The head count ratio as a measure of poverty indicates

The correct answer is D, the NSSO. 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. Option A is wrong because the Ministry of Finance uses poverty estimates in the budget and the Economic Survey but does not collect the household data. Option B is wrong because the Reserve Bank of India is the monetary authority and the banking regulator; the statistics it collects concern money, credit and payments, not household consumption baskets. Option C is wrong because the Central Statistics Office prepared national accounts and the index of industrial production; sample surveys of households were the work of the NSSO, and the two were merged into the National Statistical Office in 2019.

The correct answer is D, churning poor. 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. Option A is wrong because the occasionally poor are usually above the line and slip below it only now and then, for example after an illness or a crop failure, so their movement is not regular. Option B is wrong because the usually poor are below the line most of the time and form part of the chronic poor rather than the group that moves in and out. Option C is wrong because the chronic poor, made up of the always poor and the usually poor, stay below the line year after year and are precisely the group that does not move across it.

The correct answer is B, disguised unemployment. 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. Option A is wrong because frictional unemployment is the short gap while a worker moves between jobs or searches for a better match, and it exists even in a fully healthy economy. Option C is wrong because cyclical unemployment follows a fall in demand during a slump and disappears when the economy recovers. Option D is wrong because structural unemployment arises when the skills workers have no longer match the jobs the economy creates, so it needs retraining rather than a revival of demand.

The correct answer is C, one hundred days. 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. Option A is wrong because fifty days corresponds to no provision of the Act, though additional days beyond the hundred have at times been allowed in areas hit by drought or natural calamity. Option B is wrong for the same reason; seventy-five is associated with no guarantee under this law. Option D is wrong because one hundred and fifty days is not the statutory entitlement either, and quoting it is a common error made by candidates who confuse a relief announcement with the provision in the Act itself.

The correct answer is B, Suresh Tendulkar. 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. Option A is wrong because the Lakdawala expert group of 1993 kept the calorie-based line and its contribution was to make the lines state-specific and to update them with price indices for industrial and agricultural workers. Option C is wrong because the Rangarajan expert group reported in 2014, after Tendulkar, and went back to separate rural and urban baskets while raising the line. Option D is wrong because the task force under Y. K. Alagh in 1979 is the one that fixed the calorie norm in the first place, so it is the opposite of the answer sought.