NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Social Science Chapter 9 Regulation of Unfair Practices

Q1.

How do such price controls affect suppliers and consumers?

Answer

A price cap protects consumers from being overcharged, but it also cuts what a supplier earns per unit — so its effect depends entirely on whether supply can grow while the cap is on. The sanitiser case in the box is worth reading closely, because it shows both halves.

	Consumers	Suppliers
Immediate effect	Pay no more than ₹100 for a 200 ml bottle; protected from hoarders and black-marketeers	Earn less per bottle than the shortage price they could have charged
Risk if supply cannot grow	A shortage: at the capped price more is wanted than is offered, so there are queues, rationing by the shopkeeper, or an illegal market at a higher price	Weaker incentive to produce; some may divert stock to the black market instead
What actually happened in 2020	Sanitisers “soon became widely available at fair prices”	“Many companies started production” — new firms entered and total supply rose sharply

Why it worked in this case: a price ceiling holds the price below equilibrium, which by itself creates excess demand. The shortage disappeared here not because of the cap but because supply moved: sanitiser was cheap and quick to make, so new producers entered within weeks and the whole supply curve shifted right. Where entry is slow or costly — a new medicine, a new power plant — the same cap would leave the shortage in place. The lesson is that a ceiling manages the price, and only new supply fixes the quantity.

Tip: compare this with the chapter's own warning on page 208 — wheat capped at ₹20 when the market price is ₹30 leaves farmers ₹10 short on each kilogram, “which may lead to reduced production and shortages”. Same tool, opposite result, because supply could not expand.

Q2.

While in this case the price control was for an emergency, do you think such controls should be in practice forever?

Answer

The case for a permanent cap and the case against it both rest on evidence in this chapter, and a good answer weighs them rather than picking a side by instinct.

The case for keeping controls	The case against keeping them permanently
Essentials — medicines, basic food — cannot be postponed, so buyers have no bargaining power and can be overcharged	A price held below equilibrium leaves producers earning less than the market would pay, so output falls and shortages appear (the wheat example, ₹20 against ₹30)
Markets allocate by ability to pay; a cap keeps essentials within reach of low-income households	Weak returns mean no investment in “better seeds, irrigation, or technology” — quality and long-run output suffer
Where a few sellers dominate, competition cannot be relied on to hold prices down	Persistent shortages invite exactly the hoarding and black-marketing the control was meant to stop

A reasoned position. A price control is best understood as an emergency brake rather than an engine. It is well suited to a sudden shock — a pandemic, a disaster, a sharp shortage of one essential good — where the price is rising faster than supply can possibly respond and people would be harmed in the meantime. Kept in place permanently, it fights the market instead of correcting it: producers withdraw, supply shrinks, and the shortage becomes the normal state.

What that suggests in practice, using only the chapter's own reasoning:

Apply controls to genuinely essential goods, where there is no substitute and the purchase cannot be delayed.
Review them regularly, so a control introduced for an emergency does not simply continue by habit.
Pair a cap with measures that let supply grow — as happened when many companies began making sanitisers — since only more supply removes a shortage.
Prefer regulation of unfair practices — through bodies like the CCPA — where the real problem is cheating or a dominant seller rather than the price level itself.

Why the chapter frames it this way: its own summing-up is that regulations “are required when markets are inefficient” but “must be implemented carefully, as excessive government intervention can have adverse effects.” The question is not whether to control prices but when, for how long, and on what.

NCERT Solutions for Class 9th Social Science Chapter 9 Regulation of Unfair Practices — DON'T MISS OUT