UPSC Insta–DART (Daily Aptitude and Reasoning Test) 21 Sep 2024

In its more than 70-year-old history, the Supreme Court of India has delivered a plethora of judgments touching on the fundamental tenets governing the Constitution of India’s guarantee of equal treatment. On occasion, its verdicts have contradicted each other, with different Benches championing different meanings to the Constitution’s text and values. Some of this conflict is understandable. After all, the Constitution’s most important promises — among them, the rights to equal treatment, personal liberty, and freedom of expression and religion — are couched in abstract language. The job of interpreting the Constitution’s words, of fleshing out their real meaning, lies with the courts. Judges perform this task by looking not only at the text of the provisions but also by appealing to the Constitution’s finest moral vision, by studying its history, and by applying rules and codes that have formed over time through an accretion of precedent. Naturally, in construing the guarantees of the Constitution, judges can arrive at varying conclusions on how the document must be read. These differences assume especial salience when the Court is called on to deliberate over the features that qualify as part of the Constitution’s basic structure.

1. With reference to the above passage the following assumptions have been drawn:

1. Supreme Court Benches have given contradicting verdicts as most important assurances of the Constitution remain as ideas and ideals and not easy to interpret in one singular voice as it depends on each judges’ jurisprudence and antecedents.
2. Conflicting interpretations of the Constitution by different benches is within the realm of realistic acceptance provided the basic structure is not tinkered by varying deliberations.

Which of the above assumption(s) is/are valid?

A number of different processes may give rise to food crises. First, there are long-term causes of household income loss or income insecurity that make poor people more vulnerable. These may include physical factors such as environmental degradation, and social changes such as landlessness and asset lessness among rural people. Poverty and social inequalities, which frequently characterize famine-affected societies, have regularly meant that sections of the population are constantly kept at levels of marginal subsistence.

2. What is the most important implication made in the passage above?

The backwardness of the rural sector would be a major impediment to the overall progress of the economy. India is predominantly an agricultural country and farming is the main occupation. According to the 2011 Agricultural Census of India, an estimated 61.5% of the people are dependent on agriculture. Technical developments in the field of agriculture have increased the gap between the rich and poor, as the better off farmers have adopted modern farm technology to a greater extent than the small farmers. The All-India Rural Credit Review Committee in its report warned “If the fruits of development continue to be denied to the large sections of rural community, while prosperity accrues to some, the tensions, social and economic, may not only upset the process of orderly and peaceful change in the rural economy, but even frustrate the national efforts to set up agricultural production.’’

Most of the labour force in India depends on agriculture, not because it is remunerative but because there are no alternative employment opportunities. This is a major cause for the backwardness of Indian agriculture. A part of the labour force now engaged in agriculture needs to be shifted to non-agricultural occupations. Until the 1970s, rural development was synonymous with agricultural development and hence focused on increasing agricultural production.

3. What is the most logical inference that can be drawn from the passage above?

Which of the following assumptions are implied in the passage above?

1. Farmers in India suffer from a lack of better employment opportunities.
2. Unequal gains from farming may lead to mass protests and civil disorder in rural India.

Select the correct answer using code given below:

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our solar system. The descriptive “Milky” is derived from the appearance from the Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky, formed from the stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The chance of having the existence of extra-terrestrial life is the maximum on a planet in one of the other solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy alone contains many other Suns, many of which have planets, similar enough to the Earth to make them suitable for life to sustain.

5. Which of the following is an assumption made by the author of the above passage?