SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 25 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 13 of 99

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

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SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

‘Drain of Wealth’, a critique of the colonial exploitation, was given by which of the following nationalist leaders?

(a)Chakravarti Rajagopalachari
(b)Rajendra Prasad
(c)Dadabhai Naoroji
(d)Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

Answer

Why

Correct — C. The Drain of Wealth is Dadabhai Naoroji's theory.

His case was economic before it was moral. A part of India's national income, he argued, left the country every year and never came back: the home charges remitted to London, salaries and pensions paid in England, interest on debt raised there, and the profits of British capital in India.

He set it out at length in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, and the leader who framed it is option (c).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari — Chakravarti Rajagopalachari belongs to a much later generation — the last Governor-General of India and later the founder of the Swatantra Party — and wrote no theory of the drain.
(b)
Rajendra Prasad — Rajendra Prasad presided over the Constituent Assembly and became India's first President. His work sits in the constitutional story, not in the economic critique of the 1870s.
(d)
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel led the Bardoli satyagraha and integrated the princely states after 1947. He was an organiser and an administrator, not an economic theorist.

Concept

The Drain of Wealth was the central economic argument of the early nationalists, and its force lay in being made in the coloniser's own accounting terms.

Naoroji held that India was transferring wealth to Britain year after year with no equivalent flowing back, and that this transfer — not any failing of Indians — explained Indian poverty. He was also among the first to attempt an estimate of India's national income, which gave the argument its numbers.

The critique was carried forward by others, notably R C Dutt in his Economic History of India.

This is a Moderate-era argument, made through books, petitions and speeches in Parliament rather than through mass agitation.

That is worth remembering when a stem offers you a famous twentieth-century name: the drain theory predates the mass movements entirely.

Key facts

Dadabhai Naoroji set out the Drain of Wealth theory in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.
He was known as the Grand Old Man of India.
In 1892 he became the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons, from Central Finsbury.
He presided over the Indian National Congress three times, in 1886, 1893 and 1906.

Study next

The economic critique of colonialism by the Moderate nationalistsPresidents of the early sessions of the Indian National CongressR C Dutt's Economic History of India and how it extended the drain argument

Common traps

Attaching the theory to a twentieth-century leader, because the phrase sounds like mass-movement rhetoric.
Confusing Naoroji's book with R C Dutt's Economic History of India.

Naoroji is asked through his book, his theory and his firsts, and those three are best learnt as one entry.

The authorship of Poverty and Un-British Rule in India is asked on 23 Sep 2024, 16:00 at General Awareness Q.6.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.