Match the pairs.
Poverty Eradication Programs in India
(a) Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP)
(b) Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP)
(c) Jawahar Rojgar Yojana
(d) Sampoor

Question

Match the pairs.
Poverty Eradication Programs in India
(a) Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP)
(b) Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP)
(c) Jawahar Rojgar Yojana
(d) Sampoorna Grameen Rojgar Yojana
Year of launch
(i) 2001
(ii) 1989
(iii) 1983
(iv) 1978

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), '(a)-(iv), (b)-(iii), (c)-(ii), (d)-(i)'. The four programmes belong to four different moments in the history of rural anti-poverty policy, and their order is fixed. The Integrated Rural Development Programme was launched in 1978, initially in a limited number of blocks and extended to all blocks of the country in 1980; it was a self-employment programme that combined a government subsidy with bank credit so that a poor household could acquire an income-generating asset. The Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme followed in 1983, addressing a different group by a different method — wage employment for landless households, with the central government meeting the whole cost. The Jawahar Rozgar Yojana came in 1989, created by merging the National Rural Employment Programme with the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme into a single wage-employment scheme implemented through the panchayats. The Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana came in 2001, again by merger, this time of the Employment Assurance Scheme and the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana. So statement (a) takes 1978, item (iv); statement (b) takes 1983, item (iii); statement (c) takes 1989, item (ii); and statement (d) takes 2001, item (i) — which is option (4). There is a structural shortcut here worth noticing. List-I is printed in chronological order, oldest first, while List-II is printed in reverse chronological order, newest first. The correct mapping is therefore the exact reversal — first to last, second to third, third to second, last to first — and the straight diagonal that a hurried candidate reaches for is precisely wrong. One remembered anchor secures the whole thing: the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana was launched in 1989, the birth centenary year of Jawaharlal Nehru, after whom it is named. Fix statement (c) to item (ii) and only option (4) survives.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The straight diagonal, and in this question the exact inversion of the truth. It dates the Integrated Rural Development Programme to 2001 and the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana to 1978 — placing a scheme named for the 'total' rural employment consolidation of the 2000s more than two decades before the programme it eventually descended from. The option exists because List-II has been printed in reverse chronological order, so a candidate who matches position to position without reading the years produces this answer.  (b) Gets two pairings right — the Integrated Rural Development Programme in 1978 and the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana in 1989 — and then swaps the other two, dating the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme to 2001 and the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana to 1983. That is impossible on the internal history of the schemes: the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana of 1989 was itself created by merging the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme into a new scheme, so the older programme cannot postdate it by twelve years.  (c) Correct on the first two pairings and wrong on the last two, dating the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana to 2001 and the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana to 1989. This is the most dangerous option in the set, because a candidate who confidently places the two older schemes and then guesses between the two later ones has a straight coin-toss between this option and the right one. The tie-breaker is the name: the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana was launched in 1989, the birth centenary of Jawaharlal Nehru, which is a date to remember rather than to reason out.

Concept: India's rural anti-poverty programmes fall into two families that have run in parallel since the late 1970s, and almost every scheme in the syllabus belongs to one or the other. The self-employment family tries to raise a household's earning capacity permanently by putting an income-generating asset in its hands: the Integrated Rural Development Programme of 1978 did this with a subsidy-plus-credit package, it was merged with its allied schemes into the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana in 1999, and that in turn was restructured as the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, built around self-help groups and now known as the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana. The wage-employment family tries instead to provide immediate income and, in doing so, to create durable rural assets: the National Rural Employment Programme and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme were merged into the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana in 1989, which became the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojana in 1999, was merged with the Employment Assurance Scheme into the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana in 2001, and was finally superseded by the employment guarantee enacted in 2005. The recurring pattern is consolidation — several schemes merged into one, renamed, then merged again — which is why the dates and the mergers, rather than the scheme contents, are what examiners ask about.

State PCS 2026 Q37 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q37 — Economy PYQ with Answer