Which of the following is/are reason/s for the existence of poverty even after seven decades of Independence in India ?
A. More dependency of Economy on the agricultural sector.
B. Shortage of employm

Question

Which of the following is/are reason/s for the existence of poverty even after seven decades of Independence in India ?
A. More dependency of Economy on the agricultural sector.
B. Shortage of employment opportunities in manufacturing sector.
C. High growth rate of agriculture in comparison with developed countries.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), statements A and B are correct. Both of these are standard, well-documented explanations for the persistence of poverty in India despite decades of aggregate economic growth. Statement A, that the economy remains heavily dependent on agriculture, is true in the specific sense that matters for poverty: agriculture's share of India's workforce has stayed far larger than its share of GDP, so a large share of the working population is tied to a sector characterised by low and volatile productivity, disguised unemployment, and heavy dependence on the monsoon — this structural mismatch between where people work and where value is generated is one of the most cited drivers of continuing rural poverty. Statement B, a shortage of employment opportunities in the manufacturing sector, is equally well established: India has not gone through the scale of labour-absorbing industrialisation that other economies used to move workers out of low-productivity agriculture into higher-productivity manufacturing jobs, leaving manufacturing's share of employment persistently small and pushing the surplus workforce into low-paying informal services instead of formal manufacturing jobs. Statement C is where the question turns, and it is testing a specific technical inversion. It is not a HIGH agricultural growth rate that has kept India poor — quite the opposite. Indian agriculture's growth rate has historically been low, volatile and well below the growth rates achieved in industry and services, and this LOW, unreliable agricultural growth is itself one of the standard reasons cited for continuing poverty among the rural population dependent on it. A statement that inverts this relationship — claiming agriculture has grown fast relative to developed countries — does not describe a real driver of Indian poverty, so any option combination that includes C, such as options (1), (3) as they might be read, has to be discarded, leaving A and B as the correct pair.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Statement A is a genuine reason for continuing poverty, but pairing it with C is the trap. C claims agriculture has had a HIGH growth rate compared with developed countries, when the standard account is the reverse — Indian agricultural growth has been comparatively low and volatile, and that low growth, not a high one, is what is cited as contributing to rural poverty. A combination that keeps the correct statement A but adds an inverted claim about agricultural growth cannot be the right pairing.  (c) This under-counts the correct statements. Statement A (dependence on agriculture) is indeed correct, but statement B (shortage of manufacturing employment) is an equally standard and well-documented reason for persistent poverty — India's manufacturing sector has not created enough jobs to absorb workers moving out of agriculture, which is a core structural-transformation failure discussed in virtually every account of why poverty has proven hard to eliminate. Selecting only A leaves out a statement that is just as defensible.  (d) This under-counts in the other direction. Statement B (shortage of manufacturing jobs) is correct, but statement A (continuing dependence of the economy on agriculture) is also a standard and well-supported reason for persistent poverty — agriculture still employs a disproportionately large share of India's workforce relative to its contribution to GDP. Selecting only B leaves out a statement that is equally well established.

Concept: India's poverty debate rests heavily on the idea of structural transformation — the expected shift of a developing economy's workforce from low-productivity agriculture into higher-productivity manufacturing and then services as it grows. In economies that industrialised successfully, manufacturing absorbed large volumes of surplus agricultural labour, raising average incomes and pulling people out of poverty at scale. India's growth story since 1991 has been unusual precisely because this transformation has been incomplete: GDP growth has been led disproportionately by services, and manufacturing's share of both output and, more importantly, employment has stayed persistently below what a country at India's income level would typically show. The result is an economy where agriculture still absorbs a large share of the workforce even as its share of GDP shrinks, keeping a large population dependent on a low-productivity, low-and-volatile-growth sector — precisely the combination described (correctly) in statements A and B of this question.

State PCS 2025 Q43 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q43 — Economy PYQ with Answer