Daily Quiz #20 UPSC Prelims Marathon – July 23, 2019

Explanation: There are two main set of inflation indices for measuring price level changes in India – the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The WPI, where prices are quoted from wholesalers, is constructed by Office of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Commerce and Industries. In the case of CPI (prices quoted from retailers), there are several indices to measure it: CPI for industrial labourers (CPI-IL), agricultural labourers (CPI-AL) and rural labourers (CPI-RL) besides an all India CPI. In addition, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflator and Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) deflator from the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) provide an implicit economy-wide inflation estimate.

Explanation: The governments resort to the following options to check rising inflation:
•As a supply side measure, the government may go for import of goods which are in short-supply. As a long-term measure, governments go on to increase the production to matching the level of demand. Storage, transportation, distribution, hoarding are the other aspects of price management of this category.
•As a cost side measure, governments may try to cool down the price by cutting down the production cost of goods showing price rise with the help of tax breaks—cuts in the excise and custom duties.
•The governments may take recourse to tighter monetary policy to cool down either the demand-pull or the cost-push inflations. This is basically intended to cut down the money supply in the economy by siphoning out the extra money.

Explanation: There are certain special terms used to understand the cropping seasons of India. The agricultural crop year in India is from July to June. The Indian cropping season is classified into two main seasons- (i) kharif and (ii) rabi based on the monsoon. The kharif cropping season is from July to October during the South-West/Summer Monsoon and the rabi cropping season is
from October to March (North-East/Returning/Winter Monsoon). The crops grown between March and June are summer crops, known as jayads. The kharif crops include rice, maize, sorghum, pearl millet/bajra, finger millet/ragi (cereals), arhar (pulses), soyabean, groundnut (oilseeds), cotton, etc. The rabi crops include wheat, barley, oats (cereals), chickpea/gram (pulses), linseed, mustard (oilseeds) etc.

Explanation: To realize the objectives of land reforms, the government took three main steps which had many internal sub-steps:
•Abolition of Intermediaries Under this step, the age-old exploitative land tenure systems of the Zamindari, Mahalwari and Ryotwari were fully abolished.
•Tenancy Reforms Under this broader step, three inter-related reforms protecting the land tenants were effected:
oRegulation of rent so that a fixed and rational rate of rent could be paid by the share-croppers to the land owners;
oSecurity of tenure so that a share-cropper could feel secure about his future income and his economic security;
oOwnership rights to tenants so that the landless masses (i.e., the tenants, the share-croppers) could get the final rights for the land they plough-“land to the tillers”.
•Reorganization of Agriculture This step again has many inter-related and highly logical provisions in the direction of rational agrarian reforms:
Redistribution of land among the landless poor masses after promulgating timely ceiling laws—the move failed badly with few exceptions, such as West Bengal, Kerala and partially in Andhra Pradesh.
Consolidation of land could only succeed in the regions of the Green Revolution (i.e., Haryana, Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh) and remained marred with many loopholes and corruption.
Cooperative farming, which has a high socio-economic moral base, was only used by the big farmers to save their lands from the draconian ceiling laws.

Explanation: The Green Revolution had its positive as well as negative socio-economic and ecological impacts on the countries around the world. Food production increased in such a way (wheat in 1960s and rice, by 1970s) that many countries became self-sufficient (self sufficiency of food must not be confused with the idea of food security) and some even emerged as food exporting countries. But the discrepancy in farmers’ income, it brought with itself increased the inter-personal as well as inter-regional disparities/inequalities in India. Rise in the incidence of malaria due to water-logging, a swing in the balanced cropping patterns in favor of wheat and rice putting pulses, oilseeds, maize, barley on the margins, etc., were negative impacts.