_________ development is prioritized over environment degradation in energy generation.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), Human. The sentence is a compressed statement of the oldest dilemma in energy policy: generating power damages the environment, and the reason societies accept that damage is that energy is a direct input into people's lives. The term of art for that value is human development — the expansion of people's capabilities and choices, conventionally measured on three dimensions of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living, and expressed in the Human Development Index that the United Nations Development Programme has published since 1990. Energy connects to every one of those three dimensions in a way no other kind of development does. Electricity lets a child study after dark and a clinic refrigerate vaccines; a clean cooking fuel replaces the biomass whose smoke is a leading cause of respiratory illness among women and children in poor households; reliable power underpins the irrigation, small industry and services from which a decent standard of living is earned. That is why access to affordable, reliable and modern energy for all was made a Sustainable Development Goal in its own right rather than being folded into an economic target. Set against that, environmental degradation — mined land, dammed rivers, drowned forests, emissions from coal combustion — is a real cost that a developing country has historically been willing to bear, on the argument that human development takes priority. The blank in this sentence is asking for the noun that names that priority, and none of the other three options fills it: cultural, political and social development are all genuine concepts in their own fields, but none of them is the value conventionally weighed against environmental damage when a country decides to build a power station. Note that the whole debate exists in order to be superseded: sustainable development, as defined in the Brundtland Report of 1987, is precisely the attempt to stop treating human development and environmental protection as a trade-off at all.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Cultural development refers to the growth and transmission of a society's arts, languages, heritage, beliefs and traditions, and to the institutions that sustain them. It is a real field with real policy content — heritage conservation, language promotion, support for the performing arts — but it has no standing in the argument about whether to accept environmental damage in order to generate power. No one builds a thermal station or a dam for the sake of cultural development, and the environmental cost of energy is never justified in those terms.  (c) Political development is a concept from political science describing the growth of state capacity, the strengthening of institutions, the widening of participation and the consolidation of democratic practice. It has nothing to do with the trade-off the sentence describes. Energy projects certainly have politics attached to them — over land acquisition, displacement and the siting of plants — but the presence of political conflict around a project is not the same as political development being the goal for which environmental damage is accepted.  (d) This is the closest of the three wrong options and the one that costs candidates the question. Social development, meaning improvement in health, education, equity and social institutions, overlaps substantially with human development in ordinary usage, and a candidate who reads the sentence loosely will find it acceptable. But human development is the established technical term in exactly this debate: it is the concept the Human Development Index measures, the concept the annual Human Development Reports are written about, and the concept conventionally set against environmental degradation in the development-versus-environment argument. Where a precise term exists for the idea being tested, the broader near-synonym is the distractor.

Concept: Human development is the idea that the purpose of development is the enlargement of people's choices and capabilities, not the growth of national income for its own sake. It was given institutional form by the United Nations Development Programme, whose first Human Development Report appeared in 1990 under the direction of Mahbub ul Haq, drawing on Amartya Sen's argument that well-being should be judged by what people are actually able to do and to be rather than by what they own. The Human Development Index that accompanies the reports combines three dimensions — life expectancy at birth for a long and healthy life, schooling for access to knowledge, and gross national income per head for a decent standard of living — precisely so that a country cannot score well on income alone. Energy sits at the base of all three, which is why access to modern energy is treated as a development objective rather than merely as an industrial input, and why the seventh Sustainable Development Goal commits to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. The tension with the environment is unavoidable at the level of any single project, since every method of generating power imposes some cost on land, water, air or ecosystems; sustainable development, as the Brundtland Report defined it in 1987, is the attempt to meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.

State PCS 2024 Q36 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q36 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer