In 2020: UPSC gave an Essay Topic: Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication!!!
In 2024: UPSC gave an Essay Topic: All ideas having large consequence are always simple!!!
Both the essays can be attempted with the below content.
RELEVANCE OF THIS ESSAY
This essay is relevant from a multitude of angles – social, environmental, political and from an economic standpoint.
We live in a world, that is getting complex each passing day and as a species, we are entwined in it. It has indeed become a cob-web of complexity. And the only way out of it appears to be simplicity.
NECESSITY OF SIMPLICITY
Our species confronts a triple crisis: every biological system is deteriorating, we face growing social inequality, and the global economy has entered what could be a long depression. With our economy and climate in crisis, these times call for a change in how we live.
Happiness Index says we are not the happiest generation, although we have immense technological power with in our reach, we have access to best of the education, bet of the healthcare and all other aspects of good life, yet we are sad, depressed, isolated and disconnected from real world.
In our way through civilizational progress, it appears we have lost our true soul, lost our being. We have forgotten the ways we used to be happy with so little things, we have more now, and we are less happy, less content, more fragile and more isolated than ever before.
We are not happy with our jobs, our education,our society and our achievements and a void dwindles with in us all asking the pertinent question – What is the meaning of life ? and What went wrong ?
DEFINING SIMPLICITY
People are intuitively drawn to Simplicity, sensing its promise of the re-enchantment of life. But at the same time, they fear it, worrying that they will never enjoy themselves again. But they’re mistaken — if you’re not laughing and smiling more as you simplify, you’re not doing it right.
We’re happier and more fulfilled when we limit our outer riches and focus on inner riches. It’s not about impoverishment — where people do not have enough — particularly enough food, or shelter or safety. It’s about everyone having enough. Simplicity is about having enough, but not too much. Affluence, as the Dali Lama notes, brings inner, spiritual impoverishment.
Is Simplicity relevant to the poor? Yes, but in a different way. The Simplicity movement is a middle-class movement because it concerns making a choice about how to live, and the poor have few choices. Instead of cutting back their spending, the poor need more money to spend. The poor need new policies rather than Simplicity tips. They need policies that support higher minimum wages, good jobs, affordable housing and health care — policies that make it possible for the poor to live simply.
Simplicity is relevant to the poor in another way — it challenges our beliefs about money: As long as we allow unbridled profit to be our primary goal, people, and particularly corporations, will lie, cheat and treat workers unfairly. Ultimately, profit is the reason we go to war, and it’s the poor who fight these wars.
Simplicity, then, is about taking control over your life and resisting the forces of the dominant society that tell us to claw our way to the top, to be a winner, regardless of consequences. Being a winner does not necessarily make you happy! And in fact, it most likely won’t. Again, as Thoreau says, success is when you feel contented “with only a sense of existence”
WHAT SIMPLICITY IS NOT ?
More often than not, we have come across essays on this topic where students equate simplicity with – Poverty, Frugality, Choice of Apparel, Anti-Technology etc.
- Simplicity is not POVERTY (Don’t romanticize Poverty)
- Simplicity is not living in a HUT or leading an ASCETIC life (Instead it is a philosophy on how to lead life)
- Simplicity is not anti-technology (Technology as such is not good or bad, it is good/bad depends on the user)
- Simplicity is not banality or lack of luster
- Simplicity is not Mundane
- Simplicity is not romanticization of our past.
Simplicity is finding balance in our lives and leading a life that is uncluttered yet sophisticated.
CONSUMERISM AND ITS PERIL
Many believe it’s because a lifestyle of overconsumption creates deficiencies in things that we really need, like health, social connections, security and discretionary time. These deficiencies leave us vulnerable to daily lives of dependency, passive consumption — working, watching and waiting.
The typical urban resident waits in line five years of his or her life and spends six months sitting at red lights, eight months opening junk mail, one year searching for misplaced items and four years cleaning house. Every year, the typical high-school student spends 1,500 hours in front of the tube, compared with 900 hours spent at school.
Yet, the game is changing. Just as we approach an all time peak in consumption, converging variables like shrinking resource supplies, necessitate changes in the way we live. Here’s the good news: reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word “success.”
Instead of more stuff in our already-stuffed lives, we can choose fewer things but better things of higher quality, fewer visits to the doctor and more visits to museums and the houses of friends. Greater use of our hands and minds in creative activities like playing a flute or building a new kitchen table. If we are successful as a culture, we’ll get more value from each transaction, each relationship and each unit of energy; by reducing the waste and carelessness that now litter our economy — energy hogs like aluminum cans and plastic bottles, huge thirsty lawns, excessive airplane travel, feedlot meat and suburbs without stores — we can finance the coming transition to a lifestyle that feels more comfortable in the present and doesn’t clearcut the future.
Healthy, robust cultures mentor diets that are anthropologically correct, but sadly, in many market-bound economies, food has fallen from its lofty stature as a source of well-being, community and clarity to the simplistic category of fun. “Even wild monkeys have healthier diets than many humans,” says anthropologist Katharine Milton. Again, in our money-mad world, the focus is on snackability, convenience and shelf life rather than human life.
Alarmingly, the value of the food has radically declined in the last century. In 1900, wheat from conventional farms was 90 percent protein, compared to only 9 percent today, according to United Nations data.
The economic crisis of the fall of 2008 was clearly based on greed — the pursuit of wealth regardless of the ethics. As Thomas Friedman says in his November 25, 2008 New York Times column:
This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.
It is clear that the pursuit of wealth changes you. It makes people more greedy and selfish. So the research shows that the pursuit of wealth will not make you happy. However, there’s another, related piece of research that is more compelling than any other: The biggest predictor of the health of a nation, as measured in longevity, is the wealth gap. The bigger the gap, the lower everyone’s longevity. It’s not just that poor people’s health brings down the average. (Which is part of it, of course.) No, it hurts the wealthy as well.
The rich person in this country doesn’t have the longevity the middle-class person has in Norway, a country committed to a small wealth gap. Why is this? It seems that a wealth gap destroys social cohesion. It creates a society in which people do not feel connected with others, do not feel responsible for others, do not care about the common good.
When a society allows a wealth gap, it’s telling people: It’s a jungle out there. It’s a cutthroat world. Do what you must in order to survive. Watch your back. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t expect any help. Don’t expect fairness. It’s every man for himself. You’re on your own.
In this kind of society, people feel like they have to hustle constantly if they are to survive. They lie and cheat to get ahead. Crime and violence grow. Of course citizens come to believe that no one cares, that you can’t trust anyone. Social cohesion is destroyed.
The resulting sense of isolation and lack of belonging takes its toll. But there’s something more: Part of this is the inequality of status. There is something very harmful about inequality. The poorer people are forced to feel shame and envy. The rich people feel arrogance, contempt and disdain, as well as guilt and fear of reprisal. These are not healthy emotions!
Yes, it’s more pleasant to have higher status, but the high-status person never really feels good because there’s always someone higher! And when you’re at the top, you know everyone is trying to dethrone you. And who likes those people at the top? Do they even like each other? No, they never know who will be the one to stick the knife in.
Ultimately, the greatest harm comes because no one feels part of something greater than themselves. You feelisolated, disconnected, ignored, abandoned and alone.
All the research shows thatfeelings of caring and connection lead to health, happiness and longevity. Anger, fear, resentment and loneliness are devastating to people. These emotions will only disappear as the wealth gap disappears.
A country with a large and strong middle class is one in which government has stepped in to say that the important thing is the common good, not extreme profits for a few. People have long argued the “trickle-down” theory of economics. We have seen that it doesn’t work.
What works is equality and connection — people understanding that our fate is tied to others’ fate.
You only become more caring by being cared for. We do not feel cared for in this cutthroat culture. You learn to compete, to achieve, to prove you’re better than others; you judge others, compare yourself to others; you learn to ignore the homeless, to hide your real feelings with a false image; you learn to cheat, to fool people, to trick them, to manipulate them. Who doesn’t worry they will end up alone, abandoned and neglected — sitting drugged in a wheelchair, warehoused with other old people.
Aldous Huxley called it “organized lovelessness.” We choose technology over people and interact more and more with machines — voice mail, e-mail, cash machines. We even check our own library books outs. You don’t need anyone and no one needs you.
Juliete Schorhas noted that, over the past 30 years, real consumption expenditures per person have doubled. Her analysis reveals a double-edged sword that has emerged particularly in the 1980s and 90s: [The] booming economy reinforced a powerful cycle of “work and spend” in which consumer norms accelerated dramatically. People needed to work more to purchase all the new products being churned out by a globalizing consumer economy. And they responded to their stressful lives by participating in an orgy of consumer upscaling.
A study by the psychologist Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the ecological footprint of an individual (measured as the number of acres necessary to support one’s chosen lifestyle) increases steadily in proportion to number of hours worked per week, and rises dramatically for those working more than 35 hours per week. Kasser showed that, at the same time that ecological footprints go up, genuine life satisfaction goes down.
Repetitive stress injuries, sleep deprivation, psychological stress, obesity, lack of exercise, anxiety and depression are all quite dangerous individually, but they may also conspire to cause diabetes, heart disease or cancer. All of these illnesses are linked in some way to theculture of overwork.
Dr. Suzanne Schweikerthas noted, however, that there is a deep irony here that brings us back to some social and political questions that are broader than those of work hours alone. “Our desire to keep our health insurance benefits,” she pointed out, “ties us to jobs that are bad for our health.
CULTURAL SHIFT AND JAPAN
Imagine a way of life that’s culturally richer but materially leaner. In this emerging lifestyle, there is less stress, insecurity, pollution, doubt and debt but more vacation time, more solid connections with nature and more participation in the arts, amateur sports and politics. Greater reliance on human energy — fueled by complex carbohydrates — and less reliance on ancient sunlight stored as pollution-filled fossil fuel. Fewer fluorescent hours in the supermarket, more sunny afternoons out in the vegetable garden. Instead of being passive consumers, doggedly treadmilling to keep up with overproduction, we’ll choose healthy, renewable forms of wealth such as social capital (networks and bonds of trust), whose value increases the more we spend it, stimulating work that’s more like a puzzle than a prison sentence, and acquired skills and interests that enhance our free time, making money less of a stressful imperative.
A culture shift like this — from an emphasis on material wealth to an abundance of time, relationships and experiences — has already occurred in many societies such as 18th-century Japan.
Land was in short supply, forest resources were being depleted, and minerals such as gold and copper were suddenly scarce as well. Japan’s culture adapted by developing a national ethic that centered on moderation and efficiency.
An attachment to the material things in life was seen as demeaning, while the advancement of crafts and human knowledge were lofty goals. Quality became ingrained in a culture that eventually produced world-class solar cells and Toyota Priuses. Training and education in aesthetics and ritualistic arts fluorished, resulting in disciplines like fencing, martial arts, the tea ceremony, flower arranging, literature, art and mastery of the abacus.
The three largest cities in Japan had 1,500 bookstores among them, and most people had access to basic education, health care and the necessities of life, further enriching a culture that spent less money but paid more attention.
LESSONS FROM CANADA AND EU
Places such as Canada and the European Union (EU) have already started down this enviable path, making political and cultural space for values that lie beneath the bottom line of monetary wealth. For example, most EU countries give legal standing to mandatory family leave from work, part-time jobs with pro-rated benefits, higher taxes on energy use and pollution in exchange for lower income taxes and take-back laws requiring manufacturers to recycle products at the end of their use.
An everyday ethic is emerging in Europe that encourages sustainable behavior by popular demand. Says John de Graaf, co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, “Western European countries have invested in their social contracts. Strategic investments in health care, education, transportation, and public space reduced the need (and desire) of individuals to maximize their own incomes.”
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY – “COOL LIFE STYLE FOR A HOT PLANET”
The wake-up alarm is buzzing with news ranging from climate disruption to the end of cheap energy and food riots around the world. The time for changes in how we live is now. Only if we act swiftly and voluntarily, can we transform catastrophe into opportunity. Small steps are not sufficient. We require large-scale changes in our energy systems, the radical redesign of our urban environments, a conscious democracy with the strength to make great changes, and much more.
As individuals, we may protest that we are helpless in the face of such immense challenges and that there is little we can do. However, the reality is just the opposite — only changes in our individual lives can provide a trustworthy foundation for a human future where we can not only maintain ourselves, but also surpass ourselves.
Voluntary Simplicity is a cool lifestyle for a hot planet. Simplicity that is consciously chosen, deliberate and intentional supports a higher quality of life. Here are some of the important reasons to consciously choose Simplicity:
• Simplicity fosters a more harmonious relationship with the Earth — the land, air and water.
• Simplicity promotes fairness and equity among the people of the Earth.
• Simplicity cuts through needless clutter and complexity.
• Simplicity enhances living with balance — inner and outer, work and family, family and community.
• Simplicity reveals the beauty and intelligence of nature’s designs.
• Simplicity increases the resources available for future generations.
• Simplicity helps save animal and plant species from extinction.
• Simplicity responds to global shortages of oil, water and other vital resources.
• Simplicity keeps our eyes on the prize of what matters most in our lives — the quality of our relationships with family, friends, community, nature and cosmos.
• Simplicity yields lasting satisfactions that more than compensate for the fleeting pleasures of consumerism
• Simplicity fosters the sanity of self-discovery and an integrated approach to life.
• Simplicity blossoms in community and connects us to the world with a sense of belonging and common purpose.
• Simplicity is a lighter lifestyle that fits elegantly into the real world of the 21st century.
Voluntary Simplicity is not sacrifice.
• Sacrifice is a consumer lifestyle that is overstressed, overbusy and overworked.
• Sacrifice is investing long hours doing work that is neither meaningful nor satisfying.
• Sacrifice is being apart from family and community to earn a living.
• Sacrifice is the stress of commuting long distances and coping with traffic.
• Sacrifice is the white noise of civilization blotting out the subtle sounds of nature.
• Sacrifice is hiding nature’s beauty behind a jumble of billboard advertisements.
• Sacrifice is the smell of the city stronger than the scent of the Earth.
• Sacrifice is carrying more than 200 toxic chemicals in our bodies with consequences that will cascade for generations ahead.
• Sacrifice is the massive extinction of plants and animals and a dramatically impoverished biosphere. Sacrifice is being cut off from nature’s wildness and wisdom.
• Sacrifice is global climate disruption, crop failure, famine and forced migration.
• Sacrifice is the absence of feelings of neighborliness and community.
• Sacrifice is feeling divided among the different parts of our lives and unsure how they work together in a coherent whole.
• Sacrifice is the lost opportunity for soulful encounter with others.
Consumerism offers lives of sacrifice where Simplicity offers lives of opportunity. Simplicity creates the opportunity for greater fulfillment in work, compassion for others, feelings of kinship with all life and awe of living in a living universe.
UNDERSTANDING SIMPLICITY
Crude / Regressive Simplicity:-
The mainstream media often present Simplicity as a path of regress instead of progress. Simplicity is frequently viewed as anti-technology, anti-innovation and a backward-looking way of life that seeks a romantic return to a bygone era. A regressive Simplicity is often portrayed as a utopian, back-to-nature movement with families leaving the stresses of an urban life in favor of living on a farm or in a recreational vehicle or on a boat. This is a stereotypical view of a crudely simple lifestyle — a throwback to an earlier time and more primitive condition — with no indoor toilet, no phone, no computer, no television and no car. No thanks! Seen in this way, Simplicity is a cartoon lifestyle that seems naive, disconnected and irrelevant — an approach to living that can be easily dismissed as impractical and unworkable. Regarding Simplicity as regressive and primitive makes it easier to embrace a business-as-usual approach to living in the world.
Cosmetic/Superficial Simplicity:-
In recent years, a different view of Simplicity has begun to appear — a cosmetic Simplicity that attempts to cover over deep defects in our modern ways of living by giving the appearance of meaningful change. Shallow Simplicity assumes that green technologies — such as fuel-efficient cars, fluorescent light bulbs and recycling — will fix our problems, give us breathing room and allow us to continue pretty much as we have in the past without requiring that we make fundamental changes in how we live and work.
Cosmetic Simplicity puts green lipstick on our unsustainable lives to give them the outward appearance of health and happiness. A superficial Simplicity gives a false sense of security by implying that small measures will solve great challenges. A cosmetic Simplicity perpetuates the status quo by assuming that, with the use of green technologies, we can moderate our impact and continue along our current path of growth for another half century or more.
Sophisticated / Conscious Simplicity:-
Seldom presented in the mass media and poorly understood is an elegant Simplicity that represents a deep, graceful and sophisticated transformation in our ways of living — the work that we do, the transportation that we use, the homes and neighborhoods in which we live, the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear and much more.
A sophisticated and graceful Simplicity seeks to heal our relationship with the Earth, with one another and with the sacred universe. Conscious Simplicity is not simple. This is a life-way that is growing and flowering with a garden of expressions. Sophisticated Simplicity fits aesthetically and sustainably into the real world of the 21st century. Which of these expressions of Simplicity — crude, cosmetic or sophisticated — is most fitting in our dramatically changing world?
Simplicity is not an alternative lifestyle for a marginal few; it is a creative choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations. Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a civilizational choice and a species choice.
Even with major technological innovations in energy and transportation, it will require dramatic changes in our overall levels and patterns of living and consuming if we are to maintain the integrity of the Earth as a living system. Overall, a “deep Simplicity” that fosters an elegant transformation of our lives is vital if we are to build a workable and meaningful future.
THE GARDEN OF SIMPLICTY
1) Uncluttered Simplicity
Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on clutter, complexity and trivial distractions, both material and non-material, and focusing on the essentials — whatever those may be for each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”
2) Ecological Simplicity
Simplicity means to choose ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact on the web of life. This life-path remembers our deep roots with the Earth, air and water. It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons and the cosmos. A natural Simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the non-human realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well the human.
3) Compassionate Simplicity
Simplicity means to feel such a strong sense of kinship with others that we “choose to live simply so that others may simply live.” A compassionate Simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and being drawn toward a path of reconciliation — with other species and future generations as well as, for example, between those with great differences of wealth and opportunity. A compassionate Simplicity is a path of cooperation and fairness that seeks a future of mutually assured development for all.
4) Soulful Simplicity
Simplicity means to approach life as a meditation and to cultivate our experience of intimate connection with all that exists. By living simply, we can more directly awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful Simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.
5) Business Simplicity
Simplicity means a new kind of economy is growing in the world with many expressions of “right livelihood” in the rapidly growing market for healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds — from home building materials and energy systems to foods and transportation. When the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is combined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces and transportation systems of developed nations, it is clear that an enormous wave of green economic activity will unfold. A new economics is integral to this new approach to business, for example, where “waste equals food” or the waste of one activity represents resources for another part of the production system.
6) Civic Simplicity
Simplicity means a new approach to governing ourselves, recognizing that to live more lightly and sustainably on the Earth will require changes in every area of public life — from transportation and education to the design of our cities, public buildings and workplaces. The politics of Simplicity is also a media politics as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing, or transforming, the mass consciousness of consumerism.
7) Frugal Simplicity
Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.
SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION- LESSON FROM GOOGLE VS YAHOO
Yahoo search engine was dominant in 1990s when Google was barely starting out. But over the years, Yahoo Search engine became almost irrelevant where as Google took over. The reason was exceptionally simple.
Yahoo Search engine page and Search engine page of other competitors were cluttered with advertisements and links. While Google, kept it exceptionally simple. That’s the prime reason how and why google search engine took over and became a favorite.
Same can be said about the Bing search engine of Microsoft. Now, Yahoo is almost history and and tech journalists have written its obituary already. The reason was simple, it was Google’s simplicity and uncluttered environment that helped it to become what it is today.
Imagine, if google agrees to put an advertisement on its search page, it will reach the global audience instantaneously and how much can google earn from this, yet despite the lucrative nature of this, google stays as it is, that’s because, it very well knows , the day it loses simplicity, it will loose its sophistication and that it will be a history like Yahoo.
SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION- LESSON FROM APPLE
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. – Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs’ interest in design began with his love for his childhood home. It was in one of the many working-class subdivisions between San Francisco and San Jose that were developed by builders who churned out inexpensive modernist tract houses in the 1950s for the postwar suburban migration. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” developers such as Joseph Eichler and his imitators built houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors and lots of sliding glass doors.
“Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs agreed, which featured homes in the Eichler style. “His houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people.” His appreciation for Eichler-style homes, Jobs said, instilled his passion for making sharply designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the Eichlers. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”
Distinctive design—clean and friendly and fun—would become the hallmark of Apple products under Jobs. In an era not known for great industrial designers, Jobs’ partnerships with Hartmut Esslinger in the 1980s and then with Jony Ive starting in 1997 created an engineering and design aesthetic that set Apple apart from other technology companies and ultimately helped make it the most valuable company in the world. Its guiding tenet was simplicity—not merely the shallow simplicity that comes from an uncluttered look and feel and surface of a product, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every product, the complexities of its engineering and the function of every component. “It takes a lot of hard work,” Jobs said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” As the headline of Apple’s first marketing brochure proclaimed in 1977, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Jobs’ love of simplicity in design was honed when he became a practitioner of Buddhism. After dropping out of college, he made a long pilgrimage through India seeking enlightenment, but it was mainly the Japanese path of Zen Buddhism that stirred his sensibilities. “Zen was a deep influence,” said Daniel Kottke, a college friend who accompanied Jobs on the trip. “You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.” Jobs agreed. “I have always found Buddhism—Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular—to be aesthetically sublime,” . “The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.”, Jobs confides.
One of the few companies in the 1970s with a distinctive industrial design style was Sony. Apple’s first office, after it moved out of the Jobs’ family garage, was in a small building it shared with a Sony sales office, and Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. “He would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’”
His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony had receded by the time he began attending, starting in June 1981, the annual International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. There he was exposed to the clean and functional approach of the Bauhaus movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans-serif font typography and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his mentors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that design should be simple, yet with an expressive spirit. It emphasized rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius was “Less is more.” As with Eichler homes, the artistic sensibility was combined with the capability for mass production.
Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 Aspen design conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” He predicted the passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal grey, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it,” he said. “It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed instead an alternative that was more true to the function and nature of the products. “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.”
Jobs repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s mantra would be simplicity. “We will make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black, black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached. “The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”
Simplicity and Elegance has its Cost too– Jobs’ infatuation with design had a downside. The excess costs and delays he incurred by indulging his artistic sensibilities contributed to his ouster from Apple in 1985 and the gorgeous market failures he produced at his subsequent company, NeXT. When he was recalled to Apple in 1997, he had tempered some of his instincts and learned to make sensible trade-offs, but he was no less passionate about the importance of design. It was destined to make Apple again stand out in a market that was glutted by boxy, beige generic computers and consumer devices such as music players and phones.
“Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can understand them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity.
Jobs’ belief in the power of simplicity as a design precept reached its pinnacle with the three consumer device triumphs he produced beginning in 2001: the iPod, iPhone and iPad. He immersed himself daily in the design of the original iPod and its interface. His main demand was “Simplify!” He would go over each screen and apply a rigid test: If he wanted a song or a function, he should be able to get there in three clicks. And the click should be intuitive. If he couldn’t figure out how to navigate to something, or if it took more than three clicks, he would be brutal.
The iPod, and later the iPhone and iPad, were triumphs of Jobs’ original insight in the early 1980s that design simplicity was best accomplished by tightly wedding hardware and software. Unlike Microsoft, which licensed out its Windows operating system software to different hardware makers, such as IBM and Dell, Apple created products that were tightly integrated from end to end. This was particularly true of the first version of the iPod. Everything was tied together seamlessly: the Macintosh hardware, the Macintosh operating system, the iTunes software, the iTunes Store and the iPod hardware and software.
This allowed Apple to make the iPod device itself much simpler than rival MP3 players, such as the Rio. “What made the Rio and other devices so brain dead was that they were complicated,” Jobs explained. “They had to do things like make playlists, because they weren’t integrated with the jukebox software on your computer. So by owning the iTunes software and the iPod device, that allowed us to make the computer and the device work together, and it allowed us to put the complexity in the right place.” The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs. By integrating hardware and software, he was able to achieve both.
SIMPLICITY AND MARKET ECONOMY
The marketplace abounds with promises of simplicity. Citibank has a “simplicity” credit card, Ford has “keep it simple pricing,” and Lexmark vows to “uncomplicate” the consumer experience. Widespread calls for simplicity formed a trend that was inevitable, given the structure of the technology business around selling the same thing “new and improved” where often “improved” simply means more.
Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification. For the consumer to get less and pay more seems to contradict sound economic principles. Offer to share a cookie with a child and which half will the child want?
Yet in spite of the logic of demand, “simplicity sells” as espoused by New York Times columnist David Pogue in a presentation at the 2006 annual TED Conference in Monterey. The undeniable commercial success of the Apple iPod—a device that does less but costs more than other digital music players— is a key supporting example of this trend.
Another example is the deceivingly spare interface of the powerful Google search engine, which is so popular that “googling” has become shorthand for “searching the Web.” People not only buy, but more importantly love, designs that can make their lives simpler. For the foreseeable future, complicated technologies will continue to invade our homes and workplaces, thus simplicity is bound to be a growth industry. Simplicity is a quality that not only evokes passionate loyalty for a product design, but also has become a key strategic tool for businesses to confront their own intrinsic complexities. Dutch conglomerate Philips leads in this area with its utter devotion to realizing “sense and simplicity” and it has a “Simplicity Advisory Board (SAB) unlike any other company.
SIMPLICITY IS NOT SIMPLE
Simplicity is not simple. The world around us is exceptionally complex. Thus, its our ability on how we process complex things and make it simple will be the true achievement. As the saying goes:-
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein
Thus behind each simplicity, there lies a great deal of complexity and deeper understanding of complexity and making things simple for the general populace to understand and comprehend better.
Simplicity, Minimalism and “Less is More” philosophies are not mere philosophies, they are way of life , a life that is carefully thought and lead. If we look at the Happiness Index, we would know that the greatest economies does not have happiest people. The reason is there is a lack of simplicity, lack of thoughtful approach to life.
We live in ecosystem that is deteriorating rapidly, the generation is not the happiest one either and we are on the verge of collapse-ecologically, morally, socially, psychologically and otherwise. We need to separate between our Want and Need and then only we can approach simplicity, where life is full of joy and its richness is bountiful. Thus, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Indeed, Buddha, left home, travelled far and wide, meditated relentlessly and almost fasted to death, but in the end, gave a simpler yet practicable philosophy of life and to arrive at that, and to find the cause behind all our sorrows was not easy for him, but in doing so, he made lives simpler and elegant. HIs teaching were exceptionally simple yet sophisticated and finding a middle path is the true path to happiness and ultimate realization of pure bliss.
In the teachings of Gandhi too, we find utmost simplicity and thus he is widely read and regarded as Mahatma.
You can explore Gandhi, Buddha and other very well known similar dimensions as well.
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- Items provided through FPS
- The scale of rations
- The price of items distributed through FPS across states.
- Kyoto Protocol of 2001
- Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) as well as REDD+ mechanisms proposed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
- United Nations-mandated Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDG)
- Paris Agreement
- Carbon Neutrality
- multistrata agroforestry,
- afforestation,
- tree intercropping,
- biomass production,
- regenerative agriculture,
- conservation agriculture,
- farmland restoration,
- silvopasture,
- tropical-staple tree,
- intercropping,
- bamboo and indigenous tree–based land management.
Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.
Heat wave is a condition of air temperature which becomes fatal to human body when exposed. Often times, it is defined based on the temperature thresholds over a region in terms of actual temperature or its departure from normal.
Heat wave is considered if maximum temperature of a station reaches at least 400C or more for Plains and at least 300C or more for Hilly regions.
a) Based on Departure from Normal
Heat Wave: Departure from normal is 4.50C to 6.40C
Severe Heat Wave: Departure from normal is >6.40C
b) Based on Actual Maximum Temperature
Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥ 450C
Severe Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥470C
If above criteria met at least in 2 stations in a Meteorological sub-division for at least two consecutive days and it declared on the second day
It is occurring mainly during March to June and in some rare cases even in July. The peak month of the heat wave over India is May.
Heat wave generally occurs over plains of northwest India, Central, East & north Peninsular India during March to June.
It covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra & Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telengana.
Sometimes it occurs over Tamilnadu & Kerala also.
Heat waves adversely affect human and animal lives.
However, maximum temperatures more than 45°C observed mainly over Rajasthan and Vidarbha region in month of May.
a. Transportation / Prevalence of hot dry air over a region (There should be a region of warm dry air and appropriate flow pattern for transporting hot air over the region).
b. Absence of moisture in the upper atmosphere (As the presence of moisture restricts the temperature rise).
c. The sky should be practically cloudless (To allow maximum insulation over the region).
d. Large amplitude anti-cyclonic flow over the area.
Heat waves generally develop over Northwest India and spread gradually eastwards & southwards but not westwards (since the prevailing winds during the season are westerly to northwesterly).
The health impacts of Heat Waves typically involve dehydration, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and/or heat stroke. The signs and symptoms are as follows:
1. Heat Cramps: Ederna (swelling) and Syncope (Fainting) generally accompanied by fever below 39*C i.e.102*F.
2. Heat Exhaustion: Fatigue, weakness, dizziness, headache, nausea, vomiting, muscle cramps and sweating.
3. Heat Stoke: Body temperatures of 40*C i.e. 104*F or more along with delirium, seizures or coma. This is a potential fatal condition.
Norman Borlaug and MS Swaminathan in a wheat field in north India in March 1964
Political independence does not have much meaning without economic independence.
One of the important indicators of economic independence is self-sufficiency in food grain production.
The overall food grain scenario in India has undergone a drastic transformation in the last 75 years.
India was a food-deficit country on the eve of Independence. It had to import foodgrains to feed its people.
The situation became more acute during the 1960s. The imported food had to be sent to households within the shortest possible time.
The situation was referred to as ‘ship to mouth’.
Presently, Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns are overflowing with food grain stocks and the Union government is unable to ensure remunerative price to the farmers for their produce.
This transformation, however, was not smooth.
In the 1960s, it was disgraceful, but unavoidable for the Prime Minister of India to go to foreign countries with a begging bowl.
To avoid such situations, the government motivated agricultural scientists to make India self-sufficient in food grain production.
As a result, high-yield varieties (HYV) were developed. The combination of seeds, water and fertiliser gave a boost to food grain production in the country which is generally referred to as the Green Revolution.
The impact of the Green Revolution, however, was confined to a few areas like Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh in the north and (unified) Andhra Pradesh in the south.
Most of the remaining areas were deficit in food grain production.
Therefore the Union government had to procure food grain from surplus states to distribute it among deficit ones.
At the time, farmers in the surplus states viewed procurement as a tax as they were prevented from selling their surplus foodgrains at high prices in the deficit states.
As production of food grains increased, there was decentralisation of procurement. State governments were permitted to procure grain to meet their requirement.
The distribution of food grains was left to the concerned state governments.
Kerala, for instance, was totally a deficit state and had to adopt a distribution policy which was almost universal in nature.
Some states adopted a vigorous public distribution system (PDS) policy.
It is not out of place to narrate an interesting incident regarding food grain distribution in Andhra Pradesh. The Government of Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s implemented a highly subsidised rice scheme under which poor households were given five kilograms of rice per person per month, subject to a ceiling of 25 kilograms at Rs 2 per kg. The state government required two million tonnes of rice to implement the scheme. But it received only on one million tonne from the Union government.
The state government had to purchase another million tonne of rice from rice millers in the state at a negotiated price, which was higher than the procurement price offered by the Centre, but lower than the open market price.
A large number of studies have revealed that many poor households have been excluded from the PDS network, while many undeserving households have managed to get benefits from it.
Various policy measures have been implemented to streamline PDS. A revamped PDS was introduced in 1992 to make food grain easily accessible to people in tribal and hilly areas, by providing relatively higher subsidies.
Targeted PDS was launched in 1997 to focus on households below the poverty line (BPL).
Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) was introduced to cover the poorest of the poor.
Annapoorna Scheme was introduced in 2001 to distribute 10 kg of food grains free of cost to destitutes above the age of 65 years.
In 2013, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed by Parliament to expand and legalise the entitlement.
Conventionally, a card holder has to go to a particular fair price shop (FPS) and that particular shop has to be open when s/he visits it. Stock must be available in the shop. The card holder should also have sufficient time to stand in the queue to purchase his quota. The card holder has to put with rough treatment at the hands of a FPS dealer.
These problems do not exist once ration cards become smart cards. A card holder can go to any shop which is open and has available stocks. In short, the scheme has become card holder-friendly and curbed the monopoly power of the FPS dealer. Some states other than Chhattisgarh are also trying to introduce such a scheme on an experimental basis.
More recently, the Government of India has introduced a scheme called ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ which enables migrant labourers to purchase rations from the place where they reside. In August 2021, it was operational in 34 states and Union territories.
The intentions of the scheme are good but there are some hurdles in its implementation which need to be addressed. These problems arise on account of variation in:
It is not clear whether a migrant labourer gets items provided in his/her native state or those in the state s/he has migrated to and what prices will s/he be able to purchase them.
The Centre must learn lessons from the experiences of different countries in order to make PDS sustainable in the long-run.
For instance, Sri Lanka recently shifted to organic manure from chemical fertiliser without required planning. Consequently, it had to face an acute food shortage due to a shortage of organic manure.
Some analysts have cautioned against excessive dependence on chemical fertiliser.
Phosphorus is an important input in the production of chemical fertiliser and about 70-80 per cent of known resources of phosphorus are available only in Morocco.
There is possibility that Morocco may manipulate the price of phosphorus.
Providing excessive subsidies and unemployment relief may make people dependent, as in the case of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
It is better to teach a person how to catch a fish rather than give free fish to him / her.
Hence, the government should give the right amount of subsidy to deserving people.
The government has to increase livestock as in the case of Uruguay to make the food basket broad-based and nutritious. It has to see to it that the organic content in the soil is adequate, in order to make cultivation environmentally-friendly and sustainable in the long-run.
In short, India has transformed from a food-deficit state to a food-surplus one 75 years after independence. However, the government must adopt environmental-friendly measures to sustain this achievement.
Agroforestry is an intentional integration of trees on farmland.
Globally, it is practised by 1.2 billion people on 10 per cent area of total agricultural lands (over 1 billion hectares).
It is widely popular as ‘a low hanging fruit’ due to its multifarious tangible and intangible benefits.
The net carbon sequestered in agroforestry is 11.35 tonnes of carbon per ha
A panacea for global issues such as climate change, land degradation, pollution and food security, agroforestry is highlighted as a key strategy to fulfil several targets:
In 2017, a New York Times bestseller Project Drawdown published by 200 scientists around the world with a goal of reversing climate change, came up with the most plausible 100 solutions to slash–down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Out of these 100 solutions, 11 strategies were highlighted under the umbrella of agroforestry such as:-
Nowadays, tree-based farming in India is considered a silver bullet to cure all issues.
It was promoted under the Green India mission of 2001, six out of eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and National Agroforestry and Bamboo Mission (NABM), 2017 to bring a third of the geographical area under tree cover and offsetting GHG emissions.
These long-term attempts by the Government of India have helped enhance the agroforestry area to 13.75 million hectares.
The net carbon sequestered in agroforestry is 11.35 tonnes of carbon per ha and carbon sequestration potential is 0.35 tonnes of carbon per ha per year at the country level, according to the Central Agroforestry Research Institute, Jhansi.
India will reduce an additional 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2 by increasing tree cover. This extra tree cover could be achieved through agroforestry systems because of their ability to withstand minimum inputs under extreme situations.
Here are some examples which portray the role of agroforestry in achieving at least nine out of the 17 SDGs through sustainable food production, ecosystem services and economic benefits:
SDG 1 — No Poverty: Almost 736 million people still live in extreme poverty. Diversification through integrating trees in agriculture unlocks the treasure to provide multifunctional benefits.
Studies carried out in 2003 in the arid regions of India reported a 10-15 per cent increase in crop yield with Prosopis cineraria (khejari). Adoption of agroforestry increases income & production by reducing the cost of input & production.
SDG 2 — Zero hunger: Tree-based systems provide food and monetary returns. Traditional agroforestry systems like Prosopis cineraria and Madhuca longifolia (Mahua) provide edible returns during drought years known as “lifeline to the poor people”.
Studies showed that 26-50 per cent of households involved in tree products collection and selling act as a coping strategy to deal with hunger.
SDG 3 — Good health and well-being: Human wellbeing and health are depicted through the extent of healthy ecosystems and services they provide.
Agroforestry contributes increased access to diverse nutritious food, supply of medicine, clean air and reduces heat stress.
Vegetative buffers can filter airstreams of particulates by removing dust, gas, microbial constituents and heavy metals.
SDG 5 — Gender equality: Throughout the world around 3 billion people depend on firewood for cooking.
In this, women are the main collectors and it brings drudgery and health issues.
A study from India stated that almost 374 hours per year are spent by women for collection of firewood. Growing trees nearby provides easy access to firewood and diverts time to productive purposes.
SDG 6 — Clean Water and Sanitation: Water is probably the most vital resource for our survival. The inherent capacity of trees offers hydrological regulation as evapotranspiration recharges atmospheric moisture for rainfall; enhanced soil infiltration recharges groundwater; obstructs sediment flow; rainwater filtration by accumulation of heavy metals.
An extensive study in 35 nations published in 2017 concluded that 30 per cent of tree cover in watersheds resulted in improved sanitisation and reduced diarrheal disease.
SDG 7 — Affordable & Clean Energy: Wood fuels are the only source of energy to billions of poverty-stricken people.
Though trees are substitutes of natural forests, modern technologies in the form of biofuels, ethanol, electricity generation and dendro-biomass sources are truly affordable and clean.
Ideal agroforestry models possess fast-growing, high coppicing, higher calorific value and short rotation (2-3 years) characteristics and provide biomass of 200-400 tonnes per ha.
SDG 12 — Responsible consumption and production: The production of agricultural and wood-based commodities on a sustainable basis without depleting natural resources and as low as external inputs (chemical fertilisers and pesticides) to reduce the ecological footprints.
SDG 13 — Climate action: Globally, agricultural production accounts for up to 24 per cent of GHG emissions from around 22.2 million square km of agricultural area, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
A 2016 study depicted that conversion of agricultural land to agroforestry sequesters about 27.2± 13.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent per ha per year after establishment of systems.
Trees on farmland mitigate 109.34 million tonnes CO2 equivalent annually from 15.31 million ha, according to a 2017 report. This may offset a third of the total GHG emissions from the agriculture sector of India.
SDG 15 — Life on Land: Agroforestry ‘mimics the forest ecosystem’ to contribute conservation of flora and faunas, creating corridors, buffers to existing reserves and multi-functional landscapes.
Delivery of ecosystem services of trees regulates life on land. A one-hectare area of homegardens in Kerala was found to have 992 trees from 66 species belonging to 31 families, a recent study showed.
The report of the World Agroforestry Centre highlighted those 22 countries that have registered agroforestry as a key strategy in achieving their unconditional national contributions.
Recently, the Government of India has allocated significant financial support for promotion of agroforestry at grassroot level to make the Indian economy as carbon neutral. This makes agroforestry a low-hanging fruit to achieve the global goals.