Essay Paper Analysis (CSE MAINS 2015)
Section- A
- Lending Hands to someone is better than giving a dole.
- Quick but steady wins the race
- Character of an institution is reflected in its leader
- Education without values . as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man more clever devil
Section – B
- Technology can not replace manpower
- Crisis faced in India-Moral or Economic
- Dreams which should not let India sleep
- Can capitalism bring inclusive growth.
Analysis-
First of all, it was a very pleasant and welcoming , since 2014 , that UPSC is asking 2 essays rather than one.Which gives ample opportunity to amplify the marks.It is difficult to get more than 120 on a single essay and marks depends on connecting with the examiner.If your view point in a single essay , speaks to the mind of the examiner, you will get good marks , if not – only god can save you:).
Moreover , it is rather difficult to write 2500 word on a single topic, one usually runs out of material and digresses.
But now, when one has 2 essays , it gives real latitude to the aspirants and also helps diversify and increase one’s marks.Moreover, it is good for the UPSC too as they get to know more about you.
In general sense , Essays are all about personality and how to interpret and answer them.The essays needs in-depth understanding of a subject and this need critical thinking and one’s continuous effort to learn.
Lets analyse the essays of this year:-
There is a departure from dominance of quote based essays, which are mostly philosophical .And unless, one knows why a particular author made the quote , what is the background of it , one would not able able to answer satisfactorily.
For eg- in 2013 – “Be the change you want to see in this world ” .To answer this essay one needs to understand who said it,why he said it, was he the only one who said, how it was popularized by certain philosophy or person in our culture etc and the multiple angles of it.
Hence, quote based essays are little vague in nature and attempting them either can be very rewarding or very disastrous depending on one’s understanding and connect with the subject.Chance of digression is very high.One of the reason why who scored 140 one year scores 60 in the next year – we have personally endured this.
This year essays like – Lending Hands to someone is better than giving a dole and Quick but steady wins the race may look like quotes, but they are statements . Now how to answer them is important .
1)Lending Hands to someone is better than giving a dole –
This essay is completely relevant and a contemporary issue.If any of you have read economic survey of 2014 , you will know why this statement came. The survey is critical of the non performing , extravagant burden on Indian exchequer – rather known as SUBSIDY.How the subsidies are creating troubles rather than helping the needy.
One might think this as an philosophical essays- but it is not- it is an economic essay.There is little space for philosophy though .
Also we have asked you to read one particular article in one of our Sunday diaries , and if one has read this , he/she would be able to answer this perfectly.
Here is the link –
http://upsctree.com/2015/11/15/sunday-diaries-the-aura-of-simplicity/
and the quote in the article – ““Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” is very apt for this occasion.If you have read the article , you can even cite the example of particular IAS officer, there by making the answer more relevant to contemporary topic.
The core of the essay is however subsidy , but you cannot put figures and numbers per se, they have to be used judiciously and essay is probably checked by English professor, hence, excessive economic terms would make your essay technical and will hamper your marks. Thus it has to be answered by one of our principle philosophy – “Simplicity“.
One might argue that the essay is more philosophical (can cite examples/stories of the past) and no need to put SUBSIDY as the core theme, but remember, to make it relevant you have to use SUBSIDY , because there is a reason why UPSC has asked it this year and connecting it with contemporary issue is the single most important factor.
In conclusion ,this is an economic essay .Now you have to make the English professor understand economics.If you keep that in mind and write , this is a very nice essay to attempt.
2)Quick but steady wins the race:-
Lets understand why this was asked ?
The political development in the last year , the anti-corruption movement, Jan Andolan etc , gave rise political parties and instantaneous decisions led to unproductive log jam.It was quick but it was not steady.The product of the movement – Jan Lokpal bill is yet to do anything substantial on curbing corruption.Though it was a great movement as it generated the necessary social condition for anti-corruption in Indian Psyche.This is a fit case example of – if you are quick and not steady how it is going to to fail.
The theme of the essay is both quick and steady – that means – India is a young country and it is the time to harness India’s demographic dividend, this needs both – quick development and steady development that are sustainable.
India has been steady but not quick , hence we have lost 2 decades of opportunity as compared to China.
This essay can also be answered from citing examples from past . Once can cite examples such as Jadev Payeng (Forest man of India) – who single handedly brought a large number of area under forest through his actions. He was quick to realize that the Majuli Island can sink and only way to save it – is to grow forest cover , which can stop soil erosion and absorb excessive rainwater and he was steady in his action to plant the trees- day in – day out .We know that flood happens when forest covers on the banks were lost as forests act as sponge – they capture the water and release it slowly- hence stooping the flood.Many more such examples can be cited.One can cite historical examples – related to administration as well.
It is usually said that slow and steady wins the race , however the essay is quick and steady- that means UPSC is asking on the contemporary theme not on the age old idea of perseverance.
The relevance is , as pointed before how our governance structure should change from Slow and steady to quick and steady.
This essay has to be answered – If you are quick and not steady how it is going to fail and if you are slow but steady then how it is going to fail.
Another example can be environment – how it needs quick but steady action to succeed across globe.How we are on the verge of climatic catastrophe and how only fast and steady action can save it.
So , this is a question related mostly to – administration/policy – “designing action- taking decision-implementing it and sustaining it ” is the core.
The question mocks the rabbit and tortoise story of the past- slow and steady wins the race.
Various examples can be cited for this essay and can be both person centric/example centric or administration/policy centric .If one uses the larger objective such as administration and policy issues then it will connect with the reader , however one can use both – as one may see fit.
3)Character of an institution is reflected in its leader:-
This is a far too direct statement . If one has ample name of leaders and the institutions they led and how they changed and strengthened/weakened it – one can answer this.
This is a simple theme – the essay should delve in to – how a good man can lead a bad institution is a better way and how a bad man finds loophole in a good institution and makes it worse.
One fodder material for this can be the different Governor- Generals of India in British period. How the good one tried to do better while the bad ones tried to make it worse , even though they all were part of same institution and how their character changed the perception of their institution in the public psyche , thus painting a good/bad character of the institution altogether.
There can be multiple ways to answer this, however one should list down all the names institutions before hand and then answer the question.
Overall, this is a good essay for Public administration students , for others it is usually less attractive.
4)Education without values . as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man more clever devil
This is a quote by C.S. Lewis , however unlike past , this quote does not need greater understanding of the background of the quote and one can comfortably answer this .
It is essentially an Ethics question related mostly to Sociology. Because, we have seen , in recent times how educated ones are leaning towards extremism .
How absence of value based education has led to moral denigration in contemporary times.
How only technical education is only creating a man of skill who are devoid of ethics and take the garb of their education to justify their means.
How we are creating younger generations , who are only chasing money , becoming self-centered and disconnected from the society.
How education is creating a clever ones , yet the devil ones.
How our education is designed to teach skills to humans and not humanity .
This is a very broad topic and many examples can be cited for it , it is worth the attempt , moreover this lets one to show their understanding by ending it with a positive note and giving the necessary way forward.
Out of the 4 topics :-
- Lending Hands to someone is better than giving a dole -ECONOMIC- Worth the attempt- One can gather enough to write about it- topic is not digressive in nature-once can end with a very good conclusion
- Quick but steady wins the race:- ADMINISTRATIVE/POLICY- Worth the attempt – One can gather 1300 word easily – topic is not digressive in nature- one can end with a good conclusion , but it will be not as appealing as the previous one (we might be wrong though :))
- Character of an institution is reflected in its leader:-PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION- Good for the optional people
- Education without values . as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man more clever devil– SOCIOLOGY – worth the attempt- topic is very appealing yet can be dangerous if you digress, one needs Gandhi’s Idea of Education to get good marks on this- Many would have attempted this one- theme is bound to be critical , little scope for optimism as this is a critical topic.
As you have seen above , each topic has a specific core area – Sociology /Pub Ad/Economy.
The analysis for SECTION B will follow.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.