Consider the following Committees relating to poverty and arrange their formation in correct chronological order.
1. Lakdawala Committee
2. Rangarajan Committee
3. Tendulkar Committee
4. Dandekar and

Question

Consider the following Committees relating to poverty and arrange their formation in correct chronological order.
1. Lakdawala Committee
2. Rangarajan Committee
3. Tendulkar Committee
4. Dandekar and Rath Committee
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

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Correct — D, 4, 1, 3, 2 — Dandekar and Rath first, then Lakdawala, then Tendulkar, then Rangarajan. Take them in turn. V. M. Dandekar and Nilakantha Rath's study Poverty in India, published in 1971, is by two decades the oldest of the four; it fixed a poverty line on a daily intake of 2,250 calories per person and is the work that made calorie-anchored poverty measurement standard in India, so 4 must open the sequence. The Expert Group under D. T. Lakdawala came next, reporting in 1993; it kept the calorie anchor but broke the single national line into State-specific lines, updated by State-level price indices rather than by one all-India deflator, so 1 is second. The Expert Group under Suresh Tendulkar followed, reporting in November 2009; it abandoned the pure calorie anchor for a broader consumption basket that priced in spending on health and education and adopted the Mixed Reference Period, so 3 is third. The Expert Group under C. Rangarajan reported in June 2014 and is the most recent of the four, so 2 comes last. There is an easy internal check that settles the only ordering most candidates actually get wrong: the Rangarajan group was set up expressly to re-examine the Tendulkar methodology after the controversy over the Tendulkar line's daily figures, so Rangarajan cannot possibly precede Tendulkar. That fixes 3 before 2, and only option (d) does both that and puts Dandekar and Rath ahead of Lakdawala.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gets the opening pair right — Dandekar and Rath (1971) before Lakdawala — but then reverses the modern pair, placing Rangarajan ahead of Tendulkar. That is backwards. Tendulkar reported in November 2009 and Rangarajan in June 2014, and the Rangarajan group existed only because the government wanted the Tendulkar methodology reviewed. A committee constituted to review another committee's work cannot come before it.  (b) Wrong at both ends. It opens with Lakdawala ahead of Dandekar and Rath, although the Dandekar–Rath study of 1971 predates the Lakdawala group by roughly two decades, and it then puts Rangarajan (2014) ahead of Tendulkar (2009). This is the option that catches candidates who order the list by how familiar the names sound rather than by date.  (c) Gets the modern pair right — Tendulkar before Rangarajan — but opens with Lakdawala ahead of Dandekar and Rath. Dandekar and Rath came first: theirs is the 1971 study that put the calorie-based poverty line into Indian economics, and the Lakdawala Expert Group reported only in 1993, well after it.

Concept: India has never had one fixed poverty line; it has had a succession of expert groups, each of which redefined the basket of needs that the line is meant to price. The lineage runs from the Dandekar and Rath study of 1971, through the Planning Commission's Alagh Task Force of 1979 which produced the first official line, to the Lakdawala Expert Group reporting in 1993, the Tendulkar Expert Group reporting in November 2009 and the Rangarajan Expert Group reporting in June 2014. The early lines were anchored almost entirely on calorie norms; the later ones added non-food needs such as health, education, rent and conveyance. Because each group revised the previous one, the sequence is genuinely chronological rather than a set of parallel exercises, and UPPSC can therefore ask it as an ordering question.

State PCS 2025 Q111 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q111 — Economy PYQ with Answer