CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 39 of 120

Correct — A, Dadabhai Naoroji. Naoroji was the first person to put a rupee figure on Indian poverty and argue from it. Working from the cost of feeding a prisoner in a colonial jail, he built what amounted to a minimum cost of living and set it against the income actually available to Indians, arriving at a per-capita income of about twenty rupees a year for 1867-68. That estimate did two things at once: it made poverty a measurable quantity rather than a moral impression, and it supplied the arithmetic for his drain of wealth argument, set out at length in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901, that a large annual transfer of Indian revenue to Britain was never returned to India.

• (b)Romesh Chandra Dutt — Romesh Chandra Dutt, president of the Congress in 1899, wrote The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age and argued the de-industrialisation case — that a country which had been a great manufacturing as well as agricultural power was reduced by British trade and tariff policy. That is economic history and economic nationalism, not the construction of a poverty measure.
• (c)V.K.R.V. Rao — V.K.R.V. Rao produced the first rigorous national income estimate for India, in his Cambridge work The National Income of British India, 1931-32. That is a later and more technical exercise, and it measures national income rather than a poverty threshold — Naoroji's figure preceded it by more than sixty years.
• (d)M. Ranade — Mahadev Govind Ranade is remembered for the case that India's future lay in industrialisation and for founding the institutional study of Indian economics. He shared the nationalist critique of colonial economic policy but is not the name attached to a measured poverty line.

A poverty line is a money value of a minimum acceptable standard of living, against which actual incomes or expenditures can be compared so that the poor can be counted. In India the idea begins with Naoroji in the late nineteenth century, is taken up officially after Independence through calorie-based norms, and is refined by a series of expert groups from Alagh in 1979 through Lakdawala, Tendulkar and Rangarajan. The official Indian line has always been anchored to a consumption basket rather than to income directly.

The four names all belong to the same nationalist economic tradition, so the question is testing which one turned the argument into a number. The clue is in the stem's phrase measurable development indicator. Dutt wrote history, Ranade wrote about industrial policy, Rao measured national income in the 1930s; only Naoroji built a subsistence cost and compared income against it. It is worth being honest about the arithmetic: the jail cost of living was a rough instrument and the twenty-rupee figure is a nineteenth-century estimate reconstructed by later scholars, not a survey statistic. Its importance is methodological. Once poverty has a price, it can be argued about with evidence, and every later Indian poverty line inherits that move.

• Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was published in 1901 and gave the drain of wealth theory its fullest statement.
• He is credited with the first estimate of India's per-capita income, about twenty rupees a year for 1867-68.
• His poverty benchmark was built from the cost of maintaining a prisoner, sometimes called the jail cost of living.
• Romesh Chandra Dutt, Congress president in 1899, wrote The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age and argued the de-industrialisation case.
• V.K.R.V. Rao's The National Income of British India, 1931-32 was the first rigorous national income estimate for the country; he later founded the Delhi School of Economics and the Institute of Economic Growth.

• Crediting the poverty line to R.C. Dutt because he is the other great drain-theory writer.
• Confusing the first national income estimate, which is Naoroji's rough figure, with the first rigorous one, which is Rao's.
• Reading the twenty-rupee figure as a survey result rather than a reconstruction from cost-of-subsistence reasoning.

As a who-first attribution among nationalist economists, or as a pairing of each name with the work he is known for.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was written by

  • (a)M.G. Ranade
  • (b)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (c)R.C. Dutt
  • (d)G.K. Gokhale

  Answer(b) Dadabhai Naoroji — published in 1901, it is the fullest statement of his drain of wealth argument.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The first rigorous estimate of the national income of British India, for the year 1931-32, was made by

  • (a)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (b)V.K.R.V. Rao
  • (c)P.C. Mahalanobis
  • (d)D.R. Gadgil

  Answer(b) V.K.R.V. Rao — his Cambridge study The National Income of British India, 1931-32 set the standard for later Indian estimates.