Which of the following statement/s are correct ?
(a) The Global Multidimensional poverty index report is released by World Bank.
(b) The 2025 report is focused on the relationship between poverty & cl

Question

Which of the following statement/s are correct ?
(a) The Global Multidimensional poverty index report is released by World Bank.
(b) The 2025 report is focused on the relationship between poverty & climate change.
(c) The 2025 report examines four key climate hazards : high heat, drought, flood & air pollution.
(d) The report states that poverty in South Asia has greatly increased.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), '(b) and (c)'. Two of the four statements are false, and they fail for different reasons, so the question has to be worked in two steps. Statement (a) is false on the publisher. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index report is produced jointly by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford — not by the World Bank. The confusion is understandable, because the World Bank is the institution that maintains the international poverty line measured in dollars a day and publishes its own poverty reporting; but the multidimensional index is a UNDP and Oxford product. Striking statement (a) removes option (1) and option (2) at once, since both contain it. Statement (b) is correct. The 2025 edition, launched on 17 October 2025 to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, is titled 'Overlapping Hardships: Poverty and Climate Hazards', and its central exercise is to lay climate hazard data over multidimensional poverty data — the first time the report has done so — in order to see how far poor people are exposed to climate risk. Statement (c) is correct and reproduces the report's own list. The four hazards examined are high heat, drought, flood and air pollution. The report's headline finding follows from that overlay: of about 1.1 billion people living in acute multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, roughly 887 million — nearly four in five — are exposed to at least one of these hazards, 651 million to two or more, and 309 million to three or four at once. Statement (d) is false, and it is the statement that separates the two surviving options. Multidimensional poverty in South Asia has fallen substantially, not risen greatly; the region has recorded some of the largest reductions measured anywhere, India's own decline over the years to the early 2020s being the single largest documented in the series. A report whose purpose is to map the overlap between poverty and climate hazards does not, and could not credibly, claim that South Asian poverty has greatly increased. With (d) rejected, option (3) falls and option (4) stands. The general habit worth taking away: in a four-statement set, check the attribution statement first. Who publishes a report is the cheapest thing for an examiner to alter and the fastest thing for a prepared candidate to check, and here it eliminates half the option list in one move.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The blanket option, and it fails twice over — on the publisher in statement (a), which is the UNDP with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative rather than the World Bank, and on statement (d), which asserts a large increase in South Asian poverty when the region has in fact recorded major reductions. Two independent falsifications in a single option make this the weakest choice on the page.  (b) This gets the substance of the 2025 report right — the poverty and climate focus in statement (b) and the four hazards in statement (c) — but keeps the false attribution in statement (a). It is the option for a candidate who has read about the report's findings without registering which institutions produce it, and it is a reminder that in report-based questions the publisher is examined at least as often as the contents.  (c) This correctly drops the World Bank attribution but keeps statement (d), the claim that poverty in South Asia has greatly increased. That is the reverse of what the multidimensional poverty series records: South Asia, and India within it, has shown the largest documented declines in multidimensional poverty. The option is the closest miss in the set, and the trap is directional — a candidate who knows the report is about hardship and climate risk may assume its message must be that poverty is worsening everywhere.

Concept: The Multidimensional Poverty Index measures poverty as a set of overlapping deprivations rather than as a shortfall of income. It uses three dimensions with equal weight — health, education and standard of living — expressed through ten indicators: nutrition and child mortality under health; years of schooling and school attendance under education; and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living. A person is counted as multidimensionally poor when deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators. The index is the product of the headcount of the poor and the average intensity of their deprivation, which is what allows it to distinguish a country where many people are just below the threshold from one where fewer people are far below it. The global index is published by the United Nations Development Programme with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative; India separately maintains a National Multidimensional Poverty Index through NITI Aayog, which extends the global framework with additional indicators reflecting national priorities.

State PCS 2026 Q100 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q100 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer