BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 53 of 150

Correct — D, "More than one of the above." And the reason matters more than the answer, because it is not the usual two-out-of-three: all three statements are true, every one of them lifted from the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, the nineteenth edition, tabled on 28 February 2025. Statement (a) is the Survey's own sentence in Chapter 1, section 1.3 on printed page 8 — per capita GSDP in Bihar is estimated to have increased by 12.8 per cent at current prices and by 7.6 per cent at constant 2011-12 prices over the previous year. Table 1.5 supplies the arithmetic behind it: per capita GSDP rose from Rs 59,244 to Rs 66,828, and 66,828 divided by 59,244 is 1.128 exactly. Statement (b) is Table 1.4, the sectoral composition of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices, whose Tertiary row for the quick estimates of 2023-24 reads 58.6, following 60.9 in 2019-20, then 57.0, 57.0 and 57.8. The same column gives Primary 19.9 and Secondary 21.5, and 19.9 plus 21.5 plus 58.6 is 100.0 — the decomposition closes, which is the check that confirms you are reading the right row. There is a genuine hazard buried here: the Survey's own narrative on the facing page rounds the tertiary share up to about 59 per cent, so a candidate who memorised the prose rather than the table would have rejected 58.6 as wrong. Statement (c) is Table 1.7, where gross fixed capital formation of Rs 38,986 crore (revised estimate) stands against a GSDP of Rs 8,54,429 crore (quick estimate); the ratio is 4.56 per cent, printed as 4.6, at the end of a series that runs 1.6, 3.1, 3.3, 3.6 and then 4.6 from 2019-20 onward. Three statements, three tables, three true figures. So the trap in this item is not identifying a false statement — there is none. It is the reflex assumption that BPSC's "more than one of the above" means exactly two, which sends a candidate hunting for a flaw that is not in the paper and, more often, into marking whichever single statement they happen to recognise.

• (a)Bihar's per capita GSDP at current prices increased by 12.8% in 2023-24 over the previous year. — Not wrong — true, and therefore incomplete, which is what disqualifies it as the answer to a stem asking which statements are correct. The Survey's Chapter 1 gives the run of per capita GSDP growth at current prices as 12.4 per cent in 2021-22, 13.6 per cent in 2022-23 and 12.8 per cent in 2023-24, with Table 1.5 showing Rs 59,244 rising to Rs 66,828. Marking (a) alone means having verified one statement and never tested the other two, which is precisely the behaviour the compound fourth option is designed to catch.
• (b)The estimated share of the tertiary sector in Bihar's GSVA (constant prices) in 2023-24 was 58.6%. — Also true, and the single most likely statement to be wrongly rejected. Table 1.4 of the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25 puts the tertiary share of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices at exactly 58.6 per cent for the 2023-24 quick estimates, against Primary 19.9 and Secondary 21.5. The Survey's own prose rounds the same figure to about 59 per cent, so a candidate revising from the narrative rather than the table sees a mismatch and strikes out a correct statement — then, with only two left standing, still reaches (d) by luck or misses it by reasoning.
• (c)The Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) formed 4.6% of GSDP at current prices in 2023-24. — True as well, and the statement most often doubted because the number looks impossibly small — India's own gross fixed capital formation runs above 30 per cent of GDP. Table 1.7 is unambiguous: Rs 38,986 crore of GFCF against a GSDP of Rs 8,54,429 crore, which is 4.6 per cent, up from 1.6 per cent in 2019-20. State-level capital-formation estimates capture only the investment a State's statistical machinery can attribute within its own accounts, so they are not comparable with the national investment rate — but the figure printed in the Survey is 4.6, and the statement quotes it correctly.

Three separate aggregates are being tested here and they are routinely confused. Gross State Domestic Product is the total value of goods and services produced within a State in a year; Gross State Value Added is the same output measured before product taxes are added and subsidies removed, which is why sectoral shares are always quoted on GSVA rather than GSDP. Per capita GSDP is simply GSDP divided by projected population, and it can rise either because output grew or because prices rose — hence the two versions. At current prices nothing is adjusted, so the figure carries inflation inside it; at constant prices, in India presently the 2011-12 base, output is revalued at base-year prices so that only real volume change shows. Bihar's 2023-24 pair, plus 12.8 per cent current against plus 7.6 per cent constant, prices that gap at about five percentage points. Gross fixed capital formation is the third aggregate and a different kind of number altogether: not output but investment — the net addition to fixed assets such as buildings, machinery, roads and equipment during the year, excluding changes in inventories and excluding purchases of land, which merely change ownership. Expressed as a share of GSDP it is the standard reading of how much of what a State produces is being ploughed back into productive capacity, and it is the variable that governs whether today's growth can be sustained tomorrow. The sectoral split behind statement (b) is the Clark-Fisher three-fold division: primary, meaning agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining; secondary, meaning manufacturing, construction, electricity and water supply; tertiary, meaning trade, transport, communication, finance, real estate, public administration and other services.

There is no clever route to this question — it is a table-recall item, and the honest strategy is to know Chapter 1 of the Bihar Economic Survey. What can be reasoned, though, are the plausibility checks that keep you from discarding a true statement. Statement (b) can be self-verified: if you remember Bihar's primary share as roughly 20 per cent and its secondary share as roughly 21 to 22 per cent, then the tertiary share has to be close to 58 or 59, because the three must sum to 100 — and 19.9 plus 21.5 plus 58.6 comes to exactly 100.0. Statement (a) can be checked against remembered aggregates in the same way: a per capita figure moving from about Rs 59,000 to about Rs 67,000 is a rise of roughly one-eighth, and one-eighth is 12.5 per cent. Statement (c) survives its own implausibility once you know that a State's capital-formation estimate is not the national investment rate; the tell that it is genuine is that it sits at the end of a rising series, 1.6 to 3.1 to 3.3 to 3.6 to 4.6, rather than appearing as an isolated number. The single fact that discriminates on this paper, however, is a reading habit rather than a statistic: BPSC's "more than one of the above" places no upper limit at all. Two is enough to trigger it; three triggers it just as well. Candidates who treat the phrase as a synonym for exactly two go looking for a false statement, invent a flaw in whichever figure they know least well, and then distrust the option they have already reached. Score each statement independently, count how many survived, and mark the compound option the moment the count passes one.

• Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, Chapter 1 section 1.3, printed page 8: per capita GSDP is estimated to have risen 12.8 per cent at current prices and 7.6 per cent at constant 2011-12 prices in 2023-24; Table 1.5 gives Rs 59,244 rising to Rs 66,828, and the recent run is 12.4 per cent in 2021-22, 13.6 per cent in 2022-23 and 12.8 per cent in 2023-24.
• Table 1.4 of the same Survey, sectoral shares of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices for the 2023-24 quick estimates: Primary 19.9 per cent, Secondary 21.5 per cent, Tertiary 58.6 per cent — the tertiary row reading 60.9, 57.0, 57.0, 57.8, 58.6 from 2019-20 onwards. The Survey's own narrative rounds the tertiary share to about 59 per cent, so quote the table.
• Table 1.7: gross fixed capital formation of Rs 38,986 crore as a revised estimate against a GSDP of Rs 8,54,429 crore as a quick estimate gives 4.6 per cent for 2023-24, at the end of a series running 1.6, 3.1, 3.3, 3.6, 4.6 from 2019-20.
• Bihar's GSDP grew 14.5 per cent at current prices and 9.2 per cent at constant prices in 2023-24 — 4.9 percentage points and 1.0 percentage point respectively above the corresponding all-India growth — with the tertiary sector alone expanding 10.8 per cent.
• The base is what those growth rates are growing from: per capita GSDP of Rs 66,828 at current prices and Rs 36,333 at constant prices, against India's per capita GDP of Rs 1,84,205 and Rs 1,06,744, and a per capita Net State Domestic Product of Rs 32,174 which is 30.1 per cent of the all-India average.

• Reading 'More than one of the above' as 'exactly two' — it sets no upper limit, and in this item all three statements are true
• Revising the Survey's narrative instead of its tables — the prose rounds the tertiary share to about 59 per cent while Table 1.4 prints 58.6, and the option quotes the table
• Mixing up the four qualifiers that make these figures precise: GSDP against GSVA, current prices against constant 2011-12 prices, and quick estimates against revised estimates
• Reading Bihar's headline growth as convergence — GSDP grew 9.2 per cent in real terms, but per capita Net State Domestic Product is still only 30.1 per cent of the all-India average

BPSC lifts these items straight out of the Bihar Economic Survey and quotes the figure to one decimal place, so the State Survey's Chapter 1 tables have to be revised as tables, with the qualifier attached to every number — current or constant, GSDP or GSVA, quick or revised estimate. UPSC never asks a State statistic and rarely asks a national one to a decimal; it tests the same material conceptually instead, asking why nominal growth exceeds real growth, what the trend in the tertiary sector's share has been, or why a high savings rate need not raise output — reasoning items rather than recall items.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  According to the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, Bihar's GSDP grew by 9.2 per cent at constant (2011-12) prices in 2023-24. In relation to India's growth in the same year, this was approximately

  • (a)1.0 percentage point lower
  • (b)1.0 percentage point higher
  • (c)4.9 percentage points lower
  • (d)exactly equal

  Answer(b) 1.0 percentage point higher — Bihar's real growth of 9.2 per cent was about one percentage point above the all-India figure, while at current prices Bihar's 14.5 per cent growth ran about 4.9 percentage points above India's. The gap between the two comparisons is the price effect, not a real one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Bihar's Gross State Value Added at constant (2011-12) prices for 2023-24, the shares of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors respectively were about

  • (a)19.9 per cent, 21.5 per cent and 58.6 per cent
  • (b)21.5 per cent, 19.9 per cent and 58.6 per cent
  • (c)24.0 per cent, 30.0 per cent and 46.0 per cent
  • (d)30.1 per cent, 25.0 per cent and 44.9 per cent

  Answer(a) 19.9 per cent, 21.5 per cent and 58.6 per cent — Table 1.4 of the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, and the three shares sum to exactly 100.0. Option (b) inverts primary and secondary; the striking feature of the real split is how small Bihar's secondary sector is against India's industry share of about 27.6 per cent.