MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 22 of 100

Correct — option (2), Per capita income. This is a negative question, and unusually for an examination paper the printing helps you: the word not is set in bold italic in the English block and the corresponding Marathi नाही is emphasised in the same way, so the Commission has flagged the reversal rather than hiding it. Take the hint and read the stem as an instruction — you are looking for the one factor that the index leaves out. The Physical Quality of Life Index was constructed by Morris David Morris for the Overseas Development Council and set out in his 1979 study, and it contains exactly three indicators: the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at age one, and the basic literacy rate. Each of the three is converted to a scale running from zero to one hundred and the three are then averaged with equal weights, which is why the index itself is reported as a number between zero and one hundred. Per capita income is not among them, and its absence is not an oversight but the whole purpose of the index. Morris was writing against the practice of judging a country's progress by its national income per head, on the argument that an income figure measures the means to a decent life and not the life itself: it says nothing about how the income is distributed, nothing about whether it is spent on things that lengthen life or on things that do not, and nothing about the position of those at the bottom. His three indicators were selected precisely because they are outcomes rather than inputs — a child either survives its first year or does not, an adult either can read or cannot — and because none of them can be inflated by the consumption of a small rich minority. There is a second and finer point in the choice of indicators worth carrying away. Life expectancy is measured at age one rather than at birth, because infant deaths are already counted by the infant mortality rate and measuring expectancy from birth would count them twice. Notice that the three wrong options here are the three components of the index and the keyed option is the one thing outside it, so a candidate who has learnt the composition can answer this question in the time it takes to read it. This is also the cleanest way to distinguish the PQLI from the Human Development Index that followed it in 1990, since the HDI restored an income variable, in its present form gross national income per head at purchasing power parity, alongside health and education. Per capita income is therefore the factor not considered, and option (2) is the answer.

• (1)Life expectancy — Life expectancy is one of the three components of the index, so it cannot be the factor left out. Morris used life expectancy at age one rather than at birth, and the reason is a piece of index construction worth understanding rather than memorising: the infant mortality rate already measures deaths in the first year of life, so an expectancy measured from birth would carry the same deaths a second time and give infant survival a double weight in a three-indicator average. Measuring from the first birthday separates the two questions cleanly — the infant mortality rate asks whether children survive infancy, and expectancy at age one asks how long those who do survive can expect to live. A candidate who remembers only the phrase life expectancy and not the qualification will still get this question right, but the qualification is exactly the sort of detail a later question is built on.
• (3)Infant mortality — Infant mortality is a component of the index and so is not the answer to a question asking what the index leaves out. Its inclusion is deliberate and instructive: infant mortality is unusually sensitive to the things a development index is trying to capture, since it responds to nutrition, to clean water and sanitation, to maternal health and to the availability of basic medical care, and it responds to them at the bottom of the distribution rather than at the top. That is what makes it attractive to an index built as a protest against income averages, because a wealthy minority cannot raise a country's infant survival rate the way it can raise the country's average income. Note also that the indicator runs in the opposite direction to the other two — a high infant mortality rate is bad where high literacy and high life expectancy are good — so it is inverted before being placed on the common zero to one hundred scale.
• (4)Literacy — Literacy is the third component of the index and therefore cannot be what the index omits. Morris used basic literacy — the ability to read and write — rather than any measure of school enrolment or years of schooling, and the choice fits the design of the whole index: literacy is a durable outcome held by an adult, whereas enrolment is an input that records how many children entered a school and not what any of them learnt or retained. The distinction is worth holding because the Human Development Index of 1990 originally used adult literacy in the same spirit and later replaced it with mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling, so a question can be built on which index used which education variable at which time. Here, however, all that is needed is that literacy is inside the PQLI, which puts it outside the answer.

The Physical Quality of Life Index belongs to a line of attempts to answer a single question: how should the progress of a country be judged when its national income per head is known to be a poor guide to how its people actually live? Morris David Morris built the index for the Overseas Development Council and published it in 1979 under the title Measuring the Condition of the World's Poor. His objection to income was not that it is irrelevant but that it is an input — a measure of the means available rather than of what those means achieve — and that an average conceals distribution, so that a country can raise its income per head while the condition of the poorest is unchanged. He therefore chose three outcome indicators that a rich minority cannot supply on behalf of everyone else: the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at age one, and basic literacy. Each is rescaled so that the worst observed performance becomes zero and the best becomes one hundred, and the three rescaled values are averaged with equal weights, which is a deliberate refusal to declare any one of health, survival and education more important than the others. The index's own limits are as instructive as its content. Three indicators cannot capture political freedom, security, the position of women or the state of the environment; two of the three are health measures, so health is arguably over-represented; and by excluding income entirely the index goes further than most later measures were willing to go. The line that runs on from it is worth holding as a sequence: the PQLI of 1979, the Human Development Index of 1990 built at the UNDP under Mahbub ul Haq, which restored an income variable alongside health and education; the Human Poverty Index of 1997; and the Multidimensional Poverty Index of 2010, which measures deprivation at the level of the household rather than the country.

Composite development indices are among the most reliably examined topics in an MPSC economy section, because each one comes with a small, fixed set of testable attributes — who built it, for which organisation, in which year, out of which indicators, on what scale, and running in which direction. The Commission's favourite way of testing composition is the negative question used here: three of the four options are components and the fourth is the intruder, so a candidate either knows the list or is guessing among four plausible-sounding development variables. This paper marks its negations, and that is a genuine difference from some earlier editions: five questions in the 2022 paper carry a negative or exclusionary stem and in all five the negating word is printed in bold in both the Marathi and the English block. A student practising on this paper should not draw the general lesson that negations will be marked, because they often are not, but should certainly use the marking where it is offered. The discipline that survives either way is the same one: after reading the stem, decide in one word what you are hunting for — the odd one out, the false statement, the exception — and then evaluate every option against that word rather than against the topic. Marks on negative questions are lost far more often by candidates who knew all four facts and answered the opposite question than by candidates who did not know the index.

• The Physical Quality of Life Index was developed by Morris David Morris for the Overseas Development Council and published in his 1979 study Measuring the Condition of the World's Poor, as a deliberate alternative to judging development by national income per head.
• It has exactly three components — the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at age one, and basic literacy — each rescaled from zero to one hundred and then averaged with equal weights, so the index itself is reported on a zero to one hundred scale.
• Per capita income is deliberately excluded from the index, which is its defining feature and the point on which examination questions are almost always built.
• Life expectancy is measured at age one rather than at birth so that deaths in the first year of life, which the infant mortality rate already records, are not counted twice within a three-indicator average.
• The Human Development Index, first published by the UNDP in 1990 under Mahbub ul Haq, restored an income variable — now gross national income per head at purchasing power parity — alongside health and education indicators, which is the cleanest contrast to draw with the PQLI.

• Reading past the negation and choosing a component of the index, which is the single most common way this format is failed even when the candidate knows the composition perfectly
• Confusing the PQLI with the Human Development Index, since the presence of an income variable in the HDI and its deliberate absence from the PQLI is exactly the distinction most questions are built on
• Writing life expectancy at birth instead of at age one, which is the detail a follow-up question is most likely to attack
• Assuming that because the 2022 paper prints its negations in bold, negations will always be marked; several MPSC papers carry them in ordinary type with nothing on the page to warn the reader

Composite indices appear in MPSC papers in four regular shapes: name the author or the sponsoring body, name the year of first publication, identify which indicator is or is not included, and place a country or state in a category or rank. The composition question, in its positive or its negative form, is the most common of the four because it can be set from a single sentence of a textbook and marked without ambiguity. The efficient preparation is a table with one row for each index — PQLI, HDI, HPI, MPI, Gender Inequality Index, Gender Development Index — and columns for the author, the year, the sponsoring body, the components and the direction in which the index runs. Almost every question that can be built from an index can be answered from such a table, and building it costs less time than reading a single chapter. The direction column earns its place, because the Gender Inequality Index runs the opposite way from the PQLI and the HDI, a difference this same paper tests elsewhere.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Physical Quality of Life Index, life expectancy is measured at age one rather than at birth. What is the reason for this choice ?

  • (a)Life expectancy at birth is not available for most developing countries
  • (b)Deaths in the first year of life are already captured by the infant mortality rate, and measuring from birth would count them twice
  • (c)Children below one year are excluded from the population estimates used in the index
  • (d)Life expectancy at age one is easier to compare across countries with different birth rates

  Answer(b) Deaths in the first year of life are already captured by the infant mortality rate, and measuring from birth would count them twice. Since the index averages only three indicators with equal weights, allowing two of them to record the same event would give infant survival roughly double the influence Morris intended. Measuring expectancy from the first birthday keeps the two questions separate: the infant mortality rate asks whether children survive infancy, and expectancy at age one asks how long those who do can expect to live.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is the clearest point of difference between the Physical Quality of Life Index and the Human Development Index ?

  • (a)The PQLI includes an income variable while the HDI does not
  • (b)The HDI includes an income variable while the PQLI deliberately excludes one
  • (c)Both indices exclude income and rely only on health and education indicators
  • (d)Neither index uses literacy or schooling as an indicator

  Answer(b) The HDI includes an income variable while the PQLI deliberately excludes one. Morris built the PQLI in 1979 out of infant mortality, life expectancy at age one and basic literacy, precisely as a protest against judging development by income per head. The HDI, first published by the UNDP in 1990 under Mahbub ul Haq, restored income alongside health and education — today as gross national income per head at purchasing power parity — on the view that command over resources is itself a dimension of human development.