MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 42 of 100

Correct — option (3), statements (b) and (c). The stem prints four claims about the Sustainable Development Goals and exactly two of them survive. Statement (b) is right: the seventeen goals adopted in 2015 are routinely called the Global Goals, and the name is used by the United Nations itself and by the campaign network built around the 2030 Agenda; it is a nickname for the same list, not a rival list. Statement (c) is right too: the SDGs succeeded the eight Millennium Development Goals, which ran from 2000 to 2015 and expired at the end of that year, and the seventeen goals were written to carry the unfinished MDG agenda forward while widening it to every country rather than only the developing ones. The two statements that fail, fail on their dates, and they fail in a way worth noticing — they have swapped years with each other. Statement (a) puts the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. The city is right and the year is not: that conference, universally called Rio+20, met at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit in the same city, and its outcome document 'The Future We Want' is what launched the intergovernmental process that eventually produced the goals. Nothing was held at Rio in 2015. Statement (d) says the SDGs came into effect in January 2012. January is right and the year is not: the goals were adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015 at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York, in the resolution titled 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development', and they came into effect on 1 January 2016, with 2030 as the deadline. So 2012 belongs to the Rio conference and 2015 to the adoption, and the paper has printed each year against the other's event. Two true statements and two false ones leave only the option that names (b) and (c), which is option (3).

• (1)(b) only — This option is right about statement (b) and wrong to stop there. It rejects statement (c), which says the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals — and that is simply what happened. The eight MDGs were adopted after the Millennium Summit of September 2000 with 2015 as their target year; when that year ended the seventeen SDGs took over, having been adopted three months earlier in the same year. The relationship is one of succession and of widening: the MDGs were eight goals aimed largely at the developing world and financed substantially through aid, while the SDGs are seventeen goals with 169 targets that apply to every country, rich and poor alike, and reach into consumption, inequality, industry, cities, oceans and institutions. A candidate picks this option by treating 'replace' as too strong a word for what was really a continuation, but continuation by a new and larger framework is exactly what replacement means here.
• (2)(a) and (b) — This option accepts statement (a), and statement (a) carries a wrong year. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development met at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, not in 2015, and it is remembered as Rio+20 precisely because it fell twenty years after the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development — the Earth Summit — held in the same city, which produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. What Rio+20 did was agree the outcome document 'The Future We Want' and set up an Open Working Group to draft a set of sustainable development goals; the goals themselves were adopted three years later in New York. The statement is seductive because the venue is right and Rio genuinely is the address of the SDG story, but a compound statement fails on any single wrong link, and here the link that fails is the year.
• (4)(d) only — This option nominates the one statement that is wrong on its central fact and rejects the two that are right. The Sustainable Development Goals could not have come into effect in January 2012, because in January 2012 they did not exist: the conference that started the process of drafting them had not yet met, and it would meet that June. The goals were adopted on 25 September 2015 and came into effect on 1 January 2016, running to 2030. The month in the statement is the true part — the 2030 Agenda did begin on the first of a January — which is what makes the sentence read plausibly to a candidate who has stored 'January' without its year. Anyone choosing this option is also declaring statements (b) and (c) false, and both are uncontroversially true, so the option asks a candidate to be wrong three times over.

The Sustainable Development Goals are the seventeen goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states on 25 September 2015 in the resolution 'Transforming our world', in force from 1 January 2016 and due in 2030. They are also called the Global Goals. Their line of descent is worth holding as a sequence of conferences rather than as a list of dates. The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the environment on the international agenda; the Brundtland Commission's report 'Our Common Future' in 1987 supplied the working 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; the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro produced Agenda 21 and the two great environmental conventions; the Millennium Summit of 2000 produced the eight Millennium Development Goals for 2015; the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002 reviewed them; and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, Rio+20, agreed 'The Future We Want' and set an Open Working Group to draft goals to follow the MDGs. The SDGs differ from the MDGs in three ways that examiners like: they are universal rather than aimed at developing countries, they are far broader, and they are politically rather than legally binding, with each country reporting on its own progress. In India, NITI Aayog is the nodal institution and publishes the SDG India Index, first released in 2018.

MPSC builds SDG questions out of dates, names and numbers, because those are the parts that can be checked against a single official document. This item is a four-statement verification of exactly that sort, and it is settled by knowing which year attaches to which event. The discipline it rewards is to fix each statement on its own before looking at the options: mark (a), mark (b), mark (c), mark (d), and only then read the four rows. Candidates lose it by recognising Rio de Janeiro in statement (a), recognising January in statement (d), and choosing a row that contains a familiar word. There is a second reason to be careful here. The stem asks which statements are correct, and the word 'correct' is printed in bold in both the English and the Marathi columns — an emphasis that is easy to see on the page and impossible to see in a hurry. This paper also uses bold to mark negations elsewhere, so a bold word in an MPSC stem should slow a reader down rather than reassure them. Note finally that the printed English carries two oddities that a card must not silently repair: statement (c) capitalises 'Replace' in the middle of a sentence, and statement (d) prints 'came in to effect' as three words. Neither changes the meaning, and neither is the candidate's problem.

• The Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen goals and 169 targets — were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September 2015 in the resolution 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development', came into effect on 1 January 2016 and run to 2030.
• They are commonly called the Global Goals, which is what statement (b) asserts, and they succeeded the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted after the Millennium Summit of 2000, whose target year was 2015 — which is what statement (c) asserts.
• The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, was held at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, not in 2015; its outcome document 'The Future We Want' set up the Open Working Group that drafted the SDGs.
• Rio de Janeiro also hosted the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Earth Summit, which produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity — the reason the 2012 meeting was called Rio+20.
• Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs apply to every country rather than mainly to developing ones, and they are politically rather than legally binding, with progress reported voluntarily; NITI Aayog is India's nodal institution and publishes the SDG India Index, first released in 2018.

• Swapping the two SDG years, so that 2012 is attached to the adoption of the goals and 2015 to the Rio conference — the exact error the two false statements in this question are built on
• Confusing the 1992 Earth Summit with Rio+20 in 2012, since both were held at Rio de Janeiro and both produced documents that examiners quote
• Treating the adoption date, 25 September 2015, as the date the goals took effect, which was 1 January 2016
• Accepting a statement because its place-name or its month is right, when a compound statement fails on any single wrong element
• Reading the four option rows before judging the four statements, which is how a familiar word in a wrong statement pulls a candidate into a wrong row

Sustainable development reaches MPSC papers in three shapes. The commonest is a statement-verification item like this one, in which two or three claims about dates, names or authorship are printed and the candidate has to sort them; the error is almost always planted in a year or in a place rather than in the substance, because those are the details a candidate skips. The second is a goal-to-number match — Zero Hunger, Quality Education, Climate Action, Life Below Water and the rest — which is pure list recall and can be prepared once and kept. The third is an India-specific question about NITI Aayog's SDG India Index, about a State's rank or about the schemes mapped to a particular goal, and these run current with the year of the paper. A candidate who holds the conference sequence with its dates, the seventeen goals in order, and the last two editions of the SDG India Index has covered nearly everything the Commission can build on this topic.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, was held in which year and produced which outcome document ?

  • (a)1992, Agenda 21
  • (b)2002, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation
  • (c)2012, 'The Future We Want'
  • (d)2015, 'Transforming our world'

  Answer(c) 2012, 'The Future We Want' — the conference met at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit in the same city, and its outcome document set up the Open Working Group that drafted the Sustainable Development Goals. Agenda 21 belongs to the 1992 Earth Summit, the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and 'Transforming our world' is the 2015 General Assembly resolution that actually adopted the seventeen goals.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sustainable Development Goals came into effect on which date ?

  • (a)25 September 2015
  • (b)1 January 2016
  • (c)1 January 2012
  • (d)22 June 2012

  Answer(b) 1 January 2016 — the goals were adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015, but the 2030 Agenda entered into force at the start of the following year and runs to 2030. The other dates in the option set are all real dates from the same story wearing the wrong label: 25 September 2015 is the day of adoption, and 22 June 2012 is the closing day of the Rio+20 conference that began the drafting process.