Consider the following :
- 1.Demographic performance
- 2.Forest and ecology
- 3.Governance reforms
- 4.Stable government
- 5.Tax and fiscal efforts
For the horizontal tax devolution, the Fifteenth Finance Commission used how many of the above as criteria other than population area and income distance?
Show answer
Answer: B. The 15th Finance Commission used six criteria: population (15%), area (15%), forest and ecology (10%), income distance (45%), demographic performance (12.5%), and tax and fiscal efforts (2.5%). Leaving out population, area and income distance, three from the list were used. Governance reforms and stable government were not. So only three.
Watch for: Governance reforms sound like a reasonable criterion, but they were not part of the devolution formula.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Wrong because three of the listed items were criteria.
- C. Wrong because governance reforms was not a devolution criterion.
- D. Wrong because neither governance reforms nor stable government was a criterion.
Source to check: Report of the Fifteenth Finance Commission for 2021-26, Vol I, Chapter on Vertical and Horizontal Devolution (fincomindia.nic.in)
Answer from the official UPSC key. Written and fact-checked by AI against the official key. Spotted a mistake? Report it.