ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF (PhD admission and fellowship) · India · National Testing Agency for ICAR
Original practice questions written to the published syllabus · not past papersThe meaning and problems of rural development, the major rural development and employment programmes compared across regions, livelihood frameworks, and managing and evaluating development work.
In the exams: agricultural master's entrance examinations (heavy); agricultural development bank officer recruitment, rural development and economic and social issues (heavy); rural schemes in agricultural field officer recruitment in banking (present); agricultural extension PhD entrance and fellowship examinations (heavy)
ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF Agricultural Extension (Unit 1) and Agricultural Economics
Critical assessment of programmes and why each was restructured, PRA and RRA tools and principles, livelihood frameworks, decentralised planning, poverty measurement (FGT, expert groups) and evaluation design.
How our questions for ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF spread across the units of Rural Development, Local Governance & Livelihoods. Difficulty: 5 easy, 27 medium, 21 hard.
| Monitoring and evaluation of development interventions | 11 | |
| Poverty alleviation strategies | 10 | |
| Livelihood frameworks | 7 | |
| Meaning and problems of rural development | 4 | |
| Local government and decentralised planning | 4 | |
| Pre-Independence experiments: Sriniketan, Marthandam, Gurgaon | 3 | |
| IRDP, TRYSEM, DWCRA, JRY and SGSY | 3 | |
| MGNREGS | 3 | |
| NGOs and civil society in rural development | 3 | |
| Community development programmes of the mid-20th century | 2 | |
| Watershed development | 2 | |
| National Rural Livelihoods Mission | 1 |
Choose an answer, then open the working. Each explanation says why the right answer is right and why the others are not.
Chambers' 'deprivation trap' links five clusters of disadvantage. Which list is correct?
B. Poverty, physical weakness, isolation, vulnerability, powerlessness
Chambers (1983) named poverty, physical weakness, isolation, vulnerability and powerlessness, each reinforcing the others. The income-saving-investment chain is Nurkse's vicious circle; shocks, trends and seasonality belong to the DFID vulnerability context.
The Firka Development Scheme (1946) was launched in which province, and what was a firka?
D. Madras presidency; a small administrative unit comprising a group of villages
The Madras government's Firka Development Scheme used the firka, a revenue sub-unit covering a group of villages, as the unit for integrated rural work, drawing on Gandhian ideas of village self-sufficiency.
Kerala's People's Plan Campaign (1996) is best known for:
B. Devolving a large share of state plan funds to local bodies and mobilising gram sabhas to prepare local plans
The campaign made Kerala the leading example of decentralised planning. The first employment guarantee was Maharashtra's EGS; Kudumbashree (1998) is Kerala's SHG network.
Ian Scoones (1998) grouped rural livelihood strategies into which three types?
C. Agricultural intensification or extensification, livelihood diversification, and migration
Scoones's three strategies are intensification/extensification, diversification and migration.
For the same ten incomes [40, 60, 80, 90, 95, 110, 120, 150, 200, 300] and poverty line 100, what is the squared poverty gap (FGT alpha = 2)?
C. 0.0573
Square each normalised gap and average over all 10: (0.3600 + 0.1600 + 0.0400 + 0.0100 + 0.0025)/10 = 0.0573. Squaring the poverty gap index (0.0182) is a common but wrong shortcut. 0.1145 averages over the 5 poor instead of all 10, and 0.1350 is the poverty gap index itself.
Drèze and Sen distinguished 'growth-mediated' from 'support-led' strategies. A support-led strategy is one that:
D. Expands public health, education and social security even before incomes rise substantially
Support-led security improves living standards through public provision at low incomes; growth-mediated security relies on growth and then uses its fruits.
Average monthly income (in hundreds of rupees) of participating households rose from 40 to 70; in comparison households it rose from 42 to 55. What is the difference-in-differences estimate of impact?
A. 17
DiD = (70-40) - (55-42) = 30 - 13 = 17. 30 is the before-after change, which credits the programme with the general rise; 15 is the with-without difference, which ignores initial differences.
The PRA principle of 'optimal ignorance' means:
C. Collecting only as much information, and as precisely, as is needed for the decision
Optimal ignorance and appropriate imprecision avoid the waste of over-detailed surveys; triangulation checks accuracy.
An evaluator visits only roadside villages in the dry season and talks mainly to male leaders. Which of Chambers' biases are present?
B. Spatial, seasonal and person biases
Roadside = spatial; dry season = seasonal; male leaders = person bias. The other named biases (project, diplomatic, professional) are also in Chambers' list but are not illustrated here.
In Korten's 'generations' of NGO strategy, the third generation is:
B. Sustainable systems development, seeking changes in policies and institutions
Korten (1990): first relief and welfare; second community development; third sustainable systems development; fourth people's movements.
Ten here, 53 in the app. The Laisha app has every practice question we have written to ICAR AICE-JRF/SRF in this subject, marked as you go, with timed papers, a jump-to-unanswered list and a certificate when you pass at 70 per cent.
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