UKPSC Prelims 2025 Q144: Who had used the concept of "Jail cost of living" to

Q: What is the answer to UKPSC Prelims 2025 Q144?

A. Correct — A, Dadabhai Naoroji. **Dadabhai Naoroji** made the earliest well-known attempt to put a money value on bare subsistence in India. He took the ration menu actually served to prison inmates, priced it at prevailing rates, and called the result the jail cost of living. The estimates are set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), which collected work he had first published in the 1870s — his paper 'The Poverty of India' worked on 1867-68 prices. He used the prison diet because it was documented and deliberately minimal — a fully specified food allowance that the government itself treated as enough to keep a person alive. Pricing it turned a physical minimum into rupees. He then adjusted downward. Inmates are adults at hard labour, so their diet overstates what a whole population eats; allowing for children, Naoroji worked with about three-fourths of the adult jail cost as the average. The idea to carry away: **a poverty line is a minimum consumption bundle converted into money**. Naoroji priced a prison ration; India's later official lines priced calorie norms and consumption baskets.

UKPSC Prelims 2025 General Studies Paper-I · Question 144 of 149

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Answers from UKPSC's provisional answer key. The Commission publishes a provisional key for UKPSC Prelims 2025 and invites objections before issuing a final key. Every answer shown here is the Commission's own provisional answer (key PDF), not our derivation. If the final key changes an answer, this page is updated to match.

Who had used the concept of "Jail cost of living" to estimate the poverty line in India?

(a)Dadabhai Naoroji
(b)Mahatma Gandhi
(c)C. D. Deshmukh
(d)Vallabh Bhai Patel

Answer

Why

Correct — A, Dadabhai Naoroji.

Dadabhai Naoroji made the earliest well-known attempt to put a money value on bare subsistence in India. He took the ration menu actually served to prison inmates, priced it at prevailing rates, and called the result the jail cost of living.

The estimates are set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), which collected work he had first published in the 1870s — his paper 'The Poverty of India' worked on 1867-68 prices.

He used the prison diet because it was documented and deliberately minimal — a fully specified food allowance that the government itself treated as enough to keep a person alive. Pricing it turned a physical minimum into rupees.

He then adjusted downward. Inmates are adults at hard labour, so their diet overstates what a whole population eats; allowing for children, Naoroji worked with about three-fourths of the adult jail cost as the average.

The idea to carry away: a poverty line is a minimum consumption bundle converted into money. Naoroji priced a prison ration; India's later official lines priced calorie norms and consumption baskets.

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi wrote about the poor constantly, but his test was moral rather than statistical — he asked what an action does to the poorest person, not what a minimum diet costs.
He is the right answer to the talisman: judge every step by its effect on the poorest and weakest person you have seen.
(c)
C. D. Deshmukh — Deshmukh belongs to monetary and fiscal administration — central banking from 1943, then the Union finance portfolio in the 1950s — decades after the estimate this question describes.
He is the right answer to the first Indian to serve as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, appointed in 1943. He was later Union Finance Minister from 1950 to 1956.
(d)
Vallabh Bhai Patel — Patel's public work was mass mobilisation and administration — organising peasants, then holding the new state together.
He is the right answer to the leadership of the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and, as Home Minister, the integration of the princely states.

Concept

A poverty line is the money value of a minimum bundle of goods. Building one takes two steps: decide what a person must be able to buy to count as not poor, then price that bundle at prevailing rates.

What is contested in poverty measurement sits in the first step — whose bundle, containing what, revised how. Naoroji's answer was a prison ration menu; independent India's official answer began from a calorie norm.

Naoroji's estimate was made to support an argument, not to run a scheme.

His larger case was the drain of wealth — that British rule carried Indian resources to Britain — and a figure showing that ordinary Indians could barely afford a prisoner's diet gave that case a number.

The same question also stands at the head of India's measurement story, which later runs through the 1979 Task Force and the Lakdawala, Tendulkar and Rangarajan exercises.

Key facts

Dadabhai Naoroji's subsistence estimate is set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), which collected estimates he had first published in the 1870s.
The jail cost of living was arrived at by pricing, at prevailing rates, the ration menu served to prison inmates.
Inmates are adults at hard labour, so Naoroji took about three-fourths of the adult jail cost as the average for a population that includes children.
Naoroji is also identified with the drain of wealth theory; he was elected to the British House of Commons from Finsbury Central in 1892.
India's official poverty line was anchored to calorie norms of 2,400 kcal per person per day in rural areas and 2,100 in urban areas by the 1979 Task Force.
C. D. Deshmukh was the first Indian to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, appointed in 1943, and was Union Finance Minister from 1950 to 1956.
Vallabhbhai Patel led the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928 and, as Home Minister, oversaw the integration of the princely states.

Naoroji's jail-cost line beside India's later official line

Bundle = prisoner's ration menu→Bundle = calorie norm, 2,400 rural / 2,100 urban

Scaled to about three-fourths of the adult jail diet→Separate rural and urban baskets

A private estimate inside a nationalist critique→An official line used to count the poor

First published in the 1870s, collected in the 1901 book→Set by the 1979 Task Force, revised by later expert groups

Both convert a minimum bundle into money; they differ in where the bundle comes from and who adopts the result.

Study next

Task Force on Projections of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand, 1979 — the calorie-norm poverty lineLakdawala Expert Group (1993), Tendulkar Committee (2009) and Rangarajan Committee (2014)Head count ratio and poverty gap as measures of the extent and depth of povertyDadabhai Naoroji's drain of wealth theory and Poverty and Un-British Rule in IndiaNSSO consumption expenditure surveys and their reference periodsNITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index

Common traps

The jail cost of living prices the food ration served to inmates; reading it as a prisoner's wage, or as the cost of running a prison, aims the reasoning at the wrong quantity.
Naoroji's figure was his own published estimate, not a poverty line adopted by the government of the day.
The adult jail diet was not applied unchanged to everyone — allowing for children brought the working average down to roughly three-fourths of it.
Attribution items turn on the person-plus-method pair: Naoroji with the jail cost of living, the 1979 Task Force with the 2,400 / 2,100 calorie norms.
Each of the other three names carries a strong association of its own — the Reserve Bank, Bardoli, the talisman — and a half-remembered link can feel like knowledge.

The idea surfaces as a plain attribution — a name paired with a method, a book, or a phrase such as "jail cost of living" — with the four names drawn from different fields.

It also appears inside statement-based questions on how a poverty line is determined, where calorie intake, consumption expenditure and head count ratio are the moving parts.

Related PYQs

UPPSC_2020_PRE_GSI_Q1192020

Same subject — how poverty is estimated in India — but approached from the method rather than the person. The UPPSC item asks which measures have been used (head count ratio, calorie intake, household consumption expenditure, per capita income); this UKPSC item asks who used the concept of "Jail cost of living" to estimate the poverty line. Naoroji's jail cost of living is the colonial-era ancestor of the calorie-and-consumption approach that the UPPSC options list in its post-independence official form.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
In arriving at his estimate of subsistence in India, Dadabhai Naoroji priced which of the following?
- (a)The ration served to prison inmates
- (b)The wage of an agricultural labourer in Bengal
- (c)The land revenue demand per cultivator
- (d)The average earnings of a mill worker in Bombay
Answera — Naoroji priced the documented prison ration menu, the jail cost of living, and then scaled it down to allow for children.
Labourers' wages and mill earnings are measures of income received, and the land revenue demand is a measure of tax paid. None of the three is the cost of a minimum consumption bundle, which is what a poverty line requires.
practice — not a real PYQ
Calorie norms of 2,400 per person per day for rural areas and 2,100 for urban areas were first adopted as the basis of India's official poverty line on the recommendation of the
- (a)Task Force on Projections of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand (1979)
- (b)Lakdawala Expert Group
- (c)Tendulkar Committee
- (d)Rangarajan Committee
Answera — The 1979 Task Force fixed those calorie norms and priced the consumption baskets that met them.
The Lakdawala Expert Group (1993) retained those calorie-based baskets and changed how they were updated for prices, so it did not introduce the norms.
The Tendulkar Committee (2009) moved the line away from a calorie anchor, and the Rangarajan Committee (2014) framed a normative basket counting protein and fat alongside calories.
practice — not a real PYQ
C. D. Deshmukh is correctly described as
- (a)the first Indian to be Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
- (b)the first Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
- (c)the first Finance Minister of independent India
- (d)the first Chairman of the Planning Commission
Answera — Deshmukh took charge as Governor of the Reserve Bank in 1943, the first Indian to hold that office, and became Union Finance Minister in 1950.
Osborne Smith was the Reserve Bank's Governor at its establishment in 1935, which rules out (b). R. K. Shanmukham Chetty presented independent India's first Budget as Finance Minister, ruling out (c). The Planning Commission was chaired by the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, ruling out (d).
practice — not a real PYQ
The book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India was written by
- (a)Dadabhai Naoroji
- (b)R. C. Dutt
- (c)Rajendra Prasad
- (d)M. G. Ranade
Answera — Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901, bringing together his subsistence estimate and his drain of wealth argument.
R. C. Dutt wrote The Economic History of India, Rajendra Prasad wrote India Divided, and M. G. Ranade's economic writing appeared as Essays on Indian Economics. Each is a different book by a different author.