By which year the target of population stability has been fixed in India?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Per the official UPPSC key, the answer is B — Year 2070. 'Population stabilisation' is the stage at which the population stops growing, reached some years after the total fertility rate settles at the replacement level (~2.1). In all honesty the exact target year is not settled across sources: India's National Population Policy, 2000 stated its long-term objective as a stable population by 2045, and different official/UN projections place India's peak or stabilisation anywhere from the mid-2040s to around the 2060s-2070s. Candidates should mark the year the paper's key uses — here 2070 — while knowing the underlying figure is genuinely contested; do not treat any single year as an undisputed fact.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not the year recorded by the key, and no standard Indian population-policy document fixes 2080 as the stabilisation target.  (c) The tempting distractor — 2045 is the year named in the National Population Policy, 2000 as the long-term goal for a stable population (and UPSC's own 2008 prelims used 2045). The UPPSC 2023 key, however, marks 2070, not 2045 — a real discrepancy between the two exams.  (d) Not the year recorded by the key; a near-miss decoy sitting close to 2070/2080.

Concept: 'Population stabilisation' means the point at which a country's population stops growing — reached some years after the total fertility rate (TFR) falls to and stays at the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman, because of population momentum from a young age structure. India's National Population Policy, 2000 set replacement-level TFR as its medium-term goal and framed a long-term stabilisation objective; the precise stabilisation year is stated differently across policy documents and projections.

State PCS 2023 Q113 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q113 — Economy PYQ with Answer