Consider the following statements :
(a) India's population density was higher than South-Korea in 2017.
(b) India's population density was lower than Bangladesh in 2017.
Which of the statement/s given

Question

Consider the following statements :
(a) India's population density was higher than South-Korea in 2017.
(b) India's population density was lower than Bangladesh in 2017.
Which of the statement/s given above is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), "Only (b) is correct." Statement (b) is true and statement (a) is false, and the question can be settled by ranking alone, without remembering a single figure. Statement (a) claims India was denser than South Korea in 2017. It was not. On the World Bank series (persons per sq km of land area), India stood at about 457 and the Republic of Korea at about 527 in 2017 — Korea is the denser of the two. This surprises candidates because India is enormous in both area and population while South Korea is a small country of roughly fifty million people. But density is a ratio, and Korea's denominator is tiny: about 100,000 sq km, some seventy per cent of it mountain, with the population packed into a handful of coastal and river plains and more than four in ten Koreans living in the Seoul Capital Area alone. A small country that is heavily urbanised will routinely out-rank a large, partly rural one. So statement (a) fails. Statement (b) claims India was less dense than Bangladesh in 2017. It was, and by a wide margin — Bangladesh stood at roughly 1,246 persons per sq km, close to 2.7 times India's figure. Bangladesh is essentially one great deltaic plain, cultivable and habitable almost end to end, carrying a population of over 160 million on about 148,000 sq km. Among countries of appreciable size it is the densest in the world. Statement (b) therefore stands. One statement true, one false, and it is the second one that survives — so the credited choice is option (2). A note on the numbers: the Census of India 2011 puts India's density at 382 persons per sq km, while international series for 2017 give about 457. The two differ because they use different years and different land-area denominators. The candidate does not need to reconcile them. Every published source, on every denominator, places Bangladesh above India and India below South Korea — the ranking is what the question tests, and the ranking is not in dispute.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Option (1) would require India to be denser than South Korea and NOT less dense than Bangladesh — both halves fail. India's roughly 457 persons per sq km in 2017 sits below Korea's 527 and far below Bangladesh's 1,246. This choice is the classic size illusion: candidates reason from India's absolute population of 1.3 billion rather than from the ratio, and forget that a mountainous, hyper-urbanised peninsula of 100,000 sq km can pack people more tightly than a subcontinent can.  (c) Option (3) is the trap for the candidate who checks only the half he is sure of. Statement (b) is comfortably true, and it is tempting to wave statement (a) through on the strength of it. But "Both" needs every component to hold, and (a) does not: South Korea's density exceeds India's on the World Bank series for 2017 and on every neighbouring year. One failed component is enough to kill a "Both" option, however solid the other component looks.  (d) Option (4) is an escape option, and an escape option is only available when every named alternative can be shown to fail. Here it cannot be taken, because statement (b) survives — India was less dense than Bangladesh in 2017 on any published dataset, so at least one of the printed statements is correct and "None" is closed off. Reach for an escape option after you have knocked down the named ones, never as a way of avoiding that work.

Concept: Population density is the simplest measure of population pressure: total population divided by land area, conventionally reported as persons per square kilometre. Because it is a ratio, it is driven as much by the denominator as by the numerator — a country with a modest population on a very small or largely unusable land base can be far denser than a country with a huge population spread over a subcontinent. Demographers therefore distinguish arithmetic density (people per unit of total land) from physiological or nutritional density (people per unit of arable land), and from agricultural density (farming population per unit of arable land). The three can rank countries very differently. Egypt is an extreme illustration: its arithmetic density is unremarkable because the desert counts in the denominator, while its physiological density is among the highest on earth because almost the whole population lives on the narrow Nile strip. South Korea versus India is a milder version of the same effect, driven here by mountains and by extreme urban concentration rather than by desert.

State PCS 2026 Q41 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q41 — Geography PYQ with Answer