The Prayas ePathshala

Exams आसान है !

26 October 2024

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MAINS DAILY QUESTIONS & MODEL ANSWERS

Q1. Self-Help Groups (SHGs) empower women and make them self-reliant by inculcating the habit of savings and proper use of financial resources. Analyse.

GS III  Self Help Groups related issues

Introduction:

  • A self-help group (SHG) is a village-based financial intermediary committee normally consist of 10–20 local women or men. When the formal financial system fails to help the needy, then small groups volunteer to cater to the needs of the financially weak by collecting, saving and lending the money on a micro scale. SHGs have gained wide recognition in most developing countries in Asia where their presence is quite pervasive

Role of SHG’s in women empowerment:

  • Capital formation: Through micro-finance, many SHG’s have created valuable assets and capital in the rural areas and are sustaining livelihoods.
  • Access to credit: SHGs provide better access to credit at acceptable and convenient terms. The members have been able to obtain loans for emergent productive and non-productive purposes on comparatively easy terms. This has reduced their dependence on local moneylenders to a large extent.
  • Government initiative such as SHG-Bank linkage program is also increasing their financial inclusion and easy access to credit from formal institutions.
  • Poverty Alleviation: The approach of poverty alleviation through SHG is the most effective means and suits the ongoing process of reforms based on the policy of decentralization.
  • SHGs have given the poor the access to microfinance and consequently led to important changes in their access to productive resources such as land, water, knowledge, technology and credit.
  • Employment generation: Self-employment activities such as collective farming, bee-keeping, horticulture, sericulture have been taken up by SHG’s.
  • Social welfare: There are many successful cases where SHG women have come together to close liquor shops in their village.
  • Rural infrastructure: Schemes such as Aajeevika express have helped SHG’s in creating transport in rural areas.
  • Women empowerment: SHGs have been able to improve the skills of women to do various things by managing the available natural resources.
  • It is estimated that more than 25 million rural women of India have been benefited by the Self Help Groups (SHG).
  • As a group they can help each other to learn so many things along with the money management because most of the women in the rural areas have a very little knowledge for the management of money.
  • Kudumbashree in Kerala has been a huge success. Kudumbashree café is an exemplary example of nurturing entrepreneurship through SHG’s.
  • They also act as a delivery mechanism for various services like entrepreneurial training, livelihood promotion activity and community development programs.

Challenges faced:

  • There are issues like regional imbalance, less than ideal average loan size, lack of monitoring and training support by self-help group federations.
  • Escalating non-performing assets of self-help group loans with banks.
  • Several studies have also found issues related to governance, quality, transparency and irregularity in their functions.
  • Low levels of literacy among the rural women.
  • The study found that over time groups were disintegrating on account of coordination issues.
  • Rural micro-enterprises run by SHG members suffer from critical bottlenecks, whether in raising funds for start-up, growth and working capital or accessing high-quality technical assistance.

Way Forward:

  • Government programs can be implemented through SHGs.
  • This will not only improve the transparency and efficiency but also bring our society closer to Self-Governance as envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi.
  • Constant and enduring structural handholding support from the self-help group promoting institutions (SHPIs).
  • Frequent awareness camps can be organised by the Rural Development department authorities to create awareness about different schemes.
  • Periodic capacity-building of all members, to make the group the collective.
  • With the Government’s focus on digital financial inclusion, investing in training of group members for transition towards technological platforms.
  • It is important to invest in providing the right kind of support to maximize the impact these groups can have on livelihoods.
  • Emphasising SHG movement on women’s entrepreneurship as an engine of growth in rural India.
  • There should not be any discrimination among members based on caste, religion or political affiliations.
  • SHG approach is an enabling, empowering, and bottom-up approach for rural development that has provided considerable economic and non-economic externalities to low-income households in developing countries. SHG approach is being hailed as a sustainable tool to combat poverty, combining a for-profit approach that is self-sustaining, and a poverty alleviation focus that empowers low-income households. It is increasingly becoming a tool to exercise developmental priorities for governments in developing countries.

Q2. An earthquake is the sudden movement of Earth’s crust at a fault line. Elaborate.

GS I  Geography related issues

Introduction:

  • An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of the Earth, resulting from the sudden release of energy in the Earth‘s lithosphere that creates seismic waves. It is a natural event. Earthquake is the form of energy of wave motion transmitted through the surface layer of the earth. The location below the earth’s surface where the earthquake starts is called the hypocenter, and the location directly above it on the surface of the earth is called the epicenter.

Factors that cause earthquakes:

  • The Earth’s crust consists of seven large lithospheric plates and numerous smaller plates. These plates move towards each other (a convergent boundary), apart (a divergent boundary) or past each other (a transform boundary).
  • Earthquakes are caused by a sudden release of stress along faults in the earth’s crust.
  • The continuous motion of tectonic plates causes a steady build-up of pressure in the rock strata on both sides of a fault until the stress is sufficiently great that it is released in a sudden, jerky movement. Earthquakes caused by plate tectonics are called tectonic quakes.
  • Induced quakes are caused by human activity, like tunnel construction, filling reservoirs and implementing geothermal or fracking projects. The earthquakes that occur in the areas of large reservoirs are referred to as reservoir induced earthquakes.
  • Volcanic quakes are associated with active volcanism. They are generally not as powerful as tectonic quakes and often occur relatively near the surface. Consequently, they are usually only felt in the vicinity of the hypocenter.
  • Collapse quakes can be triggered by such phenomena as cave-ins, mostly in karst areas or close to mining facilities, as a result of subsidence.
  • Ground shaking may also occur due to the explosion of chemical or nuclear devices. Such tremors are called explosion earthquakes.

Conclusion:

  • Unlike other disasters, the damages caused by earthquakes are more devastating. Since it also destroys most of the transport and communication links, providing timely relief to the victims becomes difficult. It is not possible to prevent the occurrence of an earthquake; hence, the next best option is to emphasis on disaster preparedness and mitigation rather than curative measures.

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