The 60.2 percent share in GSDP of Bihar in 2019 – 20 was of

Question

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Correct — D, Service Sector. Only one sector of Bihar's economy has ever been anywhere near three-fifths of state output, and it is the tertiary sector. The Bihar Economic Survey publishes the sectoral shares of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices in Table 1.4 of its opening chapter, and in the 2024-25 edition that table gives the tertiary share for 2019-20 as 60.9 per cent, with the primary sector at 19.9 per cent and the secondary sector at 21.5 per cent in the most recent year of the same series. Be exact about what that does and does not confirm: the edition available for checking prints 60.9, not the 60.2 the Commission has quoted, because the Survey revises its series each year and a figure for 2019-20 published in one edition need not survive unchanged into the next. What is beyond argument is the sector, because the gap between the tertiary share of around sixty per cent and the next largest sector at roughly twenty is too wide for any revision to close. Bihar is, in structural terms, an unusually service-heavy state economy — its tertiary share runs several points above the all-India services share, not because its services are exceptionally strong but because its industry is exceptionally weak, and because much of what is counted as services here is trade, transport, construction-linked activity and public administration rather than high-value modern services.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The secondary sector as a whole — mining, manufacturing, electricity and construction — accounts for roughly a fifth of Bihar's Gross State Value Added, 21.5 per cent in the most recent year of the Economic Survey's series. That is about a third of the figure in the stem and well below the corresponding all-India industry share. Bihar's secondary sector is also dominated by construction rather than factories, which is why it grows with public works spending rather than with industrial investment.  (b) The primary sector stands at about 19.9 per cent of Bihar's Gross State Value Added — roughly a fifth, not three-fifths. This is the most tempting wrong answer for a Bihar paper, because agriculture employs a far larger share of Bihar's workforce than it contributes to output. That gap between employment share and output share is the single most important fact about the state's economy, and it is exactly what this question quietly tests.  (c) Manufacturing is only one component of the secondary sector, so it is necessarily smaller than the 21.5 per cent the whole secondary sector contributes — and in Bihar it is smaller by a wide margin, because construction is the larger part of that sector. A component of a fifth cannot be three-fifths of the total.

Concept: State output is measured as Gross State Domestic Product, and its composition is read from Gross State Value Added, broken into three sectors. The primary sector is agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining. The secondary sector is manufacturing, electricity, gas and water supply, and construction. The tertiary sector is everything else — trade, hotels, transport, storage, communication, financial services, real estate, public administration and other services. The classical development path runs primary to secondary to tertiary, and India as a whole broadly followed it, with the services share rising steadily from around 38 per cent of GDP in 1980-81 to well over half today. Bihar's path is different and is worth understanding rather than memorising: it moved from a large primary share to a large tertiary share while its secondary sector never grew to match, so its services dominance is a consequence of weak industrialisation as much as of a strong service economy. The state also carries an unusual gap between the sector that produces output and the sector that employs people, since agriculture supports a far larger share of the workforce than its fifth of output would suggest.

State PCS 2025 Q76 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q76 — Economy PYQ with Answer