Which state has become the first State to make voting compulsory in local bodies? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Which state has become the first State to make voting compulsory in local bodies?

Answer: Gujarat.

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MCQ-> Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given. Certain words have been given in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.We are told that economy is growing and that such growth benefits all of us. However, what you see is not what you always get. Most people are experiencing declining economic security in response to the problems of the global system, many communities have turned to Local Exchange Systems (LESs) to help regain some control over their economic situations.Local exchange systems come in many forms. They often involve the creation of a local currency, or a system of bartering labour, or trading of agricultural products as a means of supporting the region in which they are traded. Such a system helps preserve the viability of local economies.Local currencies allow communities to diversify their economies, reinvest resources back into their region and reduce dependence on the highly concentrated and unstable global economy. Each local currency system serves as an exchange bank for skills and resources that Individuals in the community are willing to trade. Whether in the form of paper money, service credits, or other units, a local currency facilitates the exchange of services and resources among the members of a community.By providing incentives for local trade, communities help their small businesses and reduce underemployment by providing the jobs within the community. In addition, the local exchange of food and seeds promotes environmental conservation and community food security. Local food production reduces wasteful transportation and promotes self-reliance and genetic diversity. Each transaction within a local exchange system strengthens the community fabric as neighbours interact and meet one another.There are over 1,000 local change programs worldwide more than 30 local paper currencies in North America and at least 800 Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) throughout Europe. New Zealand and Australia Local Exchange Systems vary and evolve in accordance with the needs and circumstances of the local area. This diversity is critical to the success of the local currencies. For instance, a bank in rural Massachusetts refused to lend a fanner the money needed to make it through the winter. In response, the farmer decided to print his own money Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes. In winter, customers buy the notes for $9 and they may redeem them in the summer for $10 worth of vegetables. The system enabled the community to help a farm family after being abandoned by the centralised monetary system. As small family farms continue to disappear at an alarming rate, local currencies provide tools for communities to bind together, support their local food growers and maintain their local food suppliers.Local Exchange Systems are not limited to developed countries.Rural areas of Asia, Latin America and Africa have offered some of the most effective and important programs, by adopting agriculture-based systems of exchange rather than monetary ones. In order to preserve genetic diversity, economic security and avoid dependence on industrial seed and chemical companies, many villages have developed seed saving exchange banks. For example, the village women in Ladakh have begun to collect and exchange rare seeds selected for their ability to grow in a harsh mountain climate. This exchange system protects agriculture diversity while promoting self-reliance. There is no one blueprint for a local exchange system, which is exactly why they are successful vehicles for localisation and sustainability. They promote local economic diversity and regional self-reliance while responding to a region’s specific needs. Local exchange systems play a pivotal role in creating models for sustainable societies. They are an effective educational tool, raising awareness about the global financial system and local economic matters. Local exchange systems also demonstrate that tangible, creative solutions exist and that communities can empower themselves to address global problems.Which of the following is same in meaning as the word ‘LIMITED TO’ as used in the passage?
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MCQ-> Last fortnight, news of a significant development was tucked away in the inside pages of newspapers. The government finally tabled a bill in Parliament seeking to make primary education a fundamental right. A fortnight earlier, a Delhi-based newspaper had carried a report about a three-month interruption in the Delhi Government's ‘Education for All’ programme. The report made for distressing reading. It said that literacy centres across the city were closed down, volunteers beaten up and enrolment registers burnt. All because the state government had, earlier this year, made participation in the programme mandatory for teachers in government schools. The routine denials were issued and there probably was a wee bit of exaggeration in the report.But it still is a pointer to the enormity of the task at hand. That economic development will be inherently unstable unless it is built on a solid base of education, specially primary education, has been said so often that it is in danger of becoming a platitude. Nor does India's abysmal record in the field need much reiteration. Nearly 30 million children in the six to ten age group do not go to school — reason enough to make primary education not only compulsory but a fundamental right. But is that the Explanation? More importantly, will it work? Or will it remain a mere token, like the laws providing for compulsory primary education? It is now widely known that 14 states and four Union Territories have this law on their statute books.Believe it or not, the list actually includes Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Rajasthan, where literacy and education levels are miles below the national average. A number of states have not even notified the compulsory education law. This is not to belittle the decision to make education a fundamental right. As a statement of political will, a commitment by the decision-makers, its importance cannot be undervalued. Once this commitment is clear, a lot of other things like resource allocation will naturally fall into place. But the task of universalizing elementary education (UEE) is complicated by various socio-economic and cultural factors which vary from region to region and within regions. If India's record continues to appall, it is because these intricacies have not been adequately understood by the planners and administrators.The trouble has been that education policy has been designed by grizzled mandarins ensconced in Delhi and is totally out of touch with the ground reality. The key then is to decentralise education planning and implementation. What's also needed is greater community involvement in the whole process. Only then can school timings be adjusted for convenience, school children given a curriculum they can relate to and teachers made accountable. For proof, one has only to look at the success of the district primary education programme, which was launched in 1994. It has met with a fair degree of success in the 122 districts it covers. Here the village community is involved in all aspects of education — allocating finances to supervising teachers to fixing school timings and developing curriculum and textbooks — through district planning teams. Teachers are also involved in the planning and implementation process and are given small grants to develop teaching and learning material, vastly improving motivational levels. The consequent improvement in the quality of education generates increased demand for education.But for this demand to be generated, quality will first have to be improved. In MP, the village panchayats are responsible for not only constructing and maintaining primary schools but also managing scholarships, besides organising non-formal education. How well this works in practice remains to be seen (though the department claims the schemes are working very well) but the decision to empower panchayats with such powers is itself a significant development. Unfortunately, the Panchayat Raj Act has not been notified in many states.After all, delegating powers to the panchayats is not looked upon too kindly by vested interests. More specifically, by politicians, since decentralisation of education administration takes away from them the power of transfer, which they use to grant favours and build up a support base. But if the political leadership can push through the bill to make education a fundamental right, it should also be able to persuade the states to implement the laws on Panchayat Raj. For, UEE cannot be achieved without decentralisation. Of course, this will have to be accompanied by proper supervision and adequate training of those involved in the administration of education. But the devolution of powers to the local bodies has to come first.One of the problems plaguing the education system in India is
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MCQ-> I want to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things like empires and their wars to more familiar little things. Take pins for example! I do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins as being for some reason specially important to women.There was a time when pinmakers would buy the material; shape it; make the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to the market, and sell it and the making required skill in several operations. They not only knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it all by themselves. But they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for the farthing. Pins cost so much that a woman's dress allowance was calling pin money.By the end of the 18th century Adam Smith boasted that it took 18 men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made, though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less capable and knowledgeable men than the old pin-makers, you may ask why Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilisation when its effect had so clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly 5000 pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without intelligence and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist just as an engine is fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that 'wealth accumulates, and men decay'.Nowadays Adam Smith's 18 men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The 18 flesh-and-blood men have been replaced by machines of steel which spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-tenth so intelligent, skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal, if even it’s a pin.Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure for this is not to go back to the old free for higher work than pin-making or the like. But in the meantime the fact remains that the workers are now not able to make anything themselves even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift their finger to begin their day's work until it has all been arranged for them by their employer's who themselves do not understand the machines they buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the machine maker's directions.The same is true for clothes. Earlier the whole work of making clothes, from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this but the sheep shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite unable to do it, but you are likely to find that she is not even aware of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes, which she does by buying them at the shop, she knows that there is a difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino, perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of materials when they buy their own clothes.Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and encyclopaedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information from other books, what they tell us is twenty to fifty years out of date knowledge and almost impractical today. And of course most of us are too tired of our work when we come home to want to read about it; what we need is cinema to take our minds off it and feel our imagination.It is a funny place, this word of capitalism, with its astonishing spread of education and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having the least notion of how it is made that they find people paying them money, and things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff keeps us alive, but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of capitalism as the moment for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realise that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.A suitable title to the passage would be
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MCQ-> Social life is an outflow and meeting of personality, which means that its end is the meeting of character, temperament, and sensibility, in which our thoughts and feelings, and sense perceptions are brought into play at their lightest and yet keenest.This aspect, to my thinking, is realized as much in large parties composed of casual acquaintances or even strangers, as in intimate meetings of old friends. I am not one of those superior persons who hold cocktail parties in contempt, looking upon them as barren or at best as very tryingly kaleidoscopic places for gathering, because of the strangers one has to meet in them; which is no argument, for even our most intimate friends must at one time have been strangers to us. These large gatherings will be only what we make of them if not anything better, they can be as good places to collect new friends from as the slavemarkets of Istanbul were for beautiful slaves or New Market for race horses.But they do offer more immediate enjoyment. For one thing, in them one can see the external expression of social life in appearance and behaviour at its widest and most varied where one can admire beauty of body or air, hear voices remarkable either for sweetness of refinement, look on elegance of clothes or deportment. What is more, these parties are schools for training in sociability, for in them we have to treat strangers as friends. So, in them we see social sympathy in widest commonalty spread, or at least should. We show an atrophy of the natural human instinct of getting pleasure and happiness out of other human beings if we cannot treat strangers as friends for the moment. And I would go further and paraphrase Pater to say that not to be able to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, even when we meet them casually, is on this short day of frost and sun which out life is, to sleep before evening.So, it will be seen that my conception of social life is modest, for it makes no demands on what we have, though it does make some on what we are. Interest, wonder, sympathy, and love, the first two leading to the last two, are the psychological prerequisites for social life; and the need for the first two must not be underrated. We cannot make the most even of our intimate social life unless we are able to make strangers of our oldest friends everyday by discovering unknown areas in their personality, and transform them into new friends. In sum, social life is a function of vitality.It is tragic, however, to observe that it is these very natural springs of social life which are drying up among us. It is becoming more and more difficult to come across fellow-feeling for human beings as such in our society and in all its strata. In the poor middle class, in the course of all my life. I have hardly seen any social life properly so-called. Not only has the grinding routine of making a living killed all desire for it in them, it has also generated a standing mood of peevish hostility to other human beings. Increasing economic distress in recent years has infinitely worsened this state of affairs, and has also brought a sinister addition class hatred. This has become the greatest collective emotional enjoyment of the poor middle class, and indeed they feel most social when they form a pack, and snarl or howl at people who are better off than they.Their most innocent exhibition of sociability is seen when they spill out from their intolerable homes into the streets and bazaars. I was astonished to see the milling crowds in the poor suburbs of Calcutta. But even there a group of flippant young loafers would put on a conspiratorial look if they saw a man in good clothes passing by them either on foot or in a car. I had borrowed a car from a relative to visit a friend in one of these suburbs, and he became very anxious when I had not returned before dusk. Acid and bombs, he said, were thrown at card almost every evening in that area. I was amazed. But I also know as a fact that my brother was blackmailed to pay five rupees on a trumped up charge when passing in a car through one such locality.The situation is differently inhuman, but not a whit more human, among the well-to-do. Kindliness for fellow human beings has been smothered in them, taken as a class, by the arrogance of worldly position, which among the Bengalis who show this snobbery is often only a third-class position.The word ‘they’ in the first sentence of the third paragraph refers to
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MCQ-> India is rushing headlong toward economic success and modernisation, counting on high- tech industries such as information technology and biotechnology to propel the nation toprosperity. India’s recent announcement that it would no longer produce unlicensed inexpensive generic pharmaceuticals bowed to the realities of the World TradeOrganisation while at the same time challenging the domestic drug industry to compete with the multinational firms. Unfortunately, its weak higher education sector constitutes the Achilles’ Heel of this strategy. Its systematic disinvestment in higher education inrecent years has yielded neither world-class research nor very many highly trained scholars, scientists, or managers to sustain high-tech development. India’s main competitors especially China but also Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — are investing in large and differentiated higher education systems. They are providingaccess to large number of students at the bottom of the academic system while at the same time building some research-based universities that are able to compete with theworld’s best institutions. The recent London Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the world’s top 200 universities included three in China, three in Hong Kong,three in South Korea, one in Taiwan, and one in India (an Indian Institute of Technology at number 41.— the specific campus was not specified). These countries are positioningthemselves for leadership in the knowledge-based economies of the coming era. There was a time when countries could achieve economic success with cheap labour andlow-tech manufacturing. Low wages still help, but contemporary large-scale development requires a sophisticated and at least partly knowledge-based economy.India has chosen that path, but will find a major stumbling block in its university system. India has significant advantages in the 21st century knowledge race. It has a large high ereducation sector — the third largest in the world in student numbers, after China andthe United States. It uses English as a primary language of higher education and research. It has a long academic tradition. Academic freedom is respected. There are asmall number of high quality institutions, departments, and centres that can form the basis of quality sector in higher education. The fact that the States, rather than the Central Government, exercise major responsibility for higher education creates a rather cumbersome structure, but the system allows for a variety of policies and approaches. Yet the weaknesses far outweigh the strengths. India educates approximately 10 per cent of its young people in higher education compared with more than half in the major industrialised countries and 15 per cent in China. Almost all of the world’s academic systems resemble a pyramid, with a small high quality tier at the top and a massive sector at the bottom. India has a tiny top tier. None of its universities occupies a solid position at the top. A few of the best universities have some excellent departments and centres, and there is a small number of outstanding undergraduate colleges. The University Grants Commission’s recent major support of five universities to build on their recognised strength is a step toward recognising a differentiated academic system and fostering excellence. At present, the world-class institutions are mainly limited to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and perhaps a few others such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. These institutions, combined, enroll well under 1 percent of the student population. India’s colleges and universities, with just a few exceptions, have become large, under-funded, ungovernable institutions. At many of them, politics has intruded into campus life, influencing academic appointments and decisions across levels. Under-investment in libraries, information technology, laboratories, and classrooms makes it very difficult to provide top-quality instruction or engage in cutting-edge research.The rise in the number of part-time teachers and the freeze on new full-time appointments in many places have affected morale in the academic profession. The lackof accountability means that teaching and research performance is seldom measured. The system provides few incentives to perform. Bureaucratic inertia hampers change.Student unrest and occasional faculty agitation disrupt operations. Nevertheless, with a semblance of normality, faculty administrators are. able to provide teaching, coordinate examinations, and award degrees. Even the small top tier of higher education faces serious problems. Many IIT graduates,well trained in technology, have chosen not to contribute their skills to the burgeoning technology sector in India. Perhaps half leave the country immediately upon graduation to pursue advanced study abroad — and most do not return. A stunning 86 per cent of students in science and technology fields from India who obtain degrees in the United States do not return home immediately following their study. Another significant group, of about 30 per cent, decides to earn MBAs in India because local salaries are higher.—and are lost to science and technology.A corps of dedicated and able teachers work at the IlTs and IIMs, but the lure of jobs abroad and in the private sector make it increasingly difficult to lure the best and brightest to the academic profession.Few in India are thinking creatively about higher education. There is no field of higher education research. Those in government as well as academic leaders seem content to do the “same old thing.” Academic institutions and systems have become large and complex. They need good data, careful analysis, and creative ideas. In China, more than two-dozen higher education research centers, and several government agencies are involved in higher education policy.India has survived with an increasingly mediocre higher education system for decades.Now as India strives to compete in a globalized economy in areas that require highly trained professionals, the quality of higher education becomes increasingly important.India cannot build internationally recognized research-oriented universities overnight,but the country has the key elements in place to begin and sustain the process. India will need to create a dozen or more universities that can compete internationally to fully participate in the new world economy. Without these universities, India is destined to remain a scientific backwater.Which of the following ‘statement(s) is/are correct in the context of the given passage ? I. India has the third largest higher education sector in the world in student numbers. II. India is moving rapidly toward economic success and modernisation through high tech industries such as information technology and bitechonology to make the nation to prosperity. III. India’s systematic disinvestment in higher education in recent years has yielded world class research and many world class trained scholars, scientists to sustain high-tech development....