Consider the following statements regarding Voice of Global South Summit (VOGSS) :
1. India recently concluded its 2nd Voice of Global South Summit.
2. The term Global South is related to developed co

Question

Consider the following statements regarding Voice of Global South Summit (VOGSS) :
1. India recently concluded its 2nd Voice of Global South Summit.
2. The term Global South is related to developed countries.
Which of the above statements is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 1. Statement 2 is the one that decides this question, and it is plainly false. 'Global South' is the standard contemporary name for the developing countries — the states of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania — as against the industrialised 'Global North'. The label is geographic only by rough approximation, since Australia and New Zealand lie deep in the southern hemisphere and belong to the North in this vocabulary, while much of Asia lies north of the equator and belongs to the South. What the term actually tracks is level of development and historical position in the world economy, not latitude. Tying it to developed countries inverts its meaning, so statement 2 falls and every option containing it — (a) and (d) — goes with it. Statement 1 is correct. The Voice of Global South Summit is India's own initiative, launched to give developing countries a platform to set out their priorities and to feed those priorities into the agenda India carried through its G20 presidency. The first edition was held virtually on 12–13 January 2023 under the theme 'Unity of Voice, Unity of Purpose', with 125 countries taking part. The second edition followed on 17 November 2023, again virtual, held after the New Delhi G20 Leaders' Summit so that India could report back to the Global South on what its presidency had delivered — most visibly the admission of the African Union as a permanent member of the G20. So India had indeed concluded a second VOGSS, and the answer is (c). One point of honesty that a candidate preparing today needs. By the date of this paper, 22 December 2024, India had gone further still: a third Voice of Global South Summit was held on 17 August 2024 on the theme of an empowered Global South for a sustainable future. The word 'recently' in statement 1 was therefore already trailing events on exam day. The statement remains true as written — India did conclude a second summit, and nothing about a later edition undoes that — which is why the key credits it. But learn the count as three editions to date, 2023, 2023 and 2024, and do not carry away the impression that the second was the latest.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) It picks the one false statement and rejects the true one. 'Global South' refers to developing countries, not developed ones — the developed industrialised world is the 'Global North' in the same vocabulary. And statement 1 is accurate: India held its second Voice of Global South Summit on 17 November 2023.  (b) It correctly rejects statement 2 but wrongly rejects statement 1 as well. Candidates who knew that a third VOGSS had already been held by August 2024 sometimes reasoned that 'India recently concluded its 2nd summit' was out of date and therefore wrong. That over-reads the statement: it asserts that a second summit was concluded, which is a fact, and a later third edition does not falsify it.  (d) Statement 1 is right, but statement 2 cannot be. The whole purpose of India convening the Voice of Global South Summit was to give developing countries a hearing they do not get in forums dominated by the industrialised economies — which makes no sense if 'Global South' meant developed countries. The two statements in this option contradict each other in substance.

Concept: 'Global South' is the current shorthand for the developing world, and it replaces an older sequence of terms — Third World, developing countries, the North–South divide of the 1980 Brandt Report. It is a political and economic category rather than a strictly geographical one: Australia and New Zealand sit in the southern hemisphere but count as North, while most of Asia sits north of the equator and counts as South. India's Voice of Global South Summit is a virtual leaders' conference convened by India to collect and amplify those countries' priorities, and it was designed to bracket India's G20 presidency — one edition before the presidency's substantive work, one after it, to report back.

State PCS 2024 Q46 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q46 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer