Former IAS officer who has been appointed as the new chairman of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC)? ?->(Show Answer!)

1. Former IAS officer who has been appointed as the new chairman of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC)?

Answer: Deepak Gupta.

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MCQ-> The current debate on intellectual property rights (IPRs) raises a number of important issues concerning the strategy and policies for building a more dynamic national agricultural research system, the relative roles of public and private sectors, and the role of agribusiness multinational corporations (MNCs). This debate has been stimulated by the international agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), negotiated as part of the Uruguay Round. TRIPs, for the first time, seeks to bring innovations in agricultural technology under a new worldwide IPR regime. The agribusiness MNCs (along with pharmaceutical companies) played a leading part in lobbying for such a regime during the Uruguay Round negotiations. The argument was that incentives are necessary to stimulate innovations, and that this calls for a system of patents which gives innovators the sole right to use (or sell/lease the right to use) their innovations for a specified period and protects them against unauthorised copying or use. With strong support of their national governments, they were influential in shaping the agreement on TRIPs, which eventually emerged from the Uruguay Round. The current debate on TRIPs in India - as indeed elsewhere - echoes wider concerns about ‘privatisation’ of research and allowing a free field for MNCs in the sphere of biotechnology and agriculture. The agribusiness corporations, and those with unbounded faith in the power of science to overcome all likely problems, point to the vast potential that new technology holds for solving the problems of hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the world. The exploitation of this potential should be encouraged and this is best done by the private sector for which patents are essential. Some, who do not necessarily accept this optimism, argue that fears of MNC domination are exaggerated and that farmers will accept their products only if they decisively outperform the available alternatives. Those who argue against agreeing to introduce an IPR regime in agriculture and encouraging private sector research are apprehensive that this will work to the disadvantage of farmers by making them more and more dependent on monopolistic MNCs. A different, though related apprehension is that extensive use of hybrids and genetically engineered new varieties might increase the vulnerability of agriculture to outbreaks of pests and diseases. The larger, longer-term consequences of reduced biodiversity that may follow from the use of specially bred varieties are also another cause for concern. Moreover, corporations, driven by the profit motive, will necessarily tend to underplay, if not ignore, potential adverse consequences, especially those which are unknown and which may manifest themselves only over a relatively long period. On the other hand, high-pressure advertising and aggressive sales campaigns by private companies can seduce farmers into accepting varieties without being aware of potential adverse effects and the possibility of disastrous consequences for their livelihood if these varieties happen to fail. There is no provision under the laws, as they now exist, for compensating users against such eventualities. Excessive preoccupation with seeds and seed material has obscured other important issues involved in reviewing the research policy. We need to remind ourselves that improved varieties by themselves are not sufficient for sustained growth of yields. in our own experience, some of the early high yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice and wheat were found susceptible to widespread pest attacks; and some had problems of grain quality. Further research was necessary to solve these problems. This largely successful research was almost entirely done in public research institutions. Of course, it could in principle have been done by private companies, but whether they choose to do so depends crucially on the extent of the loss in market for their original introductions on account of the above factors and whether the companies are financially strong enough to absorb the ‘losses’, invest in research to correct the deficiencies and recover the lost market. Public research, which is not driven by profit, is better placed to take corrective action. Research for improving common pool resource management, maintaining ecological health and ensuring sustainability is both critical and also demanding in terms of technological challenge and resource requirements. As such research is crucial to the impact of new varieties, chemicals and equipment in the farmer’s field, private companies should be interested in such research. But their primary interest is in the sale of seed materials, chemicals, equipment and other inputs produced by them. Knowledge and techniques for resource management are not ‘marketable’ in the same way as those inputs. Their application to land, water and forests has a long gestation and their efficacy depends on resolving difficult problems such as designing institutions for proper and equitable management of common pool resources. Public or quasi-public research institutions informed by broader, long-term concerns can only do such work. The public sector must therefore continue to play a major role in the national research system. It is both wrong and misleading to pose the problem in terms of public sector versus private sector or of privatisation of research. We need to address problems likely to arise on account of the public-private sector complementarity, and ensure that the public research system performs efficiently. Complementarity between various elements of research raises several issues in implementing an IPR regime. Private companies do not produce new varieties and inputs entirely as a result of their own research. Almost all technological improvement is based on knowledge and experience accumulated from the past, and the results of basic and applied research in public and quasi-public institutions (universities, research organisations). Moreover, as is increasingly recognised, accumulated stock of knowledge does not reside only in the scientific community and its academic publications, but is also widely diffused in traditions and folk knowledge of local communities all over. The deciphering of the structure and functioning of DNA forms the basis of much of modern biotechnology. But this fundamental breakthrough is a ‘public good’ freely accessible in the public domain and usable free of any charge. Various techniques developed using that knowledge can however be, and are, patented for private profit. Similarly, private corporations draw extensively, and without any charge, on germplasm available in varieties of plants species (neem and turmeric are by now famous examples). Publicly funded gene banks as well as new varieties bred by public sector research stations can also be used freely by private enterprises for developing their own varieties and seek patent protection for them. Should private breeders be allowed free use of basic scientific discoveries? Should the repositories of traditional knowledge and germplasm be collected which are maintained and improved by publicly funded organisations? Or should users be made to pay for such use? If they are to pay, what should be the basis of compensation? Should the compensation be for individuals or (or communities/institutions to which they belong? Should individual institutions be given the right of patenting their innovations? These are some of the important issues that deserve more attention than they now get and need serious detailed study to evolve reasonably satisfactory, fair and workable solutions. Finally, the tendency to equate the public sector with the government is wrong. The public space is much wider than government departments and includes co- operatives, universities, public trusts and a variety of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Giving greater autonomy to research organisations from government control and giving non- government public institutions the space and resources to play a larger, more effective role in research, is therefore an issue of direct relevance in restructuring the public research system.Which one of the following statements describes an important issue, or important issues, not being raised in the context of the current debate on IPRs?
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MCQ-> Read the following passages carefully and answer the questions given at the end of each passage.PASSAGE 1In a study of 150 emerging nations looking back fifty years, it was found that the single most powerful driver of economic booms was sustained growth in exports especially of manufactured products. Exporting simple manufactured goods not only increases income and consumption at home, it generates foreign revenues that allow the country to import the machinery and materials needed to improve its factories without running up huge foreign bills and debts. In short, in the case of manufacturing, one good investment leads to another. Once an economy starts down the manufacturing path, its momentum can carry it in the right direction for some time. When the ratio of investment to GDP surpasses 30 percent, it tends to stick at the level for almost nine years (on an average). The reason being that many of these nations seemed to show a strong leadership commitment to investment, particularly to investment in manufacturing. Today various international authorities have estimated that the emerging world need many trillions of dollars in investment on these kinds of transport and communication networks. The modern outlier is India where investment as a share of the economy exceeded 30 percent of GDP over the course of the 2000s, but little of that money went into factories. Indian manufacturing had been stagnant for decades at around 15 percent of GDP. The stagnation stems from the failures of the state to build functioning ports and power plants and to create an environment in which the rules governing labour, land and capital are designed and enforced in a way that encourages entrepreneurs to invest, particularly in factories. India has disappointed on both counts creating labour friendly rules and workable land acquisition norms. Between 1989 and 2010 India generated about ten million new jobs in manufacturing, but nearly all those jobs were created in enterprises that are small and informal and thus better suited to dodge India’s bureaucracy and its extremely restrictive rules regarding firing workers It is commonly said in India that the labour laws are so onerous that it is practically impossible to comply with even half of them without violating the other half.Informal shops, many of them one man operations, now account for 39 percent of India’s manufacturing workforce, up from 19 percent in 1989 and they are simply too small to compete in global markets. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik calls manufacturing the “automatic escalator” of development, because once a country finds a niche in global manufacturing, productivity often seems to start rising automatically. During its boom years India was growing in large part on the strength of investment in technology service industries, not manufacturing. This was put forward as a development strategy. Instead of growing richer by exporting even more advanced manufactured products, India could grow rich by exporting the services demanded in this new information age. These arguments began to gain traction early in the 2010s.In new research on the “service escalators”, a 2014 working paper from the World Bank made the case that the old growth escalator in manufacturing was already giving way to a new one in service industries. The report argued that while manufacturing is in retreat as a share of the global economy and is producing fewer jobs, services are still growing, contributing more to growth in output and jobs for nations rich and poor. However, one basic problem with the idea of service escalator is that in the emerging world most of the new service jobs are still in very traditional ventures. A decade on, India’s tech sector is still providing relatively simple IT services mainly in the same back office operations it started with and the number of new jobs it is creating is relatively small. In India, only about two million people work in IT services, or less than 1 percent of the workforce. So far the rise of these service industries has not been big enough to drive the mass modernisation of rural farm economies. People can move quickly from working in the fields to working on an assembly line, because both rely for the most part on manual labour. The leap from the farm to the modern service sector is much tougher since those jobs often require advanced skills. Workers who have moved into IT service jobs have generally come from a pool of relatively better educated members of the urban middle class, who speak English and have atleast some facility with computers. Finding jobs for the underemployed middle class is important but there are limits to how deeply it can transform the economy, because it is a relatively small part of the population. For now, the rule is still factories first, not service first.According to the information in the above passage, manufacturing in India has been stagnant because there is
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MCQ-> Based on the information answer the questions which follow. Eight officers of Indian Trade Service meet for a cup of coffee at Coffee Point. The officers P, Q, R, S, T. U. V and W are seated in a circle and discuss issues related to Trade in Services, Trade in Intellectual Property Rights. Investments. Tariffs, Remedies. Standards. Trade Facilitation and Subsides not necessarily in the same order. An MBA student sitting on the next table overhears the discussion and ranks the issues as per their importance from 1 to 8. No two issues can have the same rank and no two officers can have the same position. Additional information available is: i. P is sitting to the immediate left of S and the officer opposite to S discusses issues pertaining to Remedies. ii. U's issue is ranked $$7^{th}$$ and there is one officer between U and the officer whose issue is ranked $$2^{nd}$$. iii. The officer whose issue is ranked 1 is not opposite to the officer whose issue is ranked 8 who represents issues related to Investments.iv. The ranks of the issues raised by the officers sitting opposite to each other cannot be both even or both odd. v. The officer discussing issues related to Trade in Services is sitting opposite to T. T is sitting at a gap of one place from P. vi. R is sitting opposite to Q and represent issues related to Standards and Trade in Intellectual Property Rights not necessarily in the same order. vii. P's issue was ranked 4th and he was discussing issues related to Tariffs and sits opposite to the officer ranked 5th who represents issues related to Subsidies. viii. The officers representing issues related to Trade in Services and Trade facilitation are sitting adjacent to each other.Which officer discusses Remedies and what is its rank?
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MCQ-> Read the following passage and answer the questions given below it. Certain words/phrases in the passage have been printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.Marc Rodin flicked-off the switch of his transistor radio and rose from the table, leaving the breakfast tray almost untouched. He walked over to the window, lit another in the endless chain of cigarettes and gazed out at the snow-en-crusted landscape which the late arriving spring had not yet started to dismantle. He murmured a word quietly and with great venom, following up with other strong nouns and epithets that expressed his feeling towards the French President, his Government and the Action Service. Rodin was unlike his predecessor in almost every way. Tall and spare, with a cadaverous face hollowed by the hatred within, he usually masked his emotions with an un-Latin frigidity. For him there had been no Ecole Polytechnic to open doors to promotion. The son of a cobbler, he had escaped to England by fishing boat in the halcyon days of his late teens when the Germans overran France, and had enlisted as a private soldier under the banner of the Cross of Lorraine. Promotion through sergeant to warrant officer had come the hard way, in bloody battles across the face on North Africa under Koenig and later through the hedgerows of Normandy with Leclerc. A field commission during the fight for Paris had got him the officer’s chevrons his education and breeding could never have obtained and in post-war France the choice had been between reverting to civilian life or staying in the Army. But revert to what ? He had no trade but that of cobbler which his father had taught him, and he found the working class of his native country dominated by Communists, who had also taken over the Resistance and the Free French of the Interior. So he stayed in the Army, later to experience the bitterness of an officer from the ranks who saw a new young generation of educated boys graduating from the officer schools, earning in theoretical lessons carried out in classrooms the same chevrons he had sweated blood for. As he wanted them pass him in tank and privilege the bitterness started to set in. There was only one thing left to do, and that was join one of the colonial regiments, the tough crack soldiers who did the fighting while the conscript army paraded round drill squares. He managed a transfer to the colonial para-troops. Within a year he had been a company commander in Indo-China, living among other men who spoke and thought as he did. For a young man from a cobbler’s bench, promotion could still be obtained through combat, and more combat. By the end of the Indo-China campaign he was a major and after an unhappy and frustrating year in France he was sent to Algeria. The French withdrawal from Indo-China do the year he spent in France had turned his latent bitterness into a consuming loathing of politicians and Communists, whom he regarded as one and the same thing. Not until Franco was ruled by a soldier could she ever be weaned away from the grip of the treators and lickspittles who permeated her public life. Only in the Army were both breeds extinct. Like most combat officers who had seen their men die and occasionally buried the hideously mutilated bodies of those unlucky enough to be taken alive. Rodin worshipped soldiers as the true salt of the earth, the men who sacrificed themselves in blood so that the bourgeoisie could live at home in comfort. To learn from the civilians of native land after eight years of combat in the forests of Indo-China that most of them cared not a fig for the soldier, to read the denunciations of the military by the left-wing intellectuals for more trifles like the toturing of prisoners to obtain vital information, had set off inside Marc Rodin a reaction which combined with the native bitterness stemming from his own lack of opportunity, had turned into zealotry. He remained convinced that given enough backing by the civil authoritieS on the spot and the Government and people back home, the Army could have beaten the Viet-Minh. The cession of Indo-China had been a massive betrayal of the thousands of fine young men who had died there seemingly for nothing. For Rodin there would be, could be, no more betrayals. Algeria would prove it. He left the shore of Marseilles in the spring of 1956 as ner a happy man as he would ever be, convinced that the distant hills of Algeria would see the consummation of what he regarded as his life’s work, the apotheosis of the French Army in the eys of the world.What was the period when Rodin escaped to England ?
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