Under Section 28(1)(a) of the PFRDA Act, 2013, a person who is required to obtain a certificate of registration from the Authority but carries on such activities without obtaining it shall be liable to a penalty of-

Section 28(1)(a) of the PFRDA Act, 2013, imposes a penalty "of one lakh rupees for each day during which the failure continues or one crore rupees, whichever is less." The dual-component structure - a per-day component plus a global cap - is common across sub-sections, but the specific numbers matter. Option (A) substitutes "five crore" for the cap, (B) swaps the per-day figure to five lakh and inverts the comparison to "whichever is higher," (C) uses "two crore" as the cap, and (D) inflates the per-day figure to ten lakh. Only (E) reproduces the exact statutory language. The question tests precise numerical recall of the penalty section, and the distractors are close enough to the real figures to induce a guess based on pattern recognition rather than textual memory. The correct answer is (E).