Directions for the following 8 (eight) items :
Read the following eight passages and answer the item that follows each passage. Your answers to these items should be based on the passages only.
Passage-1(next question)
By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity and economic growth. Crony capitalism, where rich and the influential are alleged to have received land and natural resources and various licences in return forpayoffs to venal politicians, is now a major issue to be tackled. One of the greatest dangers to growth of developing economies like India is the middle-income where crony capitalism creates oligarchies that slow down the growth.
Passage-2(next question)
Climate adaptation may be rendered ineffective if policies are not designed in the context of other development concerns. For instance, a comprehensive strategy that seeks to improve food security in the context of climate change may include a set of coordinated measures related to agricultural extension, crop diversification, integrated water and pest management and agricultural information series. Some of these measures may have to do with climate changes and others with economic development.
Passage-3(next question)
Understanding of the role of biodiversity in the hydrological cycle enables better policy-making. The term biodiversity refers to the variety of plants, animals, microorganisms, and the ecosystems in which they occur. Water and biodiversity are interdependent. In reality, the hydrological cycle decides how biodiversity functions. In turn, vegetation and soil drive the movement of water. Every glass of water we drink has, at least in part, passed through fish, trees, bacteria, soil and other organisms. Passing through these ecosystems, it is cleansed and made fit for consumption. The supply of water is a critical service that the environment provides.
Passage-4(next question)
In the last decade, the banking sector has been restructured with a high degree of automation and products that mainly serve middle-class and upper middle-class society. Today there is need for a new agenda for the banking and non-banking financial services that does not exclude the common man
Passage-5(next question)
Safe and sustainable sanitation in slums has immeasurable benefits to women and girls in terms of their health, safety, privacy and dimity. However, women do not feature in most of the schemes and policies on urban sanitation. The fact that even now the manual scavenging exists, ones to show that not enough has been done to promote pour-flush toilets and discontinue the use of dry latrines. A more sustained and rigorous campaign needs to be launched towards the right to sanitation on a very large scale. This should primarily focus on the abolition of manual scavenging.
Passage-6(next question)
To understand the nature and quantity of Government proper for man, it is necessary to attend to his character. As nature created him for social life, she fitted him for the station she intended. In all cases she made his natural wants greater than his individual powers. No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants; and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society.
Passage-7(next question)
The nature of the legal imperatives in any given state corresponds to the effective demands that state encounters, and that these, in their turn, depend, in a general way, upon the manner in which economic power is distributed in the society which the state controls.
Passage-8(next question)
About 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agricultural practices. This includes nitrous oxide fertilizers; methane from livestock, rice production, and manure storage; and carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning biomass, but this excludes CO2 emissions from soil management practices, sayannah burning and deforestation. Foresty and use, and land-use change account for another percent of greenhouse gas emissions each ear, three quarters of which come from tropical deforestation. The remainder is largely from draining and burning tropical peatland. About the same amount of carbon is stored in the world's peatlands as is stored in the Amazon rainforest.
(Applicable only to the following question)