BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 76 of 142

Correct — D, Service Sector. Only one sector of Bihar's economy has ever been anywhere near three-fifths of state output, and it is the tertiary sector. The Bihar Economic Survey publishes the sectoral shares of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices in Table 1.4 of its opening chapter, and in the 2024-25 edition that table gives the tertiary share for 2019-20 as 60.9 per cent, with the primary sector at 19.9 per cent and the secondary sector at 21.5 per cent in the most recent year of the same series. Be exact about what that does and does not confirm: the edition available for checking prints 60.9, not the 60.2 the Commission has quoted, because the Survey revises its series each year and a figure for 2019-20 published in one edition need not survive unchanged into the next. What is beyond argument is the sector, because the gap between the tertiary share of around sixty per cent and the next largest sector at roughly twenty is too wide for any revision to close. Bihar is, in structural terms, an unusually service-heavy state economy — its tertiary share runs several points above the all-India services share, not because its services are exceptionally strong but because its industry is exceptionally weak, and because much of what is counted as services here is trade, transport, construction-linked activity and public administration rather than high-value modern services.

• (a)Industrial Sector — The secondary sector as a whole — mining, manufacturing, electricity and construction — accounts for roughly a fifth of Bihar's Gross State Value Added, 21.5 per cent in the most recent year of the Economic Survey's series. That is about a third of the figure in the stem and well below the corresponding all-India industry share. Bihar's secondary sector is also dominated by construction rather than factories, which is why it grows with public works spending rather than with industrial investment.
• (b)Agriculture Sector — The primary sector stands at about 19.9 per cent of Bihar's Gross State Value Added — roughly a fifth, not three-fifths. This is the most tempting wrong answer for a Bihar paper, because agriculture employs a far larger share of Bihar's workforce than it contributes to output. That gap between employment share and output share is the single most important fact about the state's economy, and it is exactly what this question quietly tests.
• (c)Manufacturing Sector — Manufacturing is only one component of the secondary sector, so it is necessarily smaller than the 21.5 per cent the whole secondary sector contributes — and in Bihar it is smaller by a wide margin, because construction is the larger part of that sector. A component of a fifth cannot be three-fifths of the total.

State output is measured as Gross State Domestic Product, and its composition is read from Gross State Value Added, broken into three sectors. The primary sector is agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining. The secondary sector is manufacturing, electricity, gas and water supply, and construction. The tertiary sector is everything else — trade, hotels, transport, storage, communication, financial services, real estate, public administration and other services. The classical development path runs primary to secondary to tertiary, and India as a whole broadly followed it, with the services share rising steadily from around 38 per cent of GDP in 1980-81 to well over half today. Bihar's path is different and is worth understanding rather than memorising: it moved from a large primary share to a large tertiary share while its secondary sector never grew to match, so its services dominance is a consequence of weak industrialisation as much as of a strong service economy. The state also carries an unusual gap between the sector that produces output and the sector that employs people, since agriculture supports a far larger share of the workforce than its fifth of output would suggest.

This question can be answered from structure alone. Three of the four options belong to the same family — industry, manufacturing and agriculture are all goods-producing, and no goods-producing sector in any Indian state is at sixty per cent of output. The fourth is services, which in almost every Indian state is the largest single sector. Beyond that, notice the containment relation: manufacturing is inside industry, so the two cannot both be right and the smaller cannot be the largest. Once options (a) and (c) are seen as nested, the field halves. For revision, hold three numbers for Bihar rather than one — tertiary about sixty per cent, secondary about twenty-one, primary about twenty — and quote them as the Economic Survey's Gross State Value Added shares at constant 2011-12 prices, since the same headline can be reported differently at current prices or on a Gross State Domestic Product basis. And treat a precise decimal in a stem with mild caution: the sector it points to is stable across editions of the Survey, the decimal itself is not.

• Bihar Economic Survey, Table 1.4 (sectoral shares of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices): the tertiary sector's share for 2019-20 is given as 60.9 per cent in the 2024-25 edition of the Survey.
• In the same series the primary sector stands at about 19.9 per cent and the secondary sector at about 21.5 per cent — so services are roughly three times either of the other two.
• Manufacturing is a component of the secondary sector, which as a whole is around a fifth of Bihar's Gross State Value Added; construction is the larger part of that sector in Bihar.
• Bihar's tertiary share runs several percentage points above the all-India services share of Gross Domestic Product, which is a mark of weak industry rather than of exceptional services.
• India's own tertiary share has risen steadily since 1980, from roughly 38 per cent of GDP in 1980-81 to more than half today — the trend Bihar's structure exaggerates.

• Choosing agriculture because Bihar is an agrarian state. Agriculture employs the most people but produces about a fifth of output; services produce about three-fifths.
• Treating industry and manufacturing as alternatives. Manufacturing is a component of the industrial sector, so it must be the smaller of the two — a nested pair can never both be correct.
• Reading a precise decimal as fixed. The Economic Survey revises its series annually, so the exact figure for a past year changes between editions even though the sector does not.

BPSC asks Bihar's economy through a single figure lifted from the Economic Survey and expects the candidate to attach it to the right sector or year — and it asks the same thing of India's national accounts too, as the 70th CCE paper of December 2024 did with the agriculture, industry and services shares of national Gross Value Added. UPSC asks about direction and structure instead: whether the tertiary share has been rising, or how the sectors rank against one another.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Bihar's Gross State Value Added, the sector with the smallest share is

  • (a)The tertiary sector
  • (b)The primary sector
  • (c)The secondary sector
  • (d)All three are roughly equal

  Answer(b) The primary sector — about 19.9 per cent, marginally below the secondary sector's 21.5 per cent, with the tertiary sector at around 60 per cent dominating both.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following belongs to the secondary sector in national accounting ?

  • (a)Trade, hotels and transport
  • (b)Construction
  • (c)Forestry and fishing
  • (d)Banking and insurance

  Answer(b) Construction — grouped with manufacturing, electricity, gas and water supply in the secondary sector. Trade, transport, banking and insurance are tertiary; forestry and fishing are primary.