According to Annual PLFS 2023-24 report :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, There is greater increase in Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of rural females as compared to urban females since 2021-22. Read the option carefully: it claims a bigger *increase*, not a bigger level, and the Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report for July 2023 – June 2024 settles it in one table. In usual status (principal plus subsidiary) for persons aged 15 years and above, rural female LFPR moved 36.6% in 2021-22 to 41.5% in 2022-23 to 47.6% in 2023-24 — a rise of 11.0 percentage points in two years, or almost a third above where it started. Urban female LFPR over exactly the same two years moved 23.8% to 25.4% to 28.0%, a rise of 4.2 percentage points. The rural female gain is therefore about two and a half times the urban female gain in percentage-point terms, and still the larger of the two when expressed as a proportional increase. The claim in option (a) is true on both readings, which is why no reasonable objection to it survived. Disposing of candidate objections on 31 October 2025 the Commission made the same point from a different table, quoting rural female LFPR at 35.5% against urban female 22.3% — figures on the report's all-ages base rather than the 15-and-above base of the headline table, but pointing the same way — and stating that the other two options are not correct. The economics behind the number is worth knowing: the rural surge is overwhelmingly a rise in self-employment, with women entering as own-account workers and as unpaid helpers in household enterprises, most of them in agriculture. That is also the fact that quietly destroys option (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This is the best-engineered trap on the question because two of its three components are exactly right and only the third is wrong. The report's State/UT table for Worker Population Ratio in usual status on the all-ages base does list exactly 36 States and Union Territories, and the all-India figure really is 43.7%. But 90% of 36 would mean about 32 units below the line, whereas only 12 are: Bihar 33.5, Delhi 35.2, Goa 36.5, Haryana 36.1, Kerala 42.1, Manipur 41.7, Mizoram 39.5, Punjab 41.3, Uttar Pradesh 39.2, Chandigarh 40.4, Lakshadweep 33.8 and Puducherry 41.1. That is a third of the list, not nine-tenths. A national average is a population-weighted figure, so it is normal for roughly half the units — and here rather fewer, because the units below it include the most populous States — to sit on either side of it.  (c) The direction is the wrong way round. The same report's distribution of usual-status workers by broad industry shows the share of women workers engaged in agriculture rising, not falling: 62.9% in 2021-22, 64.3% in 2022-23 and 64.4% in 2023-24. Well over three in five working women in India remain in agriculture, and the share has been drifting up. This is the mirror image of option (a) rather than an independent claim — the very rural-female entry into the labour force that makes (a) true is concentrated in farm work, so it pushes the agricultural share of women workers up. Anyone who marks (a) true and (c) true simultaneously has contradicted themselves, and the Commission recorded plainly that this option is not correct.  (d) This needs at least two of the three printed statements to hold independently, and only the first does. The second misstates the count of States below the national all-ages WPR by a factor of nearly three; the third reverses the observed trend in women's agricultural employment. It is worth pausing on this option rather than dismissing it, because BPSC does make 'More than one of the above' the key elsewhere on this paper — but here the arithmetic in (b) and the direction of change in (c) both fail against the report, so (a) stands alone.

Concept: The Periodic Labour Force Survey is the National Statistical Office's employment survey and, since it began in April 2017, the official source for India's labour-market numbers — it replaced the old quinquennial NSSO employment-unemployment rounds, whose five-year gaps left the country without recent employment data for long stretches. Its annual round runs July to June, so 'PLFS 2023-24' means July 2023 to June 2024, and the annual report for that round was released on 23 September 2024. Three headline indicators carry almost every question ever set on it. Labour Force Participation Rate is the share of the population working or seeking or available for work. Worker Population Ratio, also written Workforce Participation Rate, is the share of the population actually employed. Unemployment Rate is the share of the labour force — not of the population — that is unemployed, which is why a low unemployment rate can coexist with a low LFPR and tell you very little on its own. Each indicator is published in two activity concepts, usual status with a 365-day reference period and current weekly status with a 7-day reference period, and on two age bases, 'all ages' and '15 years and above'. Four numbers therefore exist for the same indicator in the same year, and BPSC's option (b) is built entirely on that fact.

State PCS 2025 Q47 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q47 — Economy PYQ with Answer