Tuesday 8 January 2013

Indian Economy, a CR point

I was reading through a write-up on Indian Economy-2012. I wanted to relate one point from here to the critical reasoning stuff.
The following are the facts found in a recent survey:
Fact-1: Indian economy may be broadly divided in to three sectors- Industry, Agriculture and Services. The contributions of these sectors to the GDP are as follows:
Agriculture-15%, Industry-28%, Services-57%
Fact-2: For over a considerable period, there is exodus observed in a significant extent. People are moving from rural to urban areas. Most of the people who are moving out of rural areas are not finding agriculture as a lucrative sector and trying to find jobs in industries in urban areas.

Surprise Element:
India, being known for a primarily agriculture-based country, has got only 15% of GDP from that sector. Now the point is why is it so?
From the facts-1 & 2 mentioned above, the most general conclusion may be like this:
Most of the people are not interested to work in Agriculture sector and over a period, most of the people have moved to urban areas to work in industry and services sectors. This is the reason why the Services and Industry sectors are at upper hand in contributing to GDP when compared to the Agriculture sector.
But in reality, if we see the third fact, we surprise once again:
Fact-3: Figures of 'labour-force by occupation' are like this:
Agriculture-52%, Industry-14%, Services-34%
Even though more than half of the labour-force works in Agriculture sector, the contribution from that sector is not to that extent. The point here is - "exodus" may not be the main reason (or it may not be a reason at all) for this and there must be other factors.
Bottom line:
Don't jump for a quick conclusion. Go through all answer options carefully and evaluate one by one critically.
By name itself, it's a "Critical" Reasoning section, right?

1 comment:

  1. I want to mention two points:

    1) An individual person working in agriculture makes a small contribution to GDP. On the other hand, an individual working in urban industry or services makes a larger contribution.

    2) Just because 52% of people work in agriculture it doesn't mean that people haven't been migrating in large numbers to urban areas -- not long ago I expect many more than 52% were working in agriculture.

    These two points combine to give the result reported in the article you read. These results are normal in societies where populations migrate in large numbers to work in urban areas.

    ReplyDelete