UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 111 of 150

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.

• (a)4, 1, 2, 3 — 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)1, 4, 2, 3 — 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)1, 4, 3, 2 — 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.

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.

You do not need all four dates to crack this. Two anchors do the whole job. First, Dandekar and Rath belong to the early 1970s — far older than the other three — so any option that does not start with 4 is out, which kills (b) and (c) at a stroke. Second, Rangarajan was appointed to review Tendulkar, so 3 must precede 2, which kills (a). Only (d) survives. That is the general technique for UPPSC chronology items: instead of trying to recall four dates, find one pair whose order you can argue from the logic of the events themselves, and use it to eliminate. The trap in this particular list is the Alagh Task Force of 1979, which sits chronologically between Dandekar–Rath and Lakdawala but is deliberately not offered here — UPPSC asked about Alagh separately in 2020, and a candidate who mentally inserts it can lose the thread.

• V. M. Dandekar and Nilakantha Rath, Poverty in India (1971), defined the poverty line on a daily intake of about 2,250 calories per person and established calorie-anchored poverty measurement in India
• The Planning Commission's Task Force under Y. K. Alagh (1979) produced India's first official poverty line, on calorie norms of 2,400 kcal per day in rural areas and 2,100 kcal in urban areas — it is not among the four listed here
• The Expert Group chaired by D. T. Lakdawala reported in 1993 and replaced the single national line with State-specific lines updated by State price indices
• The Expert Group chaired by Suresh Tendulkar reported in November 2009, moving from a pure calorie anchor to a wider consumption basket that included health and education spending, and adopting the Mixed Reference Period
• The Expert Group chaired by C. Rangarajan reported in June 2014, restoring separate rural and urban baskets built on calorie, protein and fat norms plus a normative non-food component, and yielding a distinctly higher poverty count than the Tendulkar line for the same year
• The Rangarajan group was constituted to re-examine the Tendulkar methodology, which is why Tendulkar must precede Rangarajan in any ordering

• Reversing Tendulkar and Rangarajan. Rangarajan (2014) reviewed Tendulkar (2009), so Tendulkar always comes first
• Forgetting how old the Dandekar and Rath work is. It belongs to 1971, a full generation before the Lakdawala group
• Slotting the Alagh Task Force into a list that does not contain it, and losing the ordering of the four that are actually named

UPPSC likes this family in two shapes — arrange the committees chronologically, as here, or attach one distinctive method to the right chairman, as it did in 2020 by asking which committee used nutritional requirements exclusively. UPSC prefers the conceptual side: what the poverty line actually measures, and why the line differs across States in a single year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following Expert Groups on poverty estimation moved India's poverty line away from a purely calorie-based anchor to a wider consumption basket that included spending on health and education?

  • (a)Alagh Task Force
  • (b)Lakdawala Expert Group
  • (c)Tendulkar Expert Group
  • (d)Rangarajan Expert Group

  Answer(c) Tendulkar Expert Group — its 2009 report replaced the calorie anchor with a broader consumption basket covering health and education and adopted the Mixed Reference Period.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Expert Group on poverty estimation chaired by C. Rangarajan submitted its report in which year?

  • (a)2009
  • (b)2011
  • (c)2014
  • (d)2016

  Answer(c) 2014 — the Rangarajan Expert Group, set up to re-examine the Tendulkar methodology, reported in June 2014.