SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 19 September 2025, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 22 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 11 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. From 2025 the candidate response sheet prints every question and option as a picture, so the text here is transcribed from those pictures for this shift and checked against them independently; where the layout carries meaning, the picture is shown as well. Each answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. SSC released a tentative key for challenge and later its final one, both only to candidates behind a login, and the sheet does not say which of the two it carries. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which reform enabled MNCs to enter India?

(a)Land Reform
(b)Globalisation
(c)Labour Law
(d)Swadeshi

Answer

Why

Correct — B. The reform that let multinational corporations (MNCs) in is globalisation, one of the three strands of India's 1991 reforms.

NCERT describes globalisation as the integration of the country's economy with the world economy. Opening to foreign trade and investment is how that integration happens, and foreign investment is how an MNC enters.

Globalisation → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Land Reform — Land reform redistributes farmland, for example by abolishing intermediaries and fixing ceilings on holdings. It changes who owns land, not whether foreign companies may enter.
(c)
Labour Law — Labour laws govern wages, working conditions and industrial relations. They apply to firms once they operate in India, but they are not what opened the economy to foreign companies.
(d)
Swadeshi — Swadeshi points the other way: it means preferring Indian goods to foreign ones. The Swadeshi movement grew out of the 1905 protests against the partition of Bengal.

Concept

The 1991 reforms answered a balance of payments crisis. NCERT notes that India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to a level that could not finance imports for more than two weeks.

The response fell under three heads: liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG). Liberalisation removed licences and controls at home, privatisation reduced government ownership, and globalisation integrated India with the world economy.

The strands overlap: an MNC also gains from liberalisation's end of industrial licensing. The stem's word enter points to globalisation, the strand about crossing borders.

Key facts

The 1991 reforms followed a balance of payments crisis, when reserves could not finance more than two weeks of imports.
The reforms are grouped as liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG).
NCERT: foreign investment (FDI plus FII) rose from about US $100 million in 1990-91 to US $23 billion in 2022-23.
The WTO, founded in 1995, succeeded GATT, which was set up in 1948.

Study next

FDI and FII: how the two forms of foreign investment differOutsourcing as an outcome of globalisationThe World Trade Organization and GATT

Common traps

Picking an internal reform such as labour law: letting foreign firms in is about opening borders, which is globalisation.
Reading Swadeshi as a reform that welcomes business: it means preferring Indian goods to foreign ones.

The 1991 backdrop is asked directly: 17 Sep 2025, 16:00, GA Q.21 keys foreign exchange as the shortage behind the crisis. 24 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.17 keys Industrial Policy 1991 as the start of liberalisation.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Economic Scene — all 92 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.