Match the correct pairs of census year and death rate in India :
Year
(a) 1981
(b) 1991
(c) 2001
(d) 2011
Death rate (Per 1000)
(i) 15
(ii) 11
(iii) 08
(iv) 07

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), the pairing (a) - (i), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iii), (d) - (iv). The left column is the census year and the right column is the crude death rate per 1,000 population, and the pairing that matters is 1981 with 15, 1991 with 11, 2001 with 08 and 2011 with 07. The two columns are printed side by side because the reader has to match them; the fact that (a) sits opposite (i) on the page proves nothing, and the pairing has to be argued from the demography. That argument is short and decisive. India's death rate has fallen in every intercensal decade since Independence — there is no decade in this period in which mortality rose — so a set of four values attached to four ascending census years must run in strictly descending order. Test the four options against that single rule and three of them collapse at once: option (2) makes the death rate climb from 11 in 1981 to 15 in 1991, option (3) makes it fall to 07 in 2001 and then jump back up to 11 in 2011, and option (4) reverses the entire series so that mortality rises steadily from 07 in 1981 to 15 in 2011. Only option (1) reads 15, 11, 08, 07 — the monotonic decline the demographic record actually shows. The magnitudes are the standard decadal figures carried in population-geography tables: roughly 15 per 1,000 in 1981, about 11 in 1991, about 8 in 2001 and about 7 in 2011. Notice also that the decline decelerates — a drop of 4 points across the 1980s, 3 across the 1990s, but only 1 across the 2000s. That flattening is not an error in the data; it is what happens as a death rate approaches its floor, because a crude death rate cannot fall much below about 6 or 7 per 1,000 once the easily preventable deaths of infancy and infectious disease have been removed and an ageing age-structure begins to push the crude figure back up.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This pairing gives 1981 a death rate of 11 and 1991 a death rate of 15, which would mean mortality in India rose over the 1980s — a decade in which the expanded immunisation programme, the spread of oral rehydration therapy and improving food availability were all pushing it down. It then has the rate falling to 07 by 2001 and rising again to 08 by 2011. Two reversals in one series is the signature of an option assembled to look plausible rather than one that tracks the actual record, and either reversal on its own is enough to reject it.  (c) This option starts correctly with 1981 at 15 and is therefore the most dangerous of the three wrong pairings — a candidate who checks only the first pair will accept it. But it then crashes the rate to 08 by 1991 and 07 by 2001 before sending it back up to 11 in 2011, which would mean India's death rate was higher in 2011 than in 1991. Nothing in the intercensal record supports a rise of that size in the 2000s. The lesson is procedural: on a match question, verify every pair, because the wrong options are built to agree with the right one on the pair a hurried candidate is most likely to check.  (d) This is the correct series read backwards: 07 in 1981, 08 in 1991, 11 in 2001, 15 in 2011. It is internally consistent and perfectly monotonic, which is exactly what makes it a trap for anyone who remembers that the numbers form an orderly progression but not which way it runs. Attaching a death rate of 15 per 1,000 to 2011 would put India's mortality in that year at a level it had already left behind three decades earlier, and would imply the country's demographic transition ran in reverse.

Concept: The crude death rate is the number of deaths in a year per 1,000 people in the population, and its long fall is the first half of the demographic transition. In a pre-transition society both birth and death rates are high and the population grows slowly; the transition begins when mortality falls — through control of epidemics and famine, immunisation, antibiotics, safe water, and better nutrition — while fertility, which is governed by social custom rather than by medicine, keeps to its old level for a generation or more. The widening gap between a birth rate that has not yet moved and a death rate that has collapsed is the natural increase that produced India's population surge. India's death rate had already done most of its falling by 1981; what the 1981-2011 stretch in this question shows is the tail of that decline, from 15 down to 7 per 1,000. Because the crude rate is not standardised for age, it has a floor: once infant and infectious-disease mortality are largely removed, the deaths that remain are the deaths of an ageing population, and a country with a growing share of elderly people can see its crude death rate stop falling — or even rise — while life expectancy continues to improve.

State PCS 2024 Q21 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q21 — Geography PYQ with Answer