Suresh said, “I did it yesterday.” Which one of the following options is the correct form of this sentence in indirect speech?
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Remember that when the reporting verb is in the past tense, three things change together: the tense shifts back, the pronoun changes, and the time expression is converted.
A second way to verify this is to run each candidate option through the three standard indirect-speech transformation rules one at a time instead of building the converted sentence from scratch.
Rule 1 (the reporting verb stays as given): the question already reports the sentence with "said", so any option that swaps it for "says" fails immediately. This rules out the option reading "Suresh says I did it yesterday" and the option reading "Suresh says that he did it the day before", since both alter the reporting verb from past to present without any basis.
Rule 2 (backshift of tense): because the reporting verb is past tense, the tense inside the reported clause must move one step further into the past. Simple past ("did") shifts to past perfect ("had done"). Checking the remaining candidate, "Suresh said that I did it yesterday" keeps the tense unchanged at simple past, so it violates this rule and is rejected.
Rule 3 (pronoun and time-reference agreement): the subject "I" in the direct quotation refers to Suresh, so it must become "he". The time marker "yesterday" is speaker-relative and must convert to "the day before" once it is removed from direct quotation. Only one surviving option satisfies Rule 2 and Rule 3 together: "Suresh said that he had done it the day before."
Since this is the only option consistent with all three rules simultaneously,
\[\boxed{\text{Suresh said that he had done it the day before (Option 4)}}\]