Which of the following sectors in India faces seasonal unemployment?

Correct — A. Agriculture is seasonal work. The crop calendar concentrates labour into sowing, transplanting, weeding and harvesting, and leaves the weeks between with little to do.

Seasonal unemployment is exactly that condition: without work for some months of the year, at work in others.

NCERT names agriculture as the sector where people usually face it, which is what option (a) says.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  Manufacturing — Manufacturing runs to a production schedule rather than a crop calendar. When factory jobs disappear it is a demand downturn or a change in technology, not the turn of a season.
• (c)
  Medical — Medical services run continuously. Illness has no off-season, so staffing does not empty out for months and refill at harvest.
• (d)
  Information technology — Information technology work is project-based and year-round. Its employment risk is a slump in orders, not an idle half-year built into the work itself.

Indian unemployment is classified by cause, and two of the named types belong to agriculture.

Seasonal unemployment is idleness for part of the year, because the work itself exists only for part of the year.

Disguised unemployment is different. Everyone appears employed, but more people work a holding than it needs, so some add nothing to output — the standard illustration is a family of eight on a plot that two could farm.

Cyclical and structural unemployment, by contrast, follow demand and the shape of the economy rather than the calendar.

Key facts

• Seasonal unemployment means being unable to find work during some months of the year, and NCERT ties it to people dependent on agriculture.
• Disguised unemployment is the other agricultural type: more people working a holding than the work requires.
• Both are covered in the NCERT Class IX Economics chapter People as Resource.

Common traps

• Choosing manufacturing because some factories are seasonal. The sector defined by the season is agriculture.
• Mixing seasonal with disguised unemployment. One is about months without work, the other about too many hands during the same months.

No directly related past PYQ was found.