MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 44 of 100

Correct — option (1), "41.8 and 25.7". The Expert Group under Professor Suresh D. Tendulkar, constituted by the Planning Commission in December 2005 and reporting in 2009, recomputed India's poverty ratios on a new methodology. Its estimates for 2004-05 are 41.8 per cent of the rural population and 25.7 per cent of the urban population below the poverty line, giving 37.2 per cent for the country as a whole. Those are the figures printed at option (1). Why the rural number jumped and the urban number did not is the substance of this question, and knowing it makes the pair memorable rather than arbitrary. The previous official series, resting on the Lakdawala methodology, had put 2004-05 poverty at 28.3 per cent rural and 25.7 per cent urban, 27.5 per cent overall. The Tendulkar Expert Group abandoned the calorie anchor that had underpinned the old rural line — the assumption that 2,400 kilocalories a day in rural areas and 2,100 in urban areas defined the threshold — because actual consumption patterns had drifted far away from it. In its place the Group took the existing all-India urban poverty line basket, the one corresponding to that 25.7 per cent urban headcount, and adopted it as the common reference basket for both sectors, then priced it for rural India using state-level price differentials and included allowances for health and education spending. The arithmetic consequence follows directly. The urban ratio for 2004-05 barely moved, because the urban basket was the reference and was carried over. The rural ratio rose sharply, from 28.3 to 41.8 per cent, because rural India was now being measured against a materially more generous urban-derived standard. The all-India figure accordingly rose from 27.5 to 37.2 per cent — roughly a hundred million people reclassified as poor by a change in the yardstick alone, with no change in anybody's actual consumption. That is the single most examinable fact about the Tendulkar Committee, and it is also why the pair "41.8 and 25.7" hangs together: one number moved and the other did not. The corresponding poverty lines for 2004-05 were about ₹447 per capita per month in rural areas and ₹579 in urban areas.

• (2)29.8 and 30.5 — Option (2) puts urban poverty (30.5) above rural (29.8). No official all-India poverty series has ever done that. On the Lakdawala estimates, on the Tendulkar estimates and on the later Rangarajan estimates alike, the rural headcount ratio exceeds the urban one in every reference year. The rural figure of 29.8 is also in the neighbourhood of the old Lakdawala rural number for 2004-05, 28.3 per cent, which is what makes this option feel familiar to a half-prepared candidate — but the ordering alone is enough to reject it without touching the digits.
• (3)35.2 and 45.2 — Option (3) inverts the sectors even more starkly, offering 35.2 per cent rural against 45.2 per cent urban. Besides breaching the rural-above-urban rule that holds across every official Indian series, the urban figure of 45.2 per cent is implausible on its face — no methodology, official or academic, has placed nearly half of urban India below the poverty line for 2004-05. This is a pure filler option, and it is disposed of by the ordering test before any recall is required.
• (4)47.2 and 35.2 — Option (4) is the only serious rival, because it does obey the ordering rule — rural 47.2 above urban 35.2 — and it lies in the plausible range. That is exactly why it is there. It fails on recall alone: the Tendulkar figures for 2004-05 are 41.8 and 25.7, not 47.2 and 35.2, and the urban number in particular is decisive, because 25.7 per cent is the very ratio the Expert Group carried over from the existing urban line. If you remember only one of the two numbers, remember the urban one.

A poverty line is a money value of monthly per capita consumption expenditure below which a person is counted as poor, and the headcount ratio is simply the percentage of the population falling below it. Everything contentious about poverty measurement in India is contained in how that line is fixed. The original approach, formalised by the Alagh task force in 1979 and carried forward by the Lakdawala Expert Group in 1993, anchored the line to calorie norms — 2,400 kilocalories a day in rural areas, 2,100 in urban — and then updated it over time by price indices rather than by fresh consumption surveys. Over three decades the basket implied by that method drifted well away from what people actually bought, and it made no separate provision for health and education spending, which had grown steadily as a share of household budgets. The Tendulkar Expert Group broke the calorie anchor, adopted a single reference consumption basket for the whole country derived from the existing urban line, priced it across States, and built health and education into it. The Rangarajan Expert Group, reporting in 2014, then went back to a normative approach combining calorie, protein and fat norms with essential non-food expenditure, and produced higher lines again.

Poverty estimation is one of the densest scoring areas in State PSC economics papers because it comes with a small, fixed, entirely learnable set of committees, years and numbers. The sequence to hold is: Alagh Task Force 1979 sets the calorie norms; Lakdawala Expert Group 1993 fixes State-level lines updated by price indices; Tendulkar Expert Group, appointed December 2005 and reporting 2009, drops the calorie anchor and raises the ratios; Rangarajan Expert Group, appointed 2012 and reporting 2014, raises them again. Note that no official poverty headcount has been published for the years after 2011-12, because the 2017-18 consumption expenditure survey was not released; that gap is itself a favourite question. Note too that the Tendulkar estimates for 2011-12 — 25.7 per cent rural, 13.7 per cent urban, 21.9 per cent all-India — contain a number that appears in this question with a different meaning: 25.7 is the urban ratio for 2004-05 and the rural ratio for 2011-12. Candidates lose marks on that coincidence every year.

• Tendulkar Committee estimates for 2004-05: rural 41.8 per cent, urban 25.7 per cent, all-India 37.2 per cent. The corresponding poverty lines were about ₹447 per capita per month rural and ₹579 urban.
• The earlier official (Lakdawala-based) estimates for the same year 2004-05 were rural 28.3 per cent, urban 25.7 per cent and all-India 27.5 per cent. The urban ratio is identical in both series because the Tendulkar Group adopted the existing urban poverty line basket as its common reference.
• Tendulkar-methodology estimates for 2011-12: rural 25.7 per cent, urban 13.7 per cent, all-India 21.9 per cent, with poverty lines of about ₹816 rural and ₹1,000 urban per capita per month. Note that 25.7 recurs here as the rural figure.
• The Rangarajan Expert Group, reporting in 2014, re-estimated 2011-12 poverty at 30.9 per cent rural, 26.4 per cent urban and 29.5 per cent all-India, on lines of about ₹972 rural and ₹1,407 urban per capita per month — appreciably higher than Tendulkar's.
• The Expert Group chaired by Prof. Suresh D. Tendulkar was constituted by the Planning Commission in December 2005 and submitted its report in 2009; its central methodological change was to abandon the calorie-norm anchor and to build health and education expenditure into the consumption basket.

• Confusing the 2004-05 and 2011-12 Tendulkar figures. 25.7 per cent is the urban ratio in 2004-05 and the rural ratio in 2011-12, and the examiner will happily offer you the right number attached to the wrong year and sector.
• Mixing Tendulkar with Rangarajan for 2011-12. Tendulkar gives 21.9 per cent all-India; Rangarajan gives 29.5 per cent for the same year. The year does not identify the estimate — the committee does.
• Forgetting that rural poverty exceeds urban poverty in every official all-India series. Any option that reverses the two can be discarded on sight, which on this question kills half the choices before recall begins.
• Believing the jump from 27.5 to 37.2 per cent for 2004-05 reflected a worsening of poverty. Nothing changed on the ground; only the yardstick changed, and both figures describe the same year.

Poverty estimation is asked in three reliable shapes. The first is direct number recall, as here — a committee, a year, and a rural/urban pair, usually with one option that inverts the sectors and one that is close but wrong. The second is methodological: which committee dropped the calorie anchor, which introduced health and education into the basket, which returned to normative nutritional norms. The third is chronological: who chaired which Expert Group and in which year it reported. A candidate who learns the four committees as a single story — norms, then price-updating, then a new reference basket, then a return to norms — can usually reconstruct the numbers from the direction of movement even when the exact digits have gone, because each step raised the measured headcount for the year it re-examined.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Expert Group that recommended abandoning the calorie-norm anchor for the poverty line and building health and education expenditure into the consumption basket was chaired by :

  • (a)Y. K. Alagh
  • (b)D. T. Lakdawala
  • (c)Suresh D. Tendulkar
  • (d)C. Rangarajan

  Answer(c) Suresh D. Tendulkar. His Expert Group, appointed by the Planning Commission in December 2005 and reporting in 2009, replaced the calorie anchor with a common reference consumption basket derived from the existing urban poverty line, priced across States and inclusive of health and education spending. Alagh set the original calorie norms in 1979, Lakdawala worked with State-level lines updated by price indices, and Rangarajan later returned to a normative nutritional approach.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  On the Tendulkar methodology, the all-India poverty headcount ratio for 2011-12 was estimated at approximately :

  • (a)37.2 per cent
  • (b)29.5 per cent
  • (c)21.9 per cent
  • (d)13.7 per cent

  Answer(c) 21.9 per cent, made up of 25.7 per cent rural and 13.7 per cent urban. The distractors are all real numbers wearing the wrong label: 37.2 per cent is the Tendulkar all-India figure for 2004-05, 29.5 per cent is the Rangarajan estimate for 2011-12, and 13.7 per cent is the urban component of the Tendulkar 2011-12 estimate rather than the all-India figure.