It is observed that :
(a) The objective of environmental sustainability often conflicts with growth objective.
(b) There is a trade-off between development and Environmental sustainability.
Which of t

Question

It is observed that :
(a) The objective of environmental sustainability often conflicts with growth objective.
(b) There is a trade-off between development and Environmental sustainability.
Which of the above statement/s is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), statement (a) alone. At first reading the two printed statements look like paraphrases of each other, and the whole question is that they are not. They turn on the difference between two words that ordinary speech treats as interchangeable and economics does not: growth and development. Growth means an increase in the real output of an economy, the thing measured by real GDP and reported as a percentage a year. Development is the wider idea — the standard of living people actually reach, which takes in incomes but also health, education, the distribution of what is produced, and the condition of the surroundings in which people live. Statement (a) sets environmental sustainability against the growth objective, and that conflict is real and familiar. An economy that raises output year after year draws more energy, more minerals, more water and more land into use and puts more waste and more emissions out at the other end, and the cheapest route to the next percentage point of output is very often the dirtiest one. Every government that has had to choose between a coal plant and its emissions, between a highway and a forest, or between a tannery's output and a river's oxygen has met that conflict directly, and the word the English column uses is 'often', which is exactly the right strength — a conflict that arises frequently rather than one that is logically necessary. (The मराठी column prints नेहमी, 'always', in both statements, so a मराठी-medium candidate cannot separate them on strength at all and has to work from the growth-versus-development distinction alone.) Statement (b) makes a different and stronger claim: that there is a trade-off between development and environmental sustainability. On the standard understanding of development that claim does not hold, because environmental quality is part of what development means rather than a price paid for it. The Brundtland Commission's report 'Our Common Future' in 1987 defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and the whole force of that definition is that development which destroys its own resource base is not development at all — it is consumption borrowed from the people who come next. The same logic runs through the 2030 Agenda, in which clean water, clean energy, life on land and life below water sit alongside decent work and industry as goals of one project rather than as competitors. A population whose air is unbreathable, whose groundwater has failed and whose soil has gone saline has not developed however fast its output grew. So the conflict named in statement (a) stands and the trade-off asserted in statement (b) does not, and the option that accepts the first and rejects the second is option (1).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option accepts the trade-off between development and environmental sustainability and rejects the conflict with growth, which inverts the distinction the question is built on. Environmental sustainability is a constituent of development rather than something surrendered to obtain it: on the Brundtland definition, development that exhausts the resource base it stands on is not sustainable development but consumption charged to the next generation. Meanwhile the conflict with the growth objective, which this option denies, is the one that is easiest to observe — it is why environmental clearances delay projects, why emission norms raise the cost of power, and why the phrase 'growth versus environment' exists at all. A candidate reaches this option by treating growth and development as synonyms and then choosing whichever of the two sentences sounds more academic. The remedy is to keep the two words separate in every sentence you read: growth is output, development is what output is for.  (c) This is the option a hurried reader chooses, because in ordinary English the two statements say the same thing twice, and a reader who has judged the first to be true will judge its apparent restatement true as well. The setter has printed the pair precisely to see whether the candidate notices the substitution of 'development' for 'growth' in the second sentence. Accepting both means asserting that environmental sustainability must be traded away for development, which contradicts the definition of sustainable development that the same syllabus teaches and that the 2030 Agenda is built on. There is a wider habit at stake here. In a two-statement item, the pair is frequently constructed so that one sentence is a slightly altered echo of the other, with the alteration carrying the whole question; the safe method is to underline the word that changed between them before deciding either.  (d) This option rejects both statements, and it cannot stand because statement (a) is uncontroversially true — the conflict between environmental objectives and the growth objective is the reason environmental regulation is politically difficult everywhere, and no serious account of the subject denies it. Rejecting it would mean claiming that raising output has no environmental cost at all, which is a stronger and stranger proposition than anything the question offers. It is also worth noting how this choice is printed. The paper writes 'None of both', which is not standard English for the idea; MPSC spells its rejecting option many different ways across this paper, and the phrasing carries no information about whether the option is the answer. Read what such a row means logically rather than reacting to how oddly it is worded, and treat its wording as the paper's habit rather than as a signal.

Concept: The separation of growth from development is one of the foundations of development economics. Growth is the increase in real output, and it is measured by real GDP or real GDP per head. Development is the broader improvement in human well-being, and the standard measures of it were built precisely because output alone was found wanting — the Physical Quality of Life Index of the 1970s, built from infant mortality, life expectancy at age one and literacy with no income term at all, and then the Human Development Index from 1990, which combines a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living. Sustainable development is the further idea that development must be able to continue, and its canonical statement is the Brundtland Commission's in 1987: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It is usually presented as resting on three pillars — economic, social and environmental — which have to be advanced together rather than traded off. Against that, the relationship between growth and environmental damage is genuinely contested. The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesis that pollution rises with income and then falls once a country is rich enough to demand and afford cleaner technology, giving an inverted-U shape; the evidence for it is mixed, holding better for local pollutants such as particulates and sulphur dioxide than for carbon dioxide, and it is a hypothesis rather than a settled law. What is not contested is that in the short run, and for a country still building its infrastructure, cheaper output and cleaner output frequently point in different directions.

State PCS 2021 Q45 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q45 — Economy PYQ with Answer