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.
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?
I want to mention two points:
ReplyDelete1) 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.