The three year action agenda of NITI Aayog for 2017-2020 aimed at :
(a) Doubling farmers' income by 2022.
(b) Provision of electricity to all households by 2022.
(c) Establishing central universities

Question

The three year action agenda of NITI Aayog for 2017-2020 aimed at :
(a) Doubling farmers' income by 2022.
(b) Provision of electricity to all households by 2022.
(c) Establishing central universities in all states by 2022.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), which says statements (a) and (b) only are correct. The Three Year Action Agenda is a NITI Aayog document recommending policy changes and programmes for action from 2017-18 to 2019-20, described in its own preface as the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission period. Statement (a) is in it plainly: the Agenda's agriculture chapter is headed 'Agriculture: Doubling Farmers' Incomes' and opens by recording that the Prime Minister has called for doubling farmers' incomes by 2022, restating the target elsewhere as doubling farmers' income by 2022-23 over the level of 2015-16; the chapter then sets out how to get there, through market reform so that farmers receive remunerative prices, higher productivity from irrigation, faster seed replacement and precision agriculture. Statement (b) is in it too: the energy chapter records that India has already committed to bring electricity to every village by May 2018 and to every household by 2022, and proposes the more ambitious goal of supplying all households on a twenty-four-hour basis. Statement (c) is not in it. The document contains no target of establishing central universities in all states; its higher education agenda is a different programme altogether — designating twenty world class universities, ten public and ten private, that would be moved out of the ordinary regulatory system, granting autonomy to the best colleges and universities, reforming regulation into a tiered system, creating project-specific research grants and expanding vocational and profession-led education. With (a) and (b) standing and (c) failing, the row that names the first two and no others is the answer, and that is option (4).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This row accepts only the farm income target and rejects the electricity one, but the Agenda carries both. Its energy chapter states directly that India has already committed to bring electricity to every village by May 2018 and to every household by 2022, and then goes further, proposing that the country aim at electricity for all households on a twenty-four-hour basis. The same chapter carries the related household energy targets of the period — LPG connections under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana and the elimination of black carbon by 2022. A candidate lands here by recalling the agriculture target, which was the most publicised element of the document, and treating the rest as unfamiliar; a row that accepts a single statement should always be checked against the possibility that a second one also holds.  (b) This row accepts the electricity target and the central universities target and rejects the farm income one, so it gets both of its judgements wrong. Doubling farmers' incomes by 2022 is not merely present in the Agenda, it is the title of an entire chapter and one of the document's best-known commitments. The central universities claim, by contrast, appears nowhere in it: the phrase does not occur in the document, and its higher education proposals run in a quite different direction, towards autonomy for a small number of designated world class universities rather than towards new central institutions in every state. A row that pairs a real target with an invented one is the standard way of building a distractor, and it is defeated by testing each statement separately rather than judging the pair.  (c) This row accepts the farm income target, which is correct, and the establishment of central universities in all states by 2022, which is not. The Agenda's education chapter identifies the problem in higher education as quality rather than the number of institutions — it notes that the gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education had risen from 20.8 per cent in 2011-12 to 24.5 per cent in 2015-16, and that an assessment of 150,000 engineering graduates in 2016 found only eighteen per cent employable in software services in a functional role — and its proposals are for less regulation, more autonomous governance and outcome-based oversight, including the identification of twenty world class universities. Nothing in that programme involves creating central universities across the states, and this is the row that a candidate reaches by assuming that any plausible-sounding target belongs to a document they have not read.

Concept: NITI Aayog, the National Institution for Transforming India, came into existence on 1 January 2015 as the government's principal policy think tank, replacing the Planning Commission. Its arrival ended the five-year plan process — the twelfth plan, which ran to 2016-17, was the last — and in May 2016 the Prime Minister's Office asked NITI Aayog to prepare instead a Fifteen Year Vision, a Seven Year Strategy and a Three Year Action Agenda. The Action Agenda was released first, because it was of immediate relevance to policy, and it covers 2017-18 to 2019-20, the last three years of the Fourteenth Finance Commission's award period. It is a wide document, running across agriculture, industry, urban and rural development, infrastructure, energy, education, health, governance and the environment, and it is deliberately written as a list of action points rather than as an argument. Two of its most quoted commitments are the doubling of farmers' incomes by 2022 and electricity for every household by 2022, both of which the document treats as goals already adopted by the government rather than as its own inventions. Unlike a five-year plan, the Agenda does not allocate money; it recommends, and it explicitly includes actions for states to take alongside the Centre.

State PCS 2021 Q36 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q36 — Economy PYQ with Answer