NDA (I) 2017 General Ability Test · Question 80 of 149

Correct — C, Delivery of Public Service. When the Twelfth Five-Year Plan speaks of enhancing human capabilities, it means the things that make a person more capable — a longer and healthier life, schooling, and marketable skills. Those are the capabilities that the Plan's health, education and skill targets were built to raise. The delivery of public services is a different kind of objective altogether: it is about how well the State machinery reaches the citizen, and the Plan handles it as a governance and service-delivery goal with its own separate targets, not as a capability residing in the individual. That is why, of the four items listed, it is the odd one out.

• (a)Life and longevity — Health outcomes are the first pillar of the human-capability agenda. The Plan's monitorable targets included reductions in infant and maternal mortality and in child undernutrition, all of them measures of life and longevity.
• (b)Education — Education is central to the Plan's capability agenda, with targets on schooling and on raising mean years of schooling. It plainly figures in the Twelfth Plan.
• (d)Skill development — Skill development sits alongside education in the Plan, which set out to create crores of new work opportunities with skill certification for a matching number of people. It is very much part of enhancing capabilities.

The Twelfth Five-Year Plan ran from 2012 to 2017 with the theme of faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth. Its 25 monitorable targets covered growth, poverty and employment, education, health, infrastructure, environment and sustainability, and service delivery. The human-development portion of the Plan was argued in the language of capabilities, an approach that treats development as the expansion of what people are actually able to do and to be.

This is an odd-one-out question that turns on a phrase rather than on data, so read the stem carefully — it asks what does not figure in the Plan's emphasis on enhancing human capabilities, not what is missing from the Plan altogether. Service delivery does appear in the Plan, through targets such as wider banking access and rural sanitation, but it is a delivery objective rather than a human capability, and that distinction is the whole question. The Twelfth Plan was the last of the Five-Year Plans; the Planning Commission had already been replaced by NITI Aayog in 2015, and the Plan period ended on 31 March 2017, weeks before this paper was written.

• The Twelfth Five-Year Plan covered 2012 to 2017 under the theme of faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth.
• Its human-capability agenda rested on health outcomes, education and skill development.
• Service delivery was tracked in the Plan through its own targets, such as banking access and rural sanitation.
• It was the last Five-Year Plan; NITI Aayog replaced the Planning Commission in 2015.

• Reading the question as 'which is absent from the Plan' rather than 'which is not part of its human-capability emphasis'.
• Assuming the Plan ignored service delivery; it did not, but it treated it as a delivery goal rather than a capability.

NDA regularly asks which item does NOT belong to a named plan or scheme, so learn each plan's stated objectives as a short list you can scan for an intruder.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The theme of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan of India was

  • (a)growth with social justice
  • (b)faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth
  • (c)removal of poverty and attainment of self-reliance
  • (d)rapid industrialisation

  Answer(b) faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth — the Plan ran from 2012 to 2017.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Planning Commission of India was replaced by which body?

  • (a)Finance Commission
  • (b)NITI Aayog
  • (c)National Development Council
  • (d)Economic Advisory Council

  Answer(b) NITI Aayog — set up in 2015, before the Twelfth Plan had run its course.