Which of the following is/are not a Millennium Development Goal(MDG) ?
(a) Achieve universal primary education.
(b) Promotion of gender equality.
(c) Reducing infant mortality.
(d) Ensure environmenta

Question

Which of the following is/are not a Millennium Development Goal(MDG) ?
(a) Achieve universal primary education.
(b) Promotion of gender equality.
(c) Reducing infant mortality.
(d) Ensure environmental sustainability.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), statement (c) alone. Read the stem before anything else: it asks which of the four items is NOT a Millennium Development Goal, and the word 'not' is printed in bold in the English column and 'नाही' in bold in the Marathi. This is an inverted question, so the three items that ARE goals have to be discarded and the one that is not is the answer. Write the inversion down before touching the list, because everything that follows is the opposite of the habit a candidate has built on ordinary items. Now the list itself. The eight Millennium Development Goals, adopted after the Millennium Summit of September 2000 with 2015 as their target year, are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. Set the four printed items against that list. 'Achieve universal primary education' is Goal 2, reproduced word for word. 'Promotion of gender equality' is the first half of Goal 3. 'Ensure environmental sustainability' is Goal 7, again word for word. Three of the four are on the list, so three of the four are discarded. That leaves 'Reducing infant mortality', and it is not one of the eight. The goal about the deaths of the young is titled 'Reduce child mortality', and its headline target was to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the UNDER-FIVE mortality rate — a different measure from the infant mortality rate, which counts deaths before the first birthday. Be precise about the relationship rather than vague: the infant mortality rate was one of the indicators tracked beneath that goal in the United Nations framework, so infant deaths were certainly being counted. But the item asks about the list of goals, and the list of goals is short, fixed and quotable; 'reducing infant mortality' is not one of its eight entries, while 'reduce child mortality' is. Statement (c) alone is therefore the odd one out, and the row that says so is option (3).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option nominates 'Achieve universal primary education' as the item that is not a Millennium Development Goal, and it is Goal 2 of the eight, reproduced in the paper word for word. The goal's target was to ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, would complete a full course of primary schooling, and it is the goal India most often reported against through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act. Two things produce this answer. One is a straightforward failure to invert: a candidate who reads the stem as asking which items ARE goals will pick the one that comes first and looks most obviously like a goal. The other is a vague memory that education appears in the successor framework as Sustainable Development Goal 4, 'Quality Education', with the inference that it must therefore be new. It is not new; the SDG widened the MDG from access to primary schooling into quality and lifelong learning, which is a change of scope and not an arrival.  (b) This option rejects two items that are both on the list. 'Achieve universal primary education' is Goal 2 verbatim, and 'promotion of gender equality' is the first half of Goal 3, whose full text reads 'Promote gender equality and empower women'. A candidate may hesitate over statement (b) because the paper prints only half the goal, turning the verb into a noun and dropping the empowerment clause; that is a paraphrase, not a departure, and paraphrase is how examiners normally print list items. The deeper cause of this answer is usually the failure to invert the stem — a candidate who is quietly answering 'which of these ARE goals' will find two familiar development phrases and choose the row that contains them. This is why the inversion has to be written down. In a negative item every judgment made about a statement has to be turned over once more before it reaches the option rows, and the second turn is the one that gets skipped under time pressure.  (d) This is the most dangerous option in the set, because it is half right. It correctly identifies statement (c) as not being one of the eight goals, and then adds statement (d), which is Goal 7 in the United Nations' own words: 'Ensure environmental sustainability'. A candidate reaches this row by a plausible-sounding argument — that the environment belongs to the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 rather than to the older poverty-focused framework — and the argument is simply wrong on the record. Environmental sustainability was one of the eight from the beginning, with targets on reversing the loss of environmental resources, on halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and on improving the lives of slum dwellers. What this option really tests is whether a candidate stops once they have found one item that satisfies the stem. In an inverted question with a single genuine outlier, the temptation to add a second is strong, and the discipline is to check every remaining item against the printed list rather than against an impression of what the framework was about.

Concept: The Millennium Development Goals came out of the Millennium Declaration adopted at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 and ran to a target year of 2015, with 1990 as the baseline against which progress was measured. There were eight goals, each carrying time-bound targets and a set of indicators beneath them: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. The first seven were addressed largely to developing countries and the eighth to the richer ones, covering aid, trade access and debt relief, which is why the framework is sometimes described as a compact between the two. India reported against the goals through the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, and the domestic programmes that carried them are familiar — Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and later the Right to Education Act for Goal 2, the National Rural Health Mission for Goals 4 and 5, the National AIDS Control Programme for Goal 6, and the drinking water and sanitation missions for the water and sanitation targets under Goal 7. When the goals expired at the end of 2015 they were succeeded by the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, adopted on 25 September 2015 and in force from 1 January 2016, which are universal rather than aimed at developing countries and reach into consumption, inequality, industry, cities, oceans and institutions as well as the older concerns.

State PCS 2021 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer