutional question about the Planning Commission, the National Development Council and NITI Aayog, and about who approved a Plan and who could amend it. The fourth is a plan-holiday or period question, testing whether a candidate knows the years each Plan ran and the gaps between them. All four are answerable from a single well-made table with one row per Plan, and the Eleventh and Twelfth deserve an extra column each because they are recent enough for the Commission to ask about their internal structure rather than only their headline.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was NOT one of the heads under which the Eleventh Five Year Plan grouped its 27 monitorable targets ?

  • (a)Women and Children
  • (b)Environment
  • (c)Defence and Internal Security
  • (d)Income and Poverty

  Answer(c) Defence and Internal Security — the Eleventh Plan grouped its 27 monitorable national targets under six heads only: Income and Poverty, Education, Health, Women and Children, Infrastructure and Environment. Defence has never been one of them, because the monitorable targets were designed to measure inclusive growth in outcomes that Central and State programmes could be held to, and 13 of the 27 were disaggregated into targets for individual States.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Eleventh Five Year Plan set an average annual growth rate of GDP of how much for the Plan period ?

  • (a)7 per cent
  • (b)8 per cent
  • (c)9 per cent
  • (d)10 per cent

  Answer(c) 9 per cent — 'Average GDP growth rate of 9% per year in the Eleventh Plan period' is the first monitorable target printed under the Income and Poverty head in Chapter 1 of Volume I of the Plan. The same head also carries agricultural GDP growth of 4 per cent a year, 58 million new work opportunities, educated unemployment below 5 per cent, a 20 per cent rise in the real wage rate of unskilled workers and a ten percentage-point reduction in the head-count ratio of consumption poverty.