Which of the following statement/s is/are correct about Bihar's economic performance in 2023-24?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, "More than one of the above." And the reason matters more than the answer, because it is not the usual two-out-of-three: all three statements are true, every one of them lifted from the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, the nineteenth edition, tabled on 28 February 2025. Statement (a) is the Survey's own sentence in Chapter 1, section 1.3 on printed page 8 — per capita GSDP in Bihar is estimated to have increased by 12.8 per cent at current prices and by 7.6 per cent at constant 2011-12 prices over the previous year. Table 1.5 supplies the arithmetic behind it: per capita GSDP rose from Rs 59,244 to Rs 66,828, and 66,828 divided by 59,244 is 1.128 exactly. Statement (b) is Table 1.4, the sectoral composition of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices, whose Tertiary row for the quick estimates of 2023-24 reads 58.6, following 60.9 in 2019-20, then 57.0, 57.0 and 57.8. The same column gives Primary 19.9 and Secondary 21.5, and 19.9 plus 21.5 plus 58.6 is 100.0 — the decomposition closes, which is the check that confirms you are reading the right row. There is a genuine hazard buried here: the Survey's own narrative on the facing page rounds the tertiary share up to about 59 per cent, so a candidate who memorised the prose rather than the table would have rejected 58.6 as wrong. Statement (c) is Table 1.7, where gross fixed capital formation of Rs 38,986 crore (revised estimate) stands against a GSDP of Rs 8,54,429 crore (quick estimate); the ratio is 4.56 per cent, printed as 4.6, at the end of a series that runs 1.6, 3.1, 3.3, 3.6 and then 4.6 from 2019-20 onward. Three statements, three tables, three true figures. So the trap in this item is not identifying a false statement — there is none. It is the reflex assumption that BPSC's "more than one of the above" means exactly two, which sends a candidate hunting for a flaw that is not in the paper and, more often, into marking whichever single statement they happen to recognise.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not wrong — true, and therefore incomplete, which is what disqualifies it as the answer to a stem asking which statements are correct. The Survey's Chapter 1 gives the run of per capita GSDP growth at current prices as 12.4 per cent in 2021-22, 13.6 per cent in 2022-23 and 12.8 per cent in 2023-24, with Table 1.5 showing Rs 59,244 rising to Rs 66,828. Marking (a) alone means having verified one statement and never tested the other two, which is precisely the behaviour the compound fourth option is designed to catch.  (b) Also true, and the single most likely statement to be wrongly rejected. Table 1.4 of the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25 puts the tertiary share of Gross State Value Added at constant 2011-12 prices at exactly 58.6 per cent for the 2023-24 quick estimates, against Primary 19.9 and Secondary 21.5. The Survey's own prose rounds the same figure to about 59 per cent, so a candidate revising from the narrative rather than the table sees a mismatch and strikes out a correct statement — then, with only two left standing, still reaches (d) by luck or misses it by reasoning.  (c) True as well, and the statement most often doubted because the number looks impossibly small — India's own gross fixed capital formation runs above 30 per cent of GDP. Table 1.7 is unambiguous: Rs 38,986 crore of GFCF against a GSDP of Rs 8,54,429 crore, which is 4.6 per cent, up from 1.6 per cent in 2019-20. State-level capital-formation estimates capture only the investment a State's statistical machinery can attribute within its own accounts, so they are not comparable with the national investment rate — but the figure printed in the Survey is 4.6, and the statement quotes it correctly.

Concept: Three separate aggregates are being tested here and they are routinely confused. Gross State Domestic Product is the total value of goods and services produced within a State in a year; Gross State Value Added is the same output measured before product taxes are added and subsidies removed, which is why sectoral shares are always quoted on GSVA rather than GSDP. Per capita GSDP is simply GSDP divided by projected population, and it can rise either because output grew or because prices rose — hence the two versions. At current prices nothing is adjusted, so the figure carries inflation inside it; at constant prices, in India presently the 2011-12 base, output is revalued at base-year prices so that only real volume change shows. Bihar's 2023-24 pair, plus 12.8 per cent current against plus 7.6 per cent constant, prices that gap at about five percentage points. Gross fixed capital formation is the third aggregate and a different kind of number altogether: not output but investment — the net addition to fixed assets such as buildings, machinery, roads and equipment during the year, excluding changes in inventories and excluding purchases of land, which merely change ownership. Expressed as a share of GSDP it is the standard reading of how much of what a State produces is being ploughed back into productive capacity, and it is the variable that governs whether today's growth can be sustained tomorrow. The sectoral split behind statement (b) is the Clark-Fisher three-fold division: primary, meaning agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining; secondary, meaning manufacturing, construction, electricity and water supply; tertiary, meaning trade, transport, communication, finance, real estate, public administration and other services.

State PCS 2025 Q53 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q53 — Economy PYQ with Answer