Indian Economy GK Questions with Answers – Page 44

Disguised unemployment is the situation in which more people work at a job than it actually needs, so taking some of them away would not reduce output at all.

The Planning Commission was set up in March 1950 by a resolution of the Union Cabinet, not by the Constitution and not by an Act of Parliament, which made it an extra-constitutional advisory body.

The index counts a household as poor when it suffers deprivation in enough of the indicators grouped under these three heads, such as nutrition and child mortality under health, years of schooling and attendance under education, and cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets under standard of living.

The head count ratio simply counts how many people fall below the line and divides that by the total population, which makes it easy to understand and easy to compare across states.

Begun in 2017, it replaced the five-yearly employment and unemployment surveys and gives annual estimates for rural and urban areas together along with more frequent estimates for urban areas, using the usual status and current weekly status measures.

This measure notes what the person did in each half day of the seven days before the survey, so every day of idleness is counted; because it picks up short spells that the longer reference periods miss, it yields the highest estimate of unemployment of the three.

Agriculture needs labour at sowing, transplanting and harvest and very little in between, and industries tied to a crop, such as sugar mills and rice mills, work only for part of the year, so the workers attached to them are idle for the remaining months.

The task force of 1979 fixed the rural line at the consumption expenditure needed to obtain 2,400 calories a day, on the ground that rural work involves more physical labour.

The Tendulkar expert group reported in 2009, moved away from the calorie anchor, used a mixed reference period for consumption and brought private spending on health and education into the basket, which raised the estimated share of the poor.

The Act, passed in 2005, gives every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work a legal right to one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year, and if work is not provided within the prescribed period the applicant becomes entitled to an unemployment allowance.

Here the extra workers appear to be employed but their marginal contribution to output is close to zero, which is why the condition is called disguised or hidden; the classic Indian example is a family farm on which several members work a plot that two could manage.

In the standard classification the churning poor are those whose consumption crosses the poverty line and falls back below it again and again, the typical cases being small and marginal farmers and casual labourers whose earnings depend on the season.

The National Sample Survey Office carries out the large household surveys of consumption expenditure from which the number of people below the poverty line is worked out, and it now functions within the National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

The National Securities Depository Limited was set up in 1996, the year the Depositories Act was passed, and was the first depository in India; it holds securities in electronic form so that shares need not change hands as paper certificates, a process called dematerialisation.

It defines what a security is, provides for the recognition of stock exchanges by the Government, and lays down the framework within which contracts in securities may be made; it is the oldest of the statutes governing this market and still the basic one.

SEBI has its head office in Mumbai, at the Bandra Kurla Complex, which places the regulator in the same city as the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange and the Reserve Bank of India, making Mumbai the financial capital of the country.

An IPO is the first sale of shares by a company to the general public, after which the shares are listed and traded on a stock exchange; it belongs to the primary market, because the money raised goes to the company itself.

A person aggrieved by an order of SEBI may appeal to the Tribunal, which is provided for by the SEBI Act itself, and from the Tribunal a further appeal lies to the Supreme Court on a question of law.

The money market deals in short-term funds of up to one year, through treasury bills, commercial paper, certificates of deposit and call money, and the Reserve Bank regulates it as part of its control over credit and liquidity.

The Sensex was compiled backwards to 1978-79 and that year was given a base value of 100, so the index number states how many times the market value of its thirty constituents has grown since then.