According to PLFS 2023-24, which of the following statements best describe the nature of employment among women in Bihar?

Question

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Correct — B, "The majority of women are self-employed, often serving as helpers in household enterprises." The source is the Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report for July 2023 to June 2024, published by the National Statistical Office in September 2024, and specifically Appendix-A Table 19, which gives the percentage distribution of workers in usual status (principal plus subsidiary) by broad status in employment for each State and Union Territory. For Bihar's female workers, rural and urban combined, that table reads: self-employed 83.5 per cent, split into own-account worker or employer 38.6 percentage points and helper in household enterprise 44.9 percentage points; regular wage or salaried employee 4.8 per cent; casual labour 11.7 per cent. Both halves of option (b) are therefore separately verified, and neither is a rounding. "Majority self-employed" understates it — 83.5 per cent is five out of every six working women in the State. "Often serving as helpers in household enterprises" is exact: at 44.9 percentage points the helper category is the single largest employment status of any kind for Bihar's women, bigger than own-account work, bigger than casual labour, and more than nine times the regular-wage share. In the National Statistical Office's classification a helper in household enterprise is a person who works in an enterprise run by a member of their own household and receives no regular wage or salary for it — that is, unpaid family labour, counted as employment because the work is economic, not because it is paid. The rural-urban split shows how completely rural Bihar drives this: rural female workers are 84.6 per cent self-employed with 45.7 points of helper work and only 3.6 per cent in regular wage jobs, while urban female workers are 60.7 per cent self-employed with 30.0 per cent in regular wage employment. Set against the all-India female distribution of 67.4 per cent self-employed, 36.7 points helper, 15.9 per cent regular wage and 16.7 per cent casual, Bihar's women are markedly more self-employed and less than a third as likely to hold a regular wage job as the average Indian woman worker. The Commission reached the same conclusion by elimination in its final revised key published on 31 October 2025, recording that under PLFS 2023-24 most women in Bihar are employed neither in the formal sector nor in the secondary sector, so options (a) and (c) fall and only (b) stands.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The exact inverse of the data. Regular wage or salaried employees account for 4.8 per cent of Bihar's women workers — 3.6 per cent in rural Bihar — against 15.9 per cent for Indian women as a whole. There is also a definitional error stacked on top of the numerical one: regular wage or salaried is a status category in the survey, not a synonym for formal employment, since a salaried worker with no written contract and no social-security cover is still counted in it. So even the 4.8 per cent overstates what this option claims.  (c) Killed by a different table of the same report. Table 33, which distributes workers by broad industry of work in current weekly status, gives Bihar's female workers as 81.2 per cent in agriculture, 7.5 per cent in the secondary sector and 11.4 per cent in the tertiary sector. Far from a majority, the secondary sector holds about one woman worker in thirteen. The comparison that shows how gendered this is: Bihar's male workers split 42.9 per cent agriculture, 29.6 per cent secondary and 27.4 per cent tertiary, so men have moved off the land in a way women have not.  (d) Requires at least two of (a), (b) and (c) to describe Bihar's women workers, and only one does. Option (a) is contradicted by a regular-wage share of 4.8 per cent and option (c) by a secondary-sector share of 7.5 per cent — these are not near-misses that might be argued either way, they are wrong by an order of magnitude. The compound option earns its place on the paper only by tempting candidates who half-recognise the phrase 'self-employed' and then hedge; the discipline is to test each statement against a number before looking at the codes.

Concept: The Periodic Labour Force Survey is the National Statistical Office's continuous household survey of employment, launched in 2017-18 to replace the old quinquennial National Sample Survey employment-unemployment rounds; its annual report runs July to June and its state tables are the standard source for questions of this kind. Two survey conventions do most of the work here. The first is the reference period: usual status with principal and subsidiary activity looks back 365 days and asks what a person mainly did, while current weekly status looks back seven days and counts anyone who worked even one hour. The second is status in employment, which sorts every worker into three broad classes. Self-employed splits into own-account workers and employers, who run an enterprise on their own account, and helpers in household enterprises, who work in a family member's enterprise without a regular wage — unpaid family labour. Regular wage or salaried employees receive a wage on a continuing basis. Casual labourers are hired for a day or a task at a time. The crucial interpretive point, and the reason this question exists, is that a high self-employment share in a poor agrarian economy is not a sign of enterprise. It usually means working on the family's own small plot or in the family's own tiny business, frequently for no separate payment at all, because there is no wage job to move to. Read that way the numbers describe the classic condition of surplus labour absorbed by the household rather than by the labour market — and Bihar's base is itself small, with an all-ages worker population ratio of 20.1 for women against 46.3 for men.

State PCS 2025 Q55 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q55 — Economy PYQ with Answer