What were the shares of the Agriculture, Industry and Services sectors in overall GVA at current prices in Financial Year 2024 according to the Economic Survey 2023-24 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 17.7%, 27.6% and 54.7%. The Economic Survey 2023-24, tabled in Parliament on 22 July 2024 and written under Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran, prints the figures verbatim in Chapter 1, paragraph 1.12: "The shares of the agriculture, industry and services sector in overall GVA at current prices were 17.7 per cent, 27.6 per cent and 54.7 per cent respectively in FY24." Three qualifiers in the stem must be honoured together, and each one moves the number — the year is FY24 (2023-24), the aggregate is gross value added and not GDP, and the valuation is at current prices, not constant 2011-12 prices. All four options are engineered to add up to exactly 100, so a candidate cannot eliminate anything by totalling them; the discriminator is the services figure of 54.7, which only option (b) carries. The same Survey corroborates it from a second direction — its services chapter plots the services share of overall GVA at 54.7 per cent for FY24. The composition also matches the growth story recorded in the same chapter: real GVA at 2011-12 prices grew 7.2 per cent in FY24 while real GDP grew 8.2 per cent (the gap explained by net taxes growing 19.1 per cent), and within that GVA growth industry expanded about 9.5 per cent and services about 7.6 per cent against agriculture's roughly 1.4 per cent, held down by an erratic and unevenly distributed 2023 monsoon. A slow-growing agriculture and a fast-growing industry are precisely what push agriculture down to 17.7 and industry up to 27.6.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Every figure here sits exactly one percentage point away from the Survey's — 18.7 against 17.7, 28.6 against 27.6, 52.7 against 54.7. It is built for the candidate who remembers the shape of the answer (services largest, agriculture smallest) but not the digits. The services number is the tell: 52.7 understates the sector by two full points.  (c) This one over-corrects in the fashionable direction — it trims agriculture and industry by a point each and pushes services to 56.7 per cent, on the instinct that India's services share is far above half and climbing steeply. The Survey's FY24 figure is 54.7 per cent, two points lower, and industry at 27.6 per cent is understated here.  (d) The most dangerous option, and the reason partial recall fails: it reproduces the agriculture share exactly right at 17.7 per cent and then shifts one percentage point from services to industry. A candidate who has memorised only the agriculture figure will stop reading at the first number. The pair that actually has to be carried is 27.6 for industry and 54.7 for services.

Concept: Gross Value Added is the value of output minus the value of intermediate consumption — what production actually adds to the economy at each stage. India's national accounts report GVA at basic prices and GDP at market prices, linked by the identity GDP = GVA + product taxes − product subsidies, which is why GDP and GVA growth rates differ in any year when indirect tax collections or subsidies move sharply. Sectoral shares are always quoted from GVA rather than GDP because taxes cannot sensibly be assigned to a producing sector. The three-fold split — agriculture (with forestry and fishing), industry (mining, manufacturing, electricity and construction) and services — is the standard presentation, and at current prices the shares reflect both real output and relative price movements, so a year of weak farm prices lowers agriculture's share even if physical output holds up.

State PCS 2024 Q61 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q61 — Economy PYQ with Answer