Which of the following statements is/are true about Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) achievements in India ?
(a) India has achieved the poverty reduction in an even manner.
(b) India was on-track t

Question

Which of the following statements is/are true about Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) achievements in India ?
(a) India has achieved the poverty reduction in an even manner.
(b) India was on-track to achieve the hunger target after the 2015 deadline.
(c) Empowering women remains a major development challenge.

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Correct — option (1), Only (b) and (c). Three statements are printed, labelled (a) to (c), and the key accepts the second and third while rejecting the first. Statement (a) claims that India achieved poverty reduction in an even manner, and that is where the question turns. India's own assessment of its Millennium Development Goals record, prepared by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, concluded that the income poverty target had been met — the proportion of the population below the poverty line was brought down to less than half its 1990 level ahead of the deadline — but it was equally clear that the achievement was distributed very unevenly. Poverty became increasingly concentrated in the poorer states rather than falling proportionately across the country, the incidence in rural India remained about twice that in urban India, and it stayed markedly higher among Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and among households headed by women. An aggregate that falls while its distribution across states and social groups widens has not been achieved evenly, and statement (a) fails on that word alone. Note carefully what is not being said: the statement is rejected not because India missed the poverty target but because it describes the manner of the achievement wrongly, and a candidate who reads the statement as a claim about whether the target was met will reason himself into the wrong answer. Statement (b) says India was on track to achieve the hunger target after the 2015 deadline, and the phrasing repays a slow reading: it is not a claim that India met the hunger target on time but the opposite, that the trajectory would carry India to the target only at some point beyond 2015. That matches the assessment of the time. The hunger target required the 1990 proportion of undernourished people to be halved by 2015, and India's progress on the child undernutrition indicator used to track it, though real, was too slow to close the gap by the deadline, so the achievement was projected for a later date. Statement (c) says that empowering women remains a major development challenge, and that too was the settled conclusion. India had substantially closed the gender gap in school enrolment, which was the education part of the third Millennium Development Goal, but the other two indicators attached to that goal — the share of women in wage employment outside agriculture and the proportion of seats held by women in the national parliament — remained low, and women's economic participation in particular was moving in the wrong direction. Statements (b) and (c) standing and statement (a) failing, option (1) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option accepts all three statements and is wrong because statement (a) is not correct. It is the natural choice for a candidate who reads statement (a) as saying that India achieved the poverty reduction target, since that much is true, and who does not register the qualification in an even manner. The qualification is the whole content of the statement. India's poverty headcount fell below half its 1990 level ahead of the deadline, but the fall was concentrated and not general: rural poverty stayed at roughly twice the urban level, the poorer states retained a disproportionate share of the poor, and Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and female-headed households continued to record higher incidence than the population as a whole. This is the standard way a collective option is made wrong — by inserting a single adverbial phrase into an otherwise true sentence — and it is why every statement must be read to its last word before being accepted.  (c) This option accepts (a) and (b) and rejects (c), which reverses the position on both of the statements it touches. Statement (a) fails, for the reasons given, because the poverty reduction was uneven across states, between rural and urban areas and across social groups. Statement (c), which this option discards, is among the least controversial assertions that could be made about India's Millennium Development Goals record: the third goal covered gender equality and women's empowerment, and while the enrolment parity indicator was largely met, the indicators on women's share of non-agricultural wage employment and on women's representation in the national parliament remained weak throughout the period. A candidate reaching this option has usually accepted statement (a) on the strength of the poverty target being met and then, having accepted two statements, felt obliged to reject one.  (d) This option accepts (a) and (c) and rejects (b), so it correctly identifies women's empowerment as a continuing challenge but goes wrong at both ends. Statement (a) fails on the evenness claim. Statement (b), which this option rejects, is more likely to be misread than genuinely doubted, because its wording is unusual: to say that India was on track to achieve the hunger target after the 2015 deadline is to say that the target would be reached late, not that it was reached on time. A reader who takes the sentence as a claim of success will reject it, knowing that India did not meet the hunger target by 2015, and will have rejected it for a reason the sentence never asserted. Where a statement places a date after a verb of achievement, read the whole clause before judging it; several statements in this paper depend on such a construction.

Concept: The Millennium Development Goals were the first global development framework with numbers attached to it. They grew out of the Millennium Declaration adopted at the United Nations in September 2000 and consisted of eight goals — on extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality and women's empowerment, child mortality, maternal health, HIV and other diseases, environmental sustainability, and a global partnership for development — broken into targets and tracked by a set of indicators, with 1990 as the baseline year and 2015 as the deadline. India monitored its own progress through the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, which published a series of country reports mapping the global indicators onto Indian data sources. The record that emerged by 2015 was mixed in a characteristic way. On income poverty India did well, bringing the headcount below half its 1990 level before the deadline, but the gains were unevenly spread across states, between rural and urban areas and across social groups, so that poverty became more concentrated even as it fell. On hunger and child undernutrition progress was real but too slow to meet the target on time. On primary education and on gender parity in enrolment India did well, while on maternal mortality, on sanitation and on women's economic and political participation it fell short. That pattern — aggregate progress with wide internal disparity and weak human development outcomes — is what shaped the Indian contribution to the design of the successor framework. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 and running to 2030, differ from the Millennium Development Goals in ways that answer these criticisms directly: there are seventeen goals rather than eight, they apply to every country rather than mainly to developing ones, they were negotiated through an open intergovernmental process rather than drafted within the United Nations Secretariat, and they place an explicit emphasis on reducing inequality and on leaving no one behind, which is the very defect that statement (a) in this question misdescribes.

State PCS 2022 Q32 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q32 — Economy PYQ with Answer