XAT 2023 — Decision Making Question 15

Read the following scenario and answer the THREE questions that follow.

Dhan, a poor but enterprising 15-year-old, resided in the world’s largest slum in a metropolitan city, along with her widowed mother. The densely packed slum housed about a million people, mostly in rickety one room tenements, connected by labyrinthine lanes and by-lanes. Dhan’s mother worked intermittently as a daily wager in a small savoury factory. For a 15-year-old, Dhan’s life was hectic. She spends two hours every day in fetching water for the household, packing breakfast and lunch for her mother. In addition, she had to prepare supper. On her mother’s insistence, Dhan also attended an evening bridge school run by an NGO. Dhan’s dream was to provide a comfortable life to her mother and take her family out of poverty. Of late, Dhan observed that the customers to a nearby tea-cumsavoury stall (TCS), were mostly the slum dwellers, who thronged the stall for its low prices and lack of alternatives. Further, Dhan gathered that the TCS could not cater to all of its customers, and the owner still made a neat Rs.800 profit per day. Dhan saw that a probable first step towards her family’s economic independence could be to own her own TCS.