26 September 2023

MAINS DAILY QUESTIONS & MODEL ANSWERS

Q1. The mental illnesses and hardships LGBTQIA+ people in India face must have comprehensive and long-term treatments. Elucidate.

GS II – Government Policies and Interventions

Introduction:

• The LGBTQIA+ community faces a variety of problems. The main problem is getting acceptance from people outside the community. A truly inclusive society is still a distant goal in the eyes of the LGBT community in India. In metropolitan India, where social media and corporate initiatives have increased awareness of LGBT rights, gay men’s circumstances appear to be better than those of transgender or lesbian women. While urban LGBT voices voiced through a number of online and offline venues are important for LGBT advocacy, they only highlight a small percentage of the myriad challenges the community faces.
• Tamil Nadu’s government amended its police behaviour guidelines to forbid harassing LGBTQIA+ individuals and those who support them.

Body:

Indian LGBTQIA+ community issues:

Issues relating to mental health:

• The community commonly experiences lifetime dissonance, pervasive stigma, discrimination, and abuse, all of which can result in significant anguish and low self-worth, which can then generate self-hatred and misery.
• The community deals with so much internalised stigma and constant fear that it can be challenging for members to even articulate their emotions, much less seek help.
• Compared to the overall population, LGBTQIA++ youth are more susceptible to anxiety and depression, with transgender people having 2.4 times as much of both.

Discrimination:

• Sexual orientation and gender identity are rarely discussed in our social, educational, or familial contexts, and when they are, the discussions are stigmatising.
• No matter how successful they may be, LGBTQIA++ people are constantly pushed to the margins of society.

Inadequate health care services:

• When they need it, even the most powerful people struggle to locate gay-affirming mental health services.
• Many psychiatrists in India still treat varied sexual orientations and gender identities as illnesses and practise “correctional therapy.”
• This also applies to standard medical care. According to a current Raahat Project survey, because of harassment and stigma, many trans and gay men would prefer to pay for and receive support from the private sector than from the government healthcare system.

How to Proceed:

• It is crucial to make sure that queer mental health issues are covered in every aspect of mental health work in India, especially in schools and colleges, in order to de-stigmatize varied gender and sexual identities.
• A vital element is the growth of self-care skills in gay kids.
• Developing agency in these young people requires a combination of factors, including capacity-building, awareness-raising, and encouraging positive behaviour changes.
• We need a movement on LGBTQ mental health that is motivated by non-discrimination and public awareness in order to change mainstream norms.
• For LGBTQIA++ people to improve their mental health, community building is essential.
• Access points for medical care and mental health education must be developed, along with comforting, secure, and informative environments.
• One of these projects, on which the Raahat Project has been working with participatory methods, has revealed a variety of persistent issues that LGBTQIA++ populations face in famous colleges.

Conclusion:

• We require comprehensive, long-term solutions that put LGBTQ mental health first, address issues facing the community, and enlist everyone in changing the environment in which they live. The development of these solutions must involve all relevant parties, including families—who are frequently a major source of mental health stress—educational institutions, communities, health-care professionals, mental health experts, and police officers.

Q2. What does inflation seek to achieve? based on an analysis of the Indian economy’s inflation-targeting policy of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). (250 words)

GS III – Indian Economy

Introduction:

• The inflation targeting (IT) approach to central banking involves adjusting monetary policy to achieve a target annual rate of inflation. The premise underlying inflation targeting is that the best approach to encourage long-term economic growth is to maintain price stability, which is achieved through lowering inflation. It adheres to the Urjit Patel Committee’s recommendations. The RBI was given responsibility for failures and made IT its major objective by the Finance Bill of 2016, which changed the RBI Act.

Body:

• Starting on April 1, 2021, the Monetary Policy Committee of the RBI will continue to establish an inflation target of 4% with a tolerance band of +/- 2 percentage points for the ensuing five years.
• In its Report on Currency and Finance for FY21, the Reserve Bank of India has declared that the present inflation target of 4% with a +/-2% tolerance zone is suitable for the ensuing five years.

Important conclusions were drawn:

• Trend inflation decreased from above 9% before flexible inflation targeting (FIT) to between 3.8 and 4.3% under FIT, demonstrating that 4% is the appropriate inflation target.
• A 6% inflation rate serves as the best upper tolerance limit for the objective.
• The ideal lower tolerance bound for inflation is 2% since a lower bound below 2% will hinder growth and a lower bound beyond 2% might frequently result in actual inflation dipping below the tolerance band.

Insufficiencies in logic:

• The economic theory supporting inflation targeting, however, has not been openly debated.
• The foundation of this paradigm is the notion that inflation denotes “overheating,” or economic activity above the “natural” level of output. The reason for this amount of activity is that central banks have kept interest rates excessively low, below the “natural” rate of interest.
• This leads to the conclusion that the best approach to fight inflation is to increase the interest rate set by the central bank, also referred to as the “repo rate” in India.
• One of the key features of this inflation theory is that its central idea, the natural level of output, is unobservable.
• It is almost impossible to support the self-referential explanation in light of this.
• Despite its logical weakness, inflation targeting is a reality because it is the Centre’s declared policy of inflation management.
• If “anchoring inflation expectations” was successful in achieving inflation targeting, and if the inflation rate has remained within the band chosen by the government and the RBI, then inflation targeting has been successful.
• But two years before to the start of inflation targeting in 2016–17, inflation in India hit the target range of 2%–6%.
• In reality, since 2011–12, inflation has been progressively dropping, having fallen to zero by 2015–16.
• This alone demonstrates that a different process than the one assumed by inflation targeting is generating inflation.
• This opinion is further supported by the finding that the relative cost of food contributed significantly to the decline in inflation throughout the five years under consideration.
• Declining food-price inflation per se does not rule out the possibility that inflation expectations may have reduced over this time.
• However, it would be difficult to justify why expectations would have fallen so sharply even in the absence of inflation targeting, which is considered to be essential for containing expectations.
• Finally, given the rise in prices and inflation expectations since March 2020, when the COVID-19 shutdown was announced, it is impossible to believe the idea of a “overheating” economy.
• On the other side, we may explain the increase in inflation in terms of food prices as supply lines were impeded by the lockdown.

Conflicting patterns are displayed:

• Growth, private investment, exports, commercial bank non-performing assets (NPAs), and employment will be used to examine how well inflation targeting has done over the past five years in reducing inflation in India.

Growth:

• The economy’s trend pace of growth actually started to slow down after 2010–2011.
• The fact that dramatically lowering inflation was unable to revive the economy and so disprove the notion that low inflation fosters growth is intriguing. As a result, inflation targeting could not have been the cause.

Investment:

• There is reason to worry that one instrument in the inflation targeting toolbox, higher interest rates, may have hurt investment.
• The real interest rate variation of almost 5 percentage points that had happened in 2013–14 was exaggerated even more when inflation targeting was put into place in 2016, which may have led to a fall in private investment.
• The idea made by policy entrepreneurs that low inflation may significantly boost private investment is noteworthy.

Exports and employment:

• Employment and exports have performed poorly since inflation targeting became a recognised policy.

NPAs: Non-performing assets:

• It is well known that a central bank that puts inflation first runs the danger of losing control over monetary stability.
• NPAs have risen since 2016, and incidents involving IL&FS, PMC Bank, PNB, and YES Bank show that financial sector mismanagement and fraud may go unchecked if the central bank only concentrates on inflation targets.

How to Proceed:

• To handle increases in capital flows, the RBI’s sterilising capability needs to be strengthened. In an open economy, managing foreign exchange reserves and the related liquidity is essential for implementing monetary policy. Maintaining price stability is FIT’s primary objective, which is encouraging for further capital account liberalisation and possible internationalisation of the Indian rupee.