Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : India is the second largest mobile gaming market in the world.
Reason (R) : There are more

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : India is the second largest mobile gaming market in the world.
Reason (R) : There are more than 950 million internet users in India.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). The commission treats both statements as true and reads India's enormous connected population as the reason for its gaming rank. Both claims hold on the metrics they actually come from, and it is worth knowing which metrics those are. (A): India is routinely reported as the world's second-largest mobile gaming market, and that is a volume ranking — game downloads and number of players, with India's player base usually put at roughly 590 million. Measured by revenue India is nowhere near second: average spend per player is small, and China, the United States, Japan and South Korea are all ahead. (R): the '950 million' figure is a telecom-regulator number. TRAI reports internet subscriptions rather than unique individuals, and that base crossed roughly 950 million during 2024-25; estimates that count people rather than connections come out lower, because one person may hold a mobile data connection and a home broadband line at once. (R) explains (A) because a mass, cheap-data, smartphone-first user base is precisely what produces a download-led mobile gaming market of that size — the standard causal account — so the code is (d). Treat both figures as orders of magnitude rather than census counts; they are metric-dependent, and what is examinable is the direction, not the decimal.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The first half is fine — both statements are true — but the denial in the second half does not survive scrutiny. India is described as the world's second-largest mobile gaming market precisely because of the size of its connected, smartphone-owning population: the user base is what drives the download volumes. That is the causal chain the question is built on, so (R) does explain (A).  (b) (R) is defensible on the figures the commission is using. On TRAI's subscription counts India's internet base crossed about 950 million in 2024-25. You could quarrel with it only by insisting on unique individuals rather than connections, and even then the order of magnitude stands — this is a question of which measure is being quoted, not of a false claim.  (c) (A) is the more widely repeated of the two claims: India's rank as the world's second-largest mobile gaming market by downloads and player numbers appears in industry reports and government material year after year. Calling it false would require reading 'market' as revenue, which is not the sense in which the claim is normally made.

Concept: This question is really about how digital statistics are built. Two very different numbers hide behind the phrase 'internet users': the telecom regulator's subscriber figure counts connections on the books of service providers, so one person with a phone SIM and a broadband line is counted twice, while survey-based estimates count people and come out lower. India's gaming rank is measured the same loose way — 'second largest' counts downloads and players, not money spent. India's internet growth has been smartphone-first and price-led since the collapse in data tariffs after 2016, which is why its gaming is overwhelmingly mobile rather than console or PC, and why volume and revenue rankings diverge so sharply.

State PCS 2025 Q17 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

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