CDS (II) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 118 of 120

Correct — A, Kautilya. The Arthashastra devotes a chapter of Book IV to remedies against national calamities, and famine is one of them. Its opening prescription is direct relief — in Shamasastry's translation, 'During famine, the king shall show favour to his people by providing them with seeds and provision' — and the chapter then lists the alternatives open to a ruler: to undertake the works usually resorted to in calamities, to distribute his own stored provisions or compel the hoards of the rich into circulation, to seek help from allied kings, to set his subjects to raising grains, vegetables, roots and fruits wherever water is available, to live on the produce of hunting and fishing, or in the last resort to migrate with his people to a kingdom with an abundant harvest. It is the combination of relief works with grain in return that is read as the earliest Indian statement of what we now call food-for-work. Being precise about the sourcing: the seeds-and-provision line above is verbatim from the chapter, while the much-quoted formula about building forts or water-works in return for food is a translator's phrasing that we could not confirm word for word, so treat the principle as certified and that particular sentence as a paraphrase. Of the three other names, none is a writer on statecraft at all, which settles the question even for a candidate who has never opened the Arthashastra.

• (b)Aryabhatta — The mathematician and astronomer of the fifth century, author of the Aryabhatiya — place value, the approximation of pi, the explanation of eclipses and the rotation of the earth. He wrote nothing on famine or administration.
• (c)Chandragomin — A Buddhist scholar and grammarian, remembered for the Chandra-vyakarana, a Sanskrit grammar. Grammar, not governance.
• (d)Prabhakara — A philosopher of the Mimamsa school, known for the Prabhakara or Guru branch of its theory of knowledge and interpretation. His subject is ritual exegesis and epistemology, not the relief of famine.

The Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya — also called Chanakya or Vishnugupta, and traditionally associated with the rise of Chandragupta Maurya — is a manual of statecraft covering administration, revenue, law, war and diplomacy. It treats calamities as a category of state business rather than as acts of fate: famine, flood, fire, epidemic and rats each get their prescribed responses, and the responsibility falls on the king. Its Saptanga theory sets out the seven limbs of the state — the ruler, the minister, the territory and people, the fort, the treasury, the army and the ally — and famine relief protects two of them at once, the janapada and the kosha.

The question can be answered by elimination alone, which is worth noticing as a technique. Three of the four names belong to mathematics, grammar and philosophy; only one belongs to government, and a question about a policy response to famine must belong to the government name. Beyond the exam, the link to modern India is direct: relief works in exchange for grain or wages ran through the Famine Codes framed after the great famines of the nineteenth century, through the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme of the 1970s, and into the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, which makes wage employment on demand a statutory right. The idea that the state should offer work rather than only alms is very old in India, and the Arthashastra is where it is first written down.

• The Arthashastra treats famine in Book IV, in the chapter on remedies against national calamities.
• It directs that during famine the king shall favour his people by providing them with seeds and provision.
• The same chapter offers alternatives: relief works, distributing stored provisions or the hoards of the rich, seeking help from allied kings, growing crops wherever water is available, living on hunting and fishing, or migrating.
• Kautilya, also called Chanakya or Vishnugupta, is traditionally associated with Chandragupta Maurya.
• The Saptanga theory lists seven limbs of the state — swami, amatya, janapada, durga, kosha, danda and mitra.

• Mistaking Aryabhata's fame for breadth — he is an astronomer and mathematician, with no writing on administration.
• Assuming the Arthashastra is only about war and espionage; a large part of it is ordinary administration and welfare.
• Confusing Chandragomin the grammarian with Chandragupta the ruler.

As a thinker-to-idea attribution, or through the Arthashastra's specific doctrines — Saptanga, Mandala, or the duties of the king in a calamity.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Saptanga theory of the state in Kautilya's Arthashastra does not include which one of the following?

  • (a)Amatya
  • (b)Durga
  • (c)Kosha
  • (d)Dhamma

  Answer(d) Dhamma — the seven limbs are swami, amatya, janapada, durga, kosha, danda and mitra; dhamma belongs to Ashoka's edicts, not to the Saptanga scheme.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The right to demand wage employment in rural India was made statutory by which legislation?

  • (a)The Food Security Act, 2013
  • (b)The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005
  • (c)The Minimum Wages Act, 1948
  • (d)The Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act, 2008

  Answer(b) The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 — the modern descendant of relief works offered in return for food.