On the basis of Tendulkar Committee estimation, ________% of the rural population and ________% of the urban population was below the poverty line in 2004-05.

Question

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Correct — option (1), "41.8 and 25.7". The Expert Group under Professor Suresh D. Tendulkar, constituted by the Planning Commission in December 2005 and reporting in 2009, recomputed India's poverty ratios on a new methodology. Its estimates for 2004-05 are 41.8 per cent of the rural population and 25.7 per cent of the urban population below the poverty line, giving 37.2 per cent for the country as a whole. Those are the figures printed at option (1). Why the rural number jumped and the urban number did not is the substance of this question, and knowing it makes the pair memorable rather than arbitrary. The previous official series, resting on the Lakdawala methodology, had put 2004-05 poverty at 28.3 per cent rural and 25.7 per cent urban, 27.5 per cent overall. The Tendulkar Expert Group abandoned the calorie anchor that had underpinned the old rural line — the assumption that 2,400 kilocalories a day in rural areas and 2,100 in urban areas defined the threshold — because actual consumption patterns had drifted far away from it. In its place the Group took the existing all-India urban poverty line basket, the one corresponding to that 25.7 per cent urban headcount, and adopted it as the common reference basket for both sectors, then priced it for rural India using state-level price differentials and included allowances for health and education spending. The arithmetic consequence follows directly. The urban ratio for 2004-05 barely moved, because the urban basket was the reference and was carried over. The rural ratio rose sharply, from 28.3 to 41.8 per cent, because rural India was now being measured against a materially more generous urban-derived standard. The all-India figure accordingly rose from 27.5 to 37.2 per cent — roughly a hundred million people reclassified as poor by a change in the yardstick alone, with no change in anybody's actual consumption. That is the single most examinable fact about the Tendulkar Committee, and it is also why the pair "41.8 and 25.7" hangs together: one number moved and the other did not. The corresponding poverty lines for 2004-05 were about ₹447 per capita per month in rural areas and ₹579 in urban areas.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Option (2) puts urban poverty (30.5) above rural (29.8). No official all-India poverty series has ever done that. On the Lakdawala estimates, on the Tendulkar estimates and on the later Rangarajan estimates alike, the rural headcount ratio exceeds the urban one in every reference year. The rural figure of 29.8 is also in the neighbourhood of the old Lakdawala rural number for 2004-05, 28.3 per cent, which is what makes this option feel familiar to a half-prepared candidate — but the ordering alone is enough to reject it without touching the digits.  (c) Option (3) inverts the sectors even more starkly, offering 35.2 per cent rural against 45.2 per cent urban. Besides breaching the rural-above-urban rule that holds across every official Indian series, the urban figure of 45.2 per cent is implausible on its face — no methodology, official or academic, has placed nearly half of urban India below the poverty line for 2004-05. This is a pure filler option, and it is disposed of by the ordering test before any recall is required.  (d) Option (4) is the only serious rival, because it does obey the ordering rule — rural 47.2 above urban 35.2 — and it lies in the plausible range. That is exactly why it is there. It fails on recall alone: the Tendulkar figures for 2004-05 are 41.8 and 25.7, not 47.2 and 35.2, and the urban number in particular is decisive, because 25.7 per cent is the very ratio the Expert Group carried over from the existing urban line. If you remember only one of the two numbers, remember the urban one.

Concept: A poverty line is a money value of monthly per capita consumption expenditure below which a person is counted as poor, and the headcount ratio is simply the percentage of the population falling below it. Everything contentious about poverty measurement in India is contained in how that line is fixed. The original approach, formalised by the Alagh task force in 1979 and carried forward by the Lakdawala Expert Group in 1993, anchored the line to calorie norms — 2,400 kilocalories a day in rural areas, 2,100 in urban — and then updated it over time by price indices rather than by fresh consumption surveys. Over three decades the basket implied by that method drifted well away from what people actually bought, and it made no separate provision for health and education spending, which had grown steadily as a share of household budgets. The Tendulkar Expert Group broke the calorie anchor, adopted a single reference consumption basket for the whole country derived from the existing urban line, priced it across States, and built health and education into it. The Rangarajan Expert Group, reporting in 2014, then went back to a normative approach combining calorie, protein and fat norms with essential non-food expenditure, and produced higher lines again.

State PCS 2026 Q44 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q44 — Economy PYQ with Answer