Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : India's success is critical for the global success of Sustainable Development Goals.
Reaso

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : India's success is critical for the global success of Sustainable Development Goals.
Reason (R) : India accounts for nearly one-sixth of the total world population.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). The Assertion is true: the 2030 Agenda's targets are global aggregates — the number of people in poverty, the number undernourished, the number without safe sanitation, the maternal and infant mortality counts — and they are simply the world's national numbers added up. The Reason is also true: India is the world's most populous country, home to roughly one-sixth of humanity (about 1.4 billion of some 8 billion people; India overtook China during 2023). And the Reason is precisely why the Assertion holds. When a single country carries about a sixth of the world's people, its performance moves the global indicator all by itself: if India misses a target the world arithmetically cannot hit it, and when India improves the global number improves. That is a causal link, not a coincidence — so the answer is not merely 'both true' but 'both true AND R explains A'.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the trap option, and it is the one that catches candidates who treat every assertion-reason pair as unconnected by default. Both halves are indeed true, but the population share is not an incidental fact sitting beside the assertion — it is the mechanism behind it. Global SDG indicators are head-counts of people, so a country holding about a sixth of those people determines a sixth of the answer. R therefore does explain A.  (b) The Reason is factually correct. India's population is about 1.4 billion against a world population of roughly 8 billion — close to one-sixth (about 17 per cent), and India has been the world's most populous country since 2023. There is nothing false in R.  (c) The Assertion is not false. It is the standard formulation used in India's own SDG documentation and by UN agencies: because of India's demographic weight, global attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals depends heavily on India's progress. Calling A false would require arguing that the world could meet population-based global targets while a sixth of humanity is left behind, which is arithmetically impossible.

Concept: The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals with 169 targets set out in 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development', adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 as the successor to the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015). Crucially, most SDG indicators are counted in people — how many live below the poverty line, how many lack drinking water, how many children are stunted. A global target is therefore the sum of national performances weighted by population, which is exactly why the most populous countries are decisive for whether the world succeeds.

State PCS 2025 Q86 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q86 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer