Which organisation conducts the Periodic Labour Force Survey?

The correct answer is 55.6 per cent, which is the overall Labour Force Participation Rate reported for the month, up from the reading of the previous month. The distractors here are all real numbers from the same bulletin, which is exactly how a paper setter builds a question on a statistical release, so each one has to be placed correctly. Option A is the overall Worker Population Ratio, not the participation rate, and it is described in the bulletin as the highest level since March of the same year. Option C is the rural participation rate, which is always higher than the national figure because village participation is stronger. Option D is the urban participation rate, which stayed unchanged from the previous month. Learn the three headline numbers as a set and attach each to the right label.

The correct answer is 4.1 per cent, and the bulletin adds the detail that makes it memorable: this is the lowest rural reading since January of the same year. Option B is the rural rate of the previous month, from which the figure declined, so it is the trap for anyone who remembers the direction of change but not the endpoint. Option C is the overall unemployment rate for the month, covering rural and urban areas together, which stayed broadly stable. Option D is the urban rate, which was slightly above the previous month and is always higher than the rural one in this series. A useful way to hold these numbers is to rank them: rural lowest, overall in the middle and urban highest, with the gap between village and town explaining much of the national average.

The correct answer is the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises 2025, abbreviated as ASUSE 2025. The release states that the report, titled Unincorporated Sector at the District Level, draws upon ASUSE data to present the scale, structure and economic performance of the sector district by district, and that this is the first initiative of the National Statistics Office to disseminate district-level estimates from a large-scale nationwide survey. The other three surveys named in the options are genuine statistical exercises, which makes them convincing distractors, but none of them is mentioned in this release and none supplies these estimates. Remember the supporting details as well: the survey covers rural and urban areas across the country, it takes in manufacturing, trade and other services, and the data were collected on tablets using computer assisted personal interviewing, with relative standard errors reported so that users can judge reliability.

The correct answer is 757. The release says that estimates of the indicators are given for 757 out of the 770 districts available in the sampling frame at the time the ASUSE sample was selected. Option C is the sharpest distractor precisely because that figure also appears in the release, but it is the size of the sampling frame and not the number of districts actually shown, so the two must be kept apart. The gap between the two numbers is explained in the release itself. Lakshadweep and Chandigarh each have a single district, so their district estimates coincide with their union territory estimates and were already published. Delhi is excluded for a different reason, namely that its rural population is very small and its villages few, so all its districts were merged into one stratum and district estimates could not be generated. Options A and D do not appear anywhere in the release.

The correct answer is 237. The release carries this as one of its headline findings, stating that in 237 districts women constitute one-third of the total workforce in the unincorporated sector. Every other option is also a real figure from the same release, which is what makes this question difficult, so each one must be attached to the right fact. The figure 280 is the number of districts where gross value added per worker exceeds the all-India average of Rs 1,56,539. The figure 331 is the approximate number of districts where gross value added per worker lies between one lakh and one and a half lakh rupees. The figure 25 is the number of districts where women make up more than half of the workforce. Two related findings are worth adding: the districts with the highest share of women-led establishments lie in Telangana, Manipur and Meghalaya, and in Mizoram at least half the establishments in every district are owned by women.