Which Indian State topped the NITI Aayog's SDG India Index 2023 ?

Question

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Correct — B, Kerala. The edition the stem means is the SDG India Index 2023-24, the fourth, released by NITI Aayog on 12 July 2024. Its own chart of state performance puts two states level at the top with a composite score of 79 — Uttarakhand and Kerala — followed by Tamil Nadu at 78, then Goa and Himachal Pradesh at 77, Punjab and Sikkim at 76, and Karnataka at 75. Uttarakhand is not among the options, so Kerala is the only state on this list that shares the top place. The other three are placed and not close: Tamil Nadu 78, Gujarat 74 alongside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and Maharashtra 73. Kerala's claim does not rest on this edition alone. In the third edition, the SDG India Index 2020-21, the report states in terms that 'Kerala retained its rank as the top State with a score of 75', with Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh sharing second place — the word 'retained' recording that Kerala had led the 2019-20 edition as well. So Kerala is the only one of the four options that has ever headed the table in any edition, which is what makes the answer safe even if a reader is unsure which edition 'the SDG India Index 2023' names. For a Bihar candidate the number that matters most is at the other end of the same chart: Bihar scored 57, the lowest of any state, though up from 52 in 2020-21 against an all-India composite that rose from 66 to 71.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The near miss, and the reason this question is not free. Tamil Nadu scored 78 in the SDG India Index 2023-24 — one point behind the joint leaders and ahead of every other state — and it had shared second place with Himachal Pradesh in 2020-21. It also tops individual goals, sharing the Goal 13 (Climate Action) lead in this edition. Consistently near the top is not the same as topping the table, which Tamil Nadu has not done.  (c) Twelfth among the states at 73, below Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and it has never led any edition of the Index. Maharashtra is India's largest state economy by gross state domestic product, which is exactly why it looks like a plausible answer — but the SDG India Index measures outcomes across sixteen goals, from nutrition and gender to sanitation and clean energy, not the size of output.  (d) Ninth at 74, level with Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and six behind the leaders, and again never a chart-topper on this Index. Gujarat does lead a single goal in this edition — Goal 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, jointly with Ladakh — and goal-wise leadership is the most common source of the belief that a state topped the whole Index.

Concept: The SDG India Index is NITI Aayog's instrument for measuring how far each state and union territory has travelled towards the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015 for the 2030 Agenda. The fourth edition tracks 113 indicators aligned to the National Indicator Framework maintained by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. For each of sixteen goals a state receives a score from 0 to 100, where 100 means the 2030 target has been met, and the composite score is the arithmetic mean of the goal scores. Goal 14, Life Below Water, is excluded from the composite because it applies only to the nine coastal states, so leaving it in would penalise the landlocked ones. States are then placed in four categories: Aspirant for 0 to 49, Performer for 50 to 64, Front Runner for 65 to 99, and Achiever for a perfect 100. The design is deliberately competitive — NITI Aayog's stated purpose is to promote what it calls collaborative competition among states — and the index is published with a public dashboard so that any state can see which of its goal scores is dragging the composite down.

State PCS 2025 Q93 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q93 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer