Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The labour force participation rate falling sharply in the recent years for females in Ind

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The labour force participation rate falling sharply in the recent years for females in India.
Reason (R) : The decline in labour force participation rate is due to the improved family income and increase in education.
Select the correct answer from codes given below :
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). Take the two statements separately, which is what an Assertion-Reason question actually demands. (A) is the observed fact: through the 2000s and 2010s India's own employment surveys — the National Sample Survey Office's Employment-Unemployment rounds, and from 2017-18 the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey — recorded a marked fall in the share of working-age women who were either working or looking for work, and by the time of this December 2019 paper India's female participation was routinely described as among the lowest of the world's large economies. That is not in dispute. (R) is also true as a statement of fact about the same period: household incomes did rise, and girls' enrolment in school and higher education did expand substantially. What (R) does not do is explain (A). Rising enrolment mostly removes young women from the labour force while they are studying — an accounting effect confined to one age band, not a reason why women in their thirties and forties withdrew. And the 'income effect' — the idea that as household income rises women step back from low-paid distress work — is one hypothesis among several that economists actively argue over, not a settled mechanism. Because (R) states true things but does not amount to the explanation of (A), the code is (b) rather than (a). Honest flag: the causes of this decline are genuinely contested in the literature, so treat the exam's position here as the exam's position, and read (R) as a partial account rather than the answer to the puzzle.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The most-chosen wrong option, because the income-and-education story is the first explanation most textbooks offer. It fails on the second half of the Assertion-Reason test: rising income and rising education are real, but they are one strand of a live debate that also includes the shrinking of agricultural work without matching non-farm jobs for women, the way surveys record unpaid work on family farms and in family enterprises, and social norms and mobility constraints. A Reason has to be the explanation, not merely a plausible contributor.  (c) Overstates the objection. (R) is not false — family incomes did improve and female education did expand over the period described. The problem with (R) is its explanatory sufficiency, not its truth, and the codes distinguish between the two.  (d) (A) is the better-documented half of the pair. The decline in women's labour force participation was recorded by India's own official employment surveys and was the standard finding cited in Economic Survey and NITI Aayog discussions in the years before this exam; denying it is the one thing the data of that period does not allow.

Concept: The labour force participation rate is the share of the working-age population that is either working or actively seeking and available for work. Three things follow from that definition and all three matter here. First, it is not the unemployment rate: unemployment is measured inside the labour force, so a woman who stops looking for work leaves the labour force altogether and is never counted as unemployed — participation can fall without unemployment rising at all. Second, it is not the worker population ratio, which counts only those actually working. Third, and most importantly, it is extremely sensitive to classification: a person in full-time education, or doing unpaid domestic duties and not seeking outside work, sits outside the labour force by definition. Since a great deal of women's work in India is unpaid labour on family farms and in household enterprises, small changes in how a survey records that work move the headline number. India's falling female participation through a period of rapid economic growth is therefore usually called a puzzle rather than a solved problem.

State PCS 2019 Q108 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q108 — Economy PYQ with Answer