UPPSC 2024 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 97 of 150

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.

• (b)(A) is false, but (R) is true. — 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)Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). — 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)(A) is true, but (R) is false. — 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.

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.

In an Assertion-Reason item the two truth judgements are usually the easy part; the mark is decided by the third question, which is whether (R) supplies the reason (A) holds. Build a fixed routine. Step one: is (A) true on its own? Step two: is (R) true on its own? Step three — only if both are true — join them with 'because' and read the sentence aloud. If it explains, choose the 'correct explanation' code; if it merely places two unrelated truths side by side, choose the 'not the correct explanation' code. Here the join works, and the historical record backs it: the welfare definition of development was adopted in direct response to the insufficiency of income measures. Watch the qualifier in (R) as well — 'not a sufficient measure' is a far weaker and far safer claim than 'not a measure', and UPPSC frequently turns an entire item on one such word.

• The Human Development Index was conceived by Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen and published in UNDP's first Human Development Report in 1990. It has three dimensions — a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living — and the standard-of-living dimension is measured by Gross National Income per capita at purchasing power parity. Income is therefore one of three components, not the measure itself.
• Morris D. Morris's Physical Quality of Life Index, published in 1979 for the Overseas Development Council, contains no income or GDP variable at all: it uses infant mortality, life expectancy at age one and basic literacy, each scaled 0-100 and equally weighted. It is the clearest illustration of the claim in the Reason.
• The Human Poverty Index was introduced in the Human Development Report of 1997 and was replaced by the Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP, in the Human Development Report of 2010. The global MPI covers deprivations in health, education and standard of living; NITI Aayog publishes a National Multidimensional Poverty Index for India.
• India's official poverty estimation has never used per capita income. It rests on household consumption expenditure surveys (the Alagh 1979 and Lakdawala 1993 lines were anchored to calorie norms; the Tendulkar Committee 2009 expressly delinked the line from one) and is reported as a head-count ratio — a further practical illustration that income per head is not treated as sufficient.
• Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics; his capability approach, popularised in Development as Freedom (1999), treats development as the expansion of substantive freedoms and treats income as instrumental rather than final.

• Reading (R) as 'per capita income is not a measure of development'. It says 'not a sufficient measure', and income is still one of the three HDI dimensions. UPPSC routinely decides an Assertion-Reason item on a single qualifier such as sufficient, only or necessary.
• Choosing code (c) reflexively whenever both statements happen to be true. Test the link explicitly by joining the two with 'because'; (c) is for two true statements that do not stand in a causal relation.
• Treating economic growth and economic development as the same thing. Growth is a rise in real output; development adds structural change and welfare improvement. Growth without development is common; development without growth is far harder.

UPPSC leans heavily on Assertion-Reason items in its development-economics block — HDI, PQLI, MPI, sustainable development — where both statements are true and the whole question is whether the Reason explains the Assertion. UPSC usually takes the same content as factual statement sets: which indicators enter the HDI, which report introduced which index, and in what year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Human Development Index, the standard-of-living dimension is currently measured by which one of the following?

  • (a)Gross Domestic Product per capita at current US dollars
  • (b)Gross National Income per capita at purchasing power parity
  • (c)Net National Product at factor cost
  • (d)Per capita household consumption expenditure

  Answer(b) Gross National Income per capita at purchasing power parity — the HDI's third dimension; the pre-2010 index used GDP per capita at PPP, and the other two dimensions are life expectancy at birth and the education indicators.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) differs from the Human Development Index chiefly in that the PQLI

  • (a)is published annually by the UNDP
  • (b)contains no income or output variable at all
  • (c)measures inequality between men and women directly
  • (d)uses purchasing power parity to convert incomes

  Answer(b) contains no income or output variable at all — Morris D. Morris built the PQLI in 1979 from infant mortality, life expectancy at age one and basic literacy alone, whereas the HDI retains income as one of its three dimensions.