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Preliminary Exam CSAT January 04

1. In the twenty-first century, as the growth rate of the economy took off to seven per cent and even more to eight per cent, year after year, some constraint disappeared. The government could pump in far more hundreds of crores of rupees into projects and make them become bigger than was thought possible earlier. Yet, in the middle of all this expenditure the same problem arose, viz the sections of the population who really needed the support were again missing out. This was therefore a new problem for which policy planners seemed to have no answer.

This is the question to which the Unique Identification Project has developed as an answer. The government has realised that the problem of reaching the benefit of various programmes to the poorest of Indians will not come about just by providing more money in the schemes. Instead, it is an issue of identifying who are those poorest. Put another way, the problem emerges because these people are often the last to stand up to ask for their share of anything. Their biggest problem is lack of an identity. They are not identified in any government records, nor do they have any identification to prove their status. So, taking advantage of the situation, corrupt administrators are often able to bypass them, to reach others.

This is where the UIDAI project comes in handy. It is a national endeavour to count all the Indians of the country and provide them an identity document or a card, essentially a number. Of course, at present it is in a voluntary form.

The planners of the project hope that once a sufficient number of Indians are enrolled in the programme, several of the government schemes can be delivered on this platform. Can it be used, for instance to identify the poor correctly to include them in the banking system, deliver grain accurately to them or deliver the benefits rightly due to them under various government programmes? How that can be made possible is the subject matter of the present issue, as the experts from the project write in this edition to explain the method and how easy or difficult, they are finding the project.

This sort of number-based identification plan has been used only by some of the developed countries that too for a literate population. No one has ever had the nerve to suggest it can be done in a continental country like India with a population that is just becoming literate. The scope of the UIDAI plan is therefore immense and the potential is mind boggling. It has just begun and is therefore a right time to do some quick analysis of the plan.

What according to the author has removed the constraints of reaching the poorest?

1. Sustained high economic growth rate in the country.

Availability of funds to finance the development projects for the poorest.

Political will of the government to reach the poorest.

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1 and 2 (b) 2 and 3 (c) 1 and 3 (d) 1, 2 and 3

General Studies

Political Science and International Relations

Sociology

Some Reference Essays

List of previous year essay topics (1997-2019)

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