EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 31 of 120

Correct — A, (a) 2, 1, 4, 6, 5, 3 — that is, AITUC, then INTUC, then UTUC, then BMS, then CITU, then SEWA. The dates behind the sequence are these. The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920 at Bombay, the first national centre of the Indian labour movement, and its immediate occasion was India's membership of the newly created International Labour Organization, which required workers' representatives to be nominated to the International Labour Conference; Lala Lajpat Rai presided over its first session. The Indian National Trade Union Congress was founded in May 1947, in the weeks before Independence, as a Congress-aligned centre set up in reaction to the leftward drift of the AITUC. The United Trade Union Congress followed in 1949 at Calcutta, formed by socialist groups that would not join either of the first two. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh was founded in 1955 at Bhopal by Dattopant Thengadi. The Centre of Indian Trade Unions was formed in 1970, after the split in the communist movement, and the Self-Employed Women's Association was registered as a trade union at Ahmedabad in 1972 under Ela Bhatt, extending union organisation for the first time to women in the unorganised and self-employed economy. Note how little of this you actually need in the examination hall. Every option begins with either 2 or 1, so the single fact that the AITUC of 1920 is the oldest of the six kills options (c) and (d) at once. Of the two survivors, option (b) places SEWA third; the single fact that SEWA of 1972 is the youngest of the six kills it. Two endpoints — oldest and youngest — settle a six-item chronology, which is the general technique for sequence questions and is far cheaper than recalling six dates.

• (b)2, 1, 3, 4, 6, 5 — This sequence opens correctly, with AITUC and then INTUC, and then places SEWA third, ahead of UTUC, BMS and CITU. That is the one placement the chronology cannot bear: SEWA was registered in 1972 and is the youngest body in the list, later than UTUC of 1949, BMS of 1955 and CITU of 1970. The option is the serious distractor precisely because it gets the difficult opening right and then buries the error in the middle, where a candidate checking only the first two entries will not look. In a sequence item, verify the last position as carefully as the first: the youngest member of a set is usually as easy to identify as the oldest, and between them they eliminate most wrong orderings.
• (c)1, 2, 5, 4, 3, 6 — This ordering opens with INTUC ahead of AITUC, which reverses the two best-known dates in the whole of Indian trade union history: the AITUC dates from 1920 and the INTUC from 1947, twenty-seven years and one constitutional era apart. The chronological relation between them is not incidental either, since the INTUC was founded by Congress-aligned leaders precisely because the older AITUC had moved out of their control. An option that puts the reaction before the thing reacted to can be discarded without examining any of its remaining entries.
• (d)1, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6 — This option also opens with INTUC before AITUC and compounds the error by placing SEWA second, in 1972's slot, ahead of the AITUC of 1920. Both failures are visible from the first two entries alone, which makes this the cheapest option to eliminate in the set. It is included to reward the candidate who begins a sequence question by asking which body is oldest rather than by attempting to reconstruct the entire chronology; that single question disposes of two of the four options here in a few seconds.

The Indian trade union movement is organised around central federations, each with a political affiliation, and its history is a sequence of foundations and splits. The All India Trade Union Congress, founded in 1920, was the first, prompted in part by the need to nominate workers' delegates to the International Labour Conference after the ILO was set up in 1919, and it later came under communist influence — a shift that produced the split of 1929, when the moderate wing led by N. M. Joshi left to form a separate federation. Independence brought a wave of new centres as political parties built their own labour wings: the Congress-aligned INTUC in 1947, the socialist Hind Mazdoor Sabha in 1948, and the UTUC in 1949. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh followed in 1955, and CITU in 1970 after the division in the communist movement. SEWA, registered in 1972, belongs to a different lineage altogether: it organises self-employed and home-based women workers — vendors, head-loaders, garment workers — who have no employer to bargain with, and it demonstrated that the Trade Unions Act, 1926 could be used to register a union of the unorganised. The Ministry of Labour and Employment recognises central trade union organisations on the basis of verified membership, and recognition governs their nomination to tripartite bodies such as the Indian Labour Conference and to Indian delegations to the ILO.

Chronology questions look like pure recall and are in fact tests of technique, because the four options are rival orderings of the same six items rather than independent claims. The efficient method is to fix the endpoints. Identify the oldest member of the set and discard every option that does not begin with it; identify the youngest and discard every option that does not end with it. On this item those two steps alone are decisive. What makes the method reliable is that the endpoints of such a set are almost always the two facts a syllabus actually teaches — here 1920 for the AITUC and 1972 for SEWA — while the middle entries are the ones nobody remembers precisely. The paper's own shape supports the technique: the guide to this booklet records that this is the longest statement list in the paper, six items against two or three elsewhere, and a six-item list is exactly the case where reconstructing the full order from memory is slowest and endpoint elimination fastest.

• The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920 at Bombay as India's first national trade union centre, with Lala Lajpat Rai presiding over its first session; a proximate occasion was the need to nominate workers' representatives to the International Labour Conference after the ILO was established in 1919.
• The Indian National Trade Union Congress was founded in May 1947 as a Congress-aligned centre, the Hind Mazdoor Sabha followed in 1948 from the socialist wing, and the United Trade Union Congress was formed at Calcutta in 1949.
• The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh was founded in 1955 at Bhopal by Dattopant Thengadi, and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions was formed in 1970 following the split in the communist movement.
• The Self-Employed Women's Association was registered as a trade union at Ahmedabad in 1972 under Ela Bhatt and organises self-employed and home-based women workers who have no single employer, showing that the Trade Unions Act, 1926 can be used to register unions of the unorganised.
• Central trade union organisations are recognised by the Ministry of Labour and Employment on the basis of verified membership, and recognition determines nomination to tripartite forums such as the Indian Labour Conference and to India's delegations to the International Labour Conference.

• Reconstructing a six-item order from memory instead of fixing the endpoints; identifying the oldest body eliminates two options here and identifying the youngest eliminates a third
• Reversing AITUC and INTUC — 1920 against 1947 — when the INTUC exists because the AITUC had already moved beyond Congress control, so the causal order matches the chronological one
• Treating SEWA as an early body because it is famous; it is the youngest in this list, registered in 1972, and belongs to the organisation of self-employed women rather than to the party-affiliated federations
• Slipping the Hind Mazdoor Sabha of 1948 into this list, which does not contain it; a related question may add it between INTUC and UTUC, and the two dates are only a year apart

This paper's labour block asks the trade union movement either as a chronology of exactly this kind or as a single-fact item on the founding year, founder or political affiliation of one federation. The pool of bodies is small and their dates cluster in three groups — one before Independence, four in the decades after, one in the 1970s — so grouping them by decade is enough for most orderings. Because the options in a chronology item are permutations rather than claims, always answer by elimination from the endpoints, and never by trying to verify a whole sequence entry by entry.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Self-Employed Women's Association, registered as a trade union at Ahmedabad, was founded by which one of the following?

  • (a)Ela Bhatt
  • (b)Aruna Asaf Ali
  • (c)Dattopant Thengadi
  • (d)Anasuya Sarabhai

  Answer(a) Ela Bhatt — a lawyer working with the textile labour movement in Ahmedabad, she founded SEWA in 1972 as a trade union of self-employed and home-based women workers, a category with no single employer to bargain against, and it was registered under the Trade Unions Act, 1926. Dattopant Thengadi founded the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh in 1955, and Anasuya Sarabhai belongs to the earlier Ahmedabad textile labour movement of the 1910s and 1920s.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following central trade union organisations was the earliest to be formed in India?

  • (a)Indian National Trade Union Congress
  • (b)All India Trade Union Congress
  • (c)Hind Mazdoor Sabha
  • (d)Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh

  Answer(b) All India Trade Union Congress — founded in 1920 at Bombay, it was the first national trade union centre in India, and its formation was closely connected with the need to send workers' representatives to the International Labour Conference after the ILO came into being in 1919. The INTUC dates from 1947, the Hind Mazdoor Sabha from 1948 and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh from 1955, all of them post-Independence foundations.