Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Development is being defined as improving living standards and welfare.
Reason (R) : Growt

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Development is being defined as improving living standards and welfare.
Reason (R) : Growth in per capita income is not a sufficient measure of development.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). Take the two statements in order. The Assertion states the definition of development that every contemporary framework now uses: development is an improvement in living standards and welfare, not merely a larger flow of output. The Reason states the defect that produced that definition: growth in per capita income, on its own, does not tell you enough. Both are true, and — this is where the marks are — the second is the cause of the first, so (R) is the correct explanation of (A) and the code is (a). The history is worth carrying into the exam hall because it makes the link obvious. Development economics in the 1950s and early 1960s did equate development with rising national and per capita income. That equation broke down when countries recorded respectable growth rates while poverty, unemployment and inequality stayed where they were, and Dudley Seers put the objection in its classic form in his 1969 address 'The Meaning of Development': ask what has been happening to poverty, to unemployment and to inequality, and only if all three have declined has there been development. The measurement apparatus then followed the argument. Morris D. Morris built the Physical Quality of Life Index in 1979 for the Overseas Development Council out of infant mortality, life expectancy at age one and basic literacy — deliberately with no income variable at all. Mahbub ul Haq, working with Amartya Sen, built the Human Development Index for the first Human Development Report in 1990, which kept income but demoted it to one of three dimensions alongside a long and healthy life and knowledge. Sen's capability approach, set out for a general reader in Development as Freedom (1999), recast development itself as the expansion of people's substantive freedoms, with income a means and never the end. Each of those steps was taken because per capita income was found insufficient. That is precisely the relation the code in option (a) describes.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Assertion is not false. Defining development in terms of living standards and welfare is not a fringe or aspirational position — it is the operating definition of the institutions that actually measure development. UNDP has ranked countries on the Human Development Index every year since 1990 on longevity, knowledge and standard of living; the United Nations adopted the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 with targets on health, education, water, equality and decent work rather than on income growth; and India itself reports poverty through consumption expenditure, calorie norms and the head-count ratio, and separately through a National Multidimensional Poverty Index built by NITI Aayog. To call the Assertion false you would have to claim development is still officially defined as income growth, which no current framework does.  (c) This is the option to beat, and the one most candidates lose the mark on. It gets the truth of both statements right and the relation between them wrong. Code (c) is meant for two statements that are separately true but sit in different causal chains — a fact and an unrelated fact. Here they sit in the same chain: the inadequacy of per capita income is the documented reason the profession moved to a welfare-based definition, and every composite index from the PQLI onwards was built for that reason. The discipline that settles it is to rewrite the pair as a single sentence joined by 'because' and see whether it reads as an argument or as a non sequitur. 'Development is defined as improving living standards and welfare BECAUSE growth in per capita income is not a sufficient measure of development' reads as an argument, so the answer is (a), not (c).  (d) The Reason is not false, and the qualifier is what makes it easy to defend. It says per capita income is not a sufficient measure — not that it is no measure at all. Per capita income is an arithmetic mean, so it says nothing about how the income is distributed; it omits health, education, personal security and environmental quality; it excludes unpaid household and care work; and it can rise for years while deprivation persists in large parts of a population. Every one of those gaps is documented in the literature that produced the alternative indices. Note also that income was never discarded — the standard-of-living dimension of the HDI is Gross National Income per capita at purchasing power parity — so the weaker claim in (R) is exactly the one the evidence supports.

Concept: Economic growth and economic development are not synonyms, and this question sits on the difference. Growth is a quantitative idea — a rise in real national output, usually reported per head to allow for population. Development is a qualitative and distributional idea — whether people live longer, learn more, work in decent conditions and are less poor. A country can grow without developing, if the additional output accrues to a narrow group or is spent in ways that leave health and schooling untouched. Because of that gap, the profession moved from single-number income measures to composite measures: Morris's Physical Quality of Life Index (1979), the UNDP's Human Development Index (1990), the Human Poverty Index (1997) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (2010). Each one is an attempt to capture living standards and welfare directly rather than to infer them from income.

State PCS 2024 Q97 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q97 — Economy PYQ with Answer