Which factor is not considered while calculating Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) ?

Question

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Correct — option (2), Per capita income. This is a negative question, and unusually for an examination paper the printing helps you: the word not is set in bold italic in the English block and the corresponding Marathi नाही is emphasised in the same way, so the Commission has flagged the reversal rather than hiding it. Take the hint and read the stem as an instruction — you are looking for the one factor that the index leaves out. The Physical Quality of Life Index was constructed by Morris David Morris for the Overseas Development Council and set out in his 1979 study, and it contains exactly three indicators: the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at age one, and the basic literacy rate. Each of the three is converted to a scale running from zero to one hundred and the three are then averaged with equal weights, which is why the index itself is reported as a number between zero and one hundred. Per capita income is not among them, and its absence is not an oversight but the whole purpose of the index. Morris was writing against the practice of judging a country's progress by its national income per head, on the argument that an income figure measures the means to a decent life and not the life itself: it says nothing about how the income is distributed, nothing about whether it is spent on things that lengthen life or on things that do not, and nothing about the position of those at the bottom. His three indicators were selected precisely because they are outcomes rather than inputs — a child either survives its first year or does not, an adult either can read or cannot — and because none of them can be inflated by the consumption of a small rich minority. There is a second and finer point in the choice of indicators worth carrying away. Life expectancy is measured at age one rather than at birth, because infant deaths are already counted by the infant mortality rate and measuring expectancy from birth would count them twice. Notice that the three wrong options here are the three components of the index and the keyed option is the one thing outside it, so a candidate who has learnt the composition can answer this question in the time it takes to read it. This is also the cleanest way to distinguish the PQLI from the Human Development Index that followed it in 1990, since the HDI restored an income variable, in its present form gross national income per head at purchasing power parity, alongside health and education. Per capita income is therefore the factor not considered, and option (2) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Life expectancy is one of the three components of the index, so it cannot be the factor left out. Morris used life expectancy at age one rather than at birth, and the reason is a piece of index construction worth understanding rather than memorising: the infant mortality rate already measures deaths in the first year of life, so an expectancy measured from birth would carry the same deaths a second time and give infant survival a double weight in a three-indicator average. Measuring from the first birthday separates the two questions cleanly — the infant mortality rate asks whether children survive infancy, and expectancy at age one asks how long those who do survive can expect to live. A candidate who remembers only the phrase life expectancy and not the qualification will still get this question right, but the qualification is exactly the sort of detail a later question is built on.  (c) Infant mortality is a component of the index and so is not the answer to a question asking what the index leaves out. Its inclusion is deliberate and instructive: infant mortality is unusually sensitive to the things a development index is trying to capture, since it responds to nutrition, to clean water and sanitation, to maternal health and to the availability of basic medical care, and it responds to them at the bottom of the distribution rather than at the top. That is what makes it attractive to an index built as a protest against income averages, because a wealthy minority cannot raise a country's infant survival rate the way it can raise the country's average income. Note also that the indicator runs in the opposite direction to the other two — a high infant mortality rate is bad where high literacy and high life expectancy are good — so it is inverted before being placed on the common zero to one hundred scale.  (d) Literacy is the third component of the index and therefore cannot be what the index omits. Morris used basic literacy — the ability to read and write — rather than any measure of school enrolment or years of schooling, and the choice fits the design of the whole index: literacy is a durable outcome held by an adult, whereas enrolment is an input that records how many children entered a school and not what any of them learnt or retained. The distinction is worth holding because the Human Development Index of 1990 originally used adult literacy in the same spirit and later replaced it with mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling, so a question can be built on which index used which education variable at which time. Here, however, all that is needed is that literacy is inside the PQLI, which puts it outside the answer.

Concept: The Physical Quality of Life Index belongs to a line of attempts to answer a single question: how should the progress of a country be judged when its national income per head is known to be a poor guide to how its people actually live? Morris David Morris built the index for the Overseas Development Council and published it in 1979 under the title Measuring the Condition of the World's Poor. His objection to income was not that it is irrelevant but that it is an input — a measure of the means available rather than of what those means achieve — and that an average conceals distribution, so that a country can raise its income per head while the condition of the poorest is unchanged. He therefore chose three outcome indicators that a rich minority cannot supply on behalf of everyone else: the infant mortality rate, life expectancy at age one, and basic literacy. Each is rescaled so that the worst observed performance becomes zero and the best becomes one hundred, and the three rescaled values are averaged with equal weights, which is a deliberate refusal to declare any one of health, survival and education more important than the others. The index's own limits are as instructive as its content. Three indicators cannot capture political freedom, security, the position of women or the state of the environment; two of the three are health measures, so health is arguably over-represented; and by excluding income entirely the index goes further than most later measures were willing to go. The line that runs on from it is worth holding as a sequence: the PQLI of 1979, the Human Development Index of 1990 built at the UNDP under Mahbub ul Haq, which restored an income variable alongside health and education; the Human Poverty Index of 1997; and the Multidimensional Poverty Index of 2010, which measures deprivation at the level of the household rather than the country.

State PCS 2022 Q22 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q22 — Economy PYQ with Answer