Aug 1, 2017

ILP 2018 FULL PLAN & GUIDELINES

Hello Friends Amazed to see your excitement and energy by being part of coveted ILP 2018 journey. Before you start with ILP, we would like to share few very important aspects related with this preparation. We have shared the Full Plan of ILP 2018. There are few minor changes from the sample plan given for 3 months. Kindly go through full plan very carefully. Remember "To start is easy but to finish is difficult" To achieve any target and to improve every day, one needs to cross a certain threshold. For example, if a person says that he aspires to be a body builder and is very consistent in his exercises but what he does is ‘one push up every day’. Do you think he would be able to get into desired shape despite of him being consistent? So, despite of him being consistent, regular and motivated, he is not crossing that minimum threshold. Similarly, while preparing for UPSC even if you are consistent and motivated, to get the desired result, you need to get out of your comfort zone and break the sweat to improve. Let us decode each and every aspect one by one!     About Full ILP 2018 Plan Look at the full plan first and then read this further. Now answer this question! What would have been your strategy, planning and way out for this preparation if you were not part of ILP 2018? ILP has many things that will reduced your effort to prepare quality content yourself like Babapedia for Current Affairs, Value Add Notes for Prelims and Mains both and Tests for Prelims and Mains both. On top of it, you have Baba with you. :)  If you feel this plan is hectic then you have not gone through the ocean of syllabus and you are not aware of what it takes to be in that coveted list. Irrespective of you being a fresher or a veteran or a working professional, UPSC doesn’t differentiate. There is no gender differentiation either. So, all my dear freshers and working professionals, kindly understand that you only have one distinction and that is being part of ILP (if you utilize it with the best of your capability) You have nothing to worry now. The only requirement is to have faith in your mentor and blindly follow this plan. Take our words that if you consistently and honestly follow this plan, will witness growth in your learning curve very soon. Perquisites to follow ILP for the desired result   Stop everything that you were following till now And stick to ILP Plan and its demand. "He Who Begins Many Things Finishes But Few" Very Important Suggestion  Not everyone's capability is same. Some may take more or less time/effort to finish the same target and vice versa. Make this plan your soul of preparation and live with it. It doesn't matter if you are taking more time to understand something. Focus on Final Examination. You should be equipped well by the time you sit for the final examination. The whole process and planning is to make you do sincere and consistent effort. Just stick to the process and keep working hard without any expectation. Sometimes it takes little more time to feel the change. But it will surely be there if consistent effort is made. You may also prepare in advance using the Value Add Notes and Plan sources of upcoming SETs and Blocks. If you are a veteran, may also focus more on Mains topics and simultaneously prepare. It is just that one should always align the process as per their need. Let us address some of the very important aspects or say issues we have received through emails and comments regarding note making, current affairs from Babapedia, time management and related issues. Current Affairs from Babapedia Note- Some of you asked whether to also cover previous available content of Babapedia for tests? Na..Na..Na..Na..Na..Re ....  :P It is given for you reference only. Its Search Engine can be used to check all the interrelated content. UPSC has started asking few questions from past 2 years. Having Babapedia’s old content will help you here. It’s your discretion to read them or not J Since many aspirants failed to understand the importance of note making, constant revision and relevance of content we had to come up with Babapedia. Without Babapedia You would have navigated through various newspapers and sources to prepare current affairs. Would have spent ‘n’ number of hours preparing the same. Doing less revision in the process. With Babapedia No need to worry about current affairs for Prelims It covers all important topics of current affairs. You just need to follow it regularly and keep updating in your notes Note Making from Babapedia Reason we disabled copy paste in Babapedia: You would have created your own drive from Babapedia by copying pasting (not exactly the notes for revision). Do not give reasons like “I cannot highlight texts or copy paste relevant points”. By forcing you to make notes from there, we actually want you to follow and learn smart method of note making (as explained above) and spend more time in revision (remember without babapedia- your effort would have been more and less output) Write in Keywords and generate your story for easy revision purpose. You will thank us for this before the Prelims exam :) Daily News Analysis from iasbaba.com In DNA we cover two issues on daily basis (Forget about Must Read articles) In a month, around 50 issues If you start consolidating and revising only those issues, will end up internalizing at least 50 issues by heart per month. How many over the period of 1 year? Current Affairs evolves over the period of time. You need to understand that any issue when gets completed will be covered sooner or later. But lack of patience and habit of overloading of content from here and there puts you off the track. And you end up rushing for everything at your disposal. Do not run after covering everything from here and there. This will only kill your time and will give false satisfaction that you are preparing but actually you are not. You are just having inputs as coverage not learning and output. Remember: The question is not about how hard you are working. But it is about how productive you are in the given time? You effort needs to be result oriented. All that matters is your output! Aspirant’s Question: The issues are very long and elaborated. How to make notes from them? We cover them in a manner so that you need not spend much time in basic understanding of the same using google. Your notes should be smartly made. They need to be precise and coherent in a way that they are easy to revise and you can make complete sense out of them when you read that topic after some time.   Recall the last movie you watched? Say X movie before a month Since you last watched it before a month, logically you shouldn’t remember anything about it. (The same is your logic when you are asked about your study, right?) Are you able to connect with our point? Exactly! You remember almost everything about that movie and can easily explain it and make someone understand the plot of the movie. But same is not the case when you study something or some issue. Why is it so? It is because of the disconnect between your thoughts and visualization of what you study. Movie was visualized and you connected with the story so that it is in your mind for long time. Can you do same when preparing? Yes you can. Start visualizing issues and make very crisp note. Your notes should be understandable only by you no one else. It should be the raw script of the issue in the form of key words and mind maps, looking at which you should be able to narrate the whole issue just like the movie. If you learn this art, it will become very easy for you to retrieve information provided you practice this with lot of revision. Enough of Gyan :) Now DNA is done. Let’s talk about AIR and RSTV AIR and RSTV We don't cover too many issues here since it is already covered under topics of DNA. Can’t you prepare them well? These issues directly covers Mains topics.   Yojana/Kurukshetra Magazine To the point and relevant content for exam is given to ease your burden on monthly basis. Hardly 30 pages of content can be condensed into 5 pages by you with multiple revisions. Try to do it.   Value Add Notes VAN should be consulted only after you are done with all the standard sources given in the plan. Or if VAN is uploaded before go through it in cursory manner and then pick standard texts. But do not skip standard texts at any cost.     Importance of Tests after each Block We will also cover many important concepts in current affairs (not part of Babapedia) in Block Tests. Why? So that you do not get overconfident by great scores in tests :P So that you are not left with any important issues or concepts UPSC examination is very unpredictable and our job as a mentor is to make you prepare for that unpredictability as well. Your intention should be learning in the process from Babapedia as well as Tests. For those who think they won’t be able to catch up with the Plan What if you were not a part of ILP? A false satisfaction that you are preparing? Our suggestions At least you have quality content at your disposal. Prepare from that and revise properly. Take up the tests even if it is delayed due to personal issues. You can easily score 35 marks Do retrospective learning (learning from tests and solutions) and revise all the concepts from the tests   “Inefficiency and lag in following Plan/Schedule leading to procrastination”- Never fall prey to this. It will always be compounding in nature and you will never come out of it. Some Valuable Suggestion for Smart Preparation How are you going to revise from Tests and Babapedia? What will you do 1 month before prelims? Will you sit again and download the test pdfs and start solving them again? If you do that, will only end up doing nothing! We suggest Make different set of Note Books for Economy, S&T;, Environment, History, Geography and Polity- For Tests Suppose you are done with first Block of Polity Tests comprising of X Questions from Current Affairs and Polity. X Questions = at least 3-4 associated concepts Hence 10 such Questions will expose you to at least 40 related concepts. Retrospective Learning and Note Making Write all the concepts that you learnt from that test in your Note Book Do the same for all the tests and keep revising Suppose you kept doing this exercise for all polity tests. In the end Revision will become a cake walk for you. Since carrying these note books will not be a problem, you can revise from it anywhere and anytime. (Imagine all those concepts in your respective note books in revision friendly mode) Same way make different note books for current affairs from babapedia “Try to understand the importance of smart work” The same was communicated to all the successful candidates of last year’s ILP. Trust us, they followed it blindly. If simple act of joining test series or any program can give you result then you need to introspect your “Dream and Desire” Your dream and desire has to be translated through actions and the only thing that will help you – ‘Consistency, regularity and continuous hard work’ There is not a single soul on this earth without a ‘Dream’. And everyone wants to convert their dream into reality. But how many are able to do so? This translation of dream into reality is governed by Dream- Thought Process- Action- Hard Work-Sacrifices-Continuous Effort- Living with your Dream “The best way to predict the future is to create it” As said “You can bring the Horse to the pond but you cannot make it drink”   While conceiving this plan, we thought to revolutionize the learning through our planning, approach and most importantly result. And for that our Team is working day and night. Not only this, everything on iasbaba.com and ILP platform is an effort towards this very goal. The only thing that motivates us to work tirelessly is your future and dream   Rightly put that we are selfish. We are selfish for your success and accomplishment of your dream.  And you need to become positively selfish to gain maximum out of this programme, provided you use it in the right spirit :) We wish you wake up early and reflect on these words at the earliest. Your life’s motto should be “Wake up with determination and go to bed with satisfaction” Note- And please do not mess the forum with too many similar queries. First read everything carefully and try to find out ways yourself and then check whether the same doubt has been answered by someone on any threads or not. Your last resort should be to mail us or create threads for small issues.  Update- VAN and Booklist will be updated by early morning!     All the very Best IASbaba

Jul 31, 2017 IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs 31st July, 2017

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs – 31st July 2017 Archives ECONOMY/AGRICULTURE TOPIC: General Studies 2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation. Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes; mechanisms, laws, institutions and Bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of these vulnerable sections. General studies 3: Major crops cropping patterns in various parts of the country, different types of irrigation and irrigation systems storage, transport and marketing of agricultural produce and issues and related constraints; e-technology in the aid of farmers. Making Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana(PMFBY) farmer-centric Recent floods in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Assam show that even in an otherwise normal monsoon year, farmers in certain pockets could still suffer due to natural calamities. The droughts of 2014-15 and 2015-16 exposed that the existing crop insurance schemes were not enough to alleviate farmers’ woes. Issues with NAIS and WBCIS: The sums insured under National Agriculture Insurance Scheme (NAIS), modified NAIS, and Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (WBCIS) were too low, as premiums were kept low. Further, the compensation was too meagre, and the long wait which the farmers had to go through meant that the relief wasn’t meaningful. So, governments often used the National Disaster Relief Funds to address the situation. Unfortunately, it was not based on any robust scientific system and had its own loopholes. PMFBY- A game changer: The PMFBY raised the sums insured to realistic levels, basically to cover the cost of cultivation of farmers. The premiums were heavily subsidised by the Centre and the states in equal proportions, with farmers paying only 2 per cent of the premium for kharif and 1.5 percent for rabi (for horticulture crops it was 5 per cent). Farmers found the PMFBY attractive. Consequently, in the very first kharif season (2016), area (in ha) and number of farmers covered under PMFBY, both increased to 37.5 million. It was 47 per cent higher in terms of number of farmers, and 38 per cent higher in terms of area, over NAIS and MNAIS schemes of kharif of 2015, a drought year. However, if compared to a normal kharif year, say 2013, the number of farmers opting for the scheme increased by 210 per cent in kharif 2016, and the area covered increased by 126 per cent. The sum insured on per hectare basis under the PMFBY increased by 51 per cent over kharif 2015. All these indicators show that the PMFBY is moving at a good pace and in the right direction. Issues: There are three critical steps in the process: First, the state has to notify the crops, make clusters of districts, determine the sums to be insured based on district level committees, and invite tenders from insurance companies. Second, the state and the Centre have to pay premium to the companies providing insurance. Third, in case of crop damages, quickly assess the damages and ask companies to pay the claims of farmers. Unfortunately, in this entire process, farmers have almost no role. That’s the reason why its implementation and effectiveness has fallen between the cracks. If states delay notifications, or payment of premiums, or crop cutting data, there is no way companies can pay compensation to the farmers in time. It is exactly this slow pace and casual attitude of several state agencies that delayed compensations to farmers for losses in kharif 2016, and it may happen again in kharif 2017. Most states have failed to provide smartphones to revenue staff to capture and upload data of crop cutting, which continues to come with enormous delay. There is hardly any use of modern technology in assessing crop damages. The PMFBY has moved in the right direction and made substantial progress in terms of coverage, but failed in quick dispensation of claims to farmers. The primary reason behind this failure is the lethargy and casual attitude of state agencies. If the PMFBY has to succeed: Farmers must have a bigger stake in its functioning. There is an urgent need to link the insurance database with Core Banking Solution (CBS) so that when premium is deducted from a farmer’s bank account, the bank sends him a message informing about the premium, sum insured and name of insurance company. IRCTC has a similar system is place for railway tickets and there is no reason why our technology-savvy banks and insurance companies cannot do it quickly. Currently, several loanee farmers may not even be aware that they are insured. If the system remains locked between state agencies and insurance companies, chances are that farmers will get short changed. It is time that the PM makes this flagship program farmer-centric with effective implementation. It can pay rich dividends. Connecting the dots: Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana is seen as a game changer over previous insurance schemes. However, its effective implementation faces some impediments. Discuss. Also read: Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana: Assessment SOCIAL ISSUES TOPIC: General Studies 2 Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes; mechanisms, laws, institutions and bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of these vulnerable sections. Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation Protecting the Domestic Workers In news: The recent case of a minor girl in Noida being accused of stealing; and the counter allegations of her ill-treatment are the latest in a long list of incidents involving domestic workers and questions of the rights of such workers. A clash on 12 July between domestic workers and their employers in an upmarket, gated housing society in Noida has snowballed into a full-blown class war with an overt anti-Muslim dimension. Introduction: Domestic work as an economic activity is too vast and employs too many to remain unregulated. Though the 2011 NSSO data put the number of domestic workers at 3.9 million, trade unions estimate the number to be around 10 million. Most of these are from vulnerable communities – Adivasis, Dalits or landless OBCs. Nearly all of them are migrant workers. And an overwhelming number are women. Issues: Most of the domestic servants are migrants, women, many are minors, and belong to the lowest end of the economic spectrum. This makes them easy to replace, and easier still to exploit. Indeed, hardly a week goes by without some news report about a domestic help being abused by her employer. Cases of torture, beatings, sexual assault, and incarceration is common. Since they belong to the unorganised sector, there are no laws safeguarding their rights – no minimum wage requirements, no health or insurance benefits, and no job security whatsoever. The nexus of the state and the market has managed to keep domestic work outside the realm of economic regulation. Neither the Maternity Benefits Act nor the Minimum Wages Act or any of the scores of other labour laws apply to domestic work. Domestic workers can be hired and fired at will. The employer has no legally binding obligations. In a country where 93% of the workforce is in the unorganised sector and therefore beyond the purview of most labour laws, domestic workers represent a new low in terms of disempowerment: they are not even recognised as workers. Their work — cooking, cleaning, dish-washing, baby-sitting — is not recognised as work by the state. Apart from facing routine, structural exploitation in the form of low wages, heavy workloads, and long hours, domestic workers face graver dangers, as is evident from cases of employers confining and assaulting them coming to light with frightening regularity. The inequality of domestic workers’ circumstances is accentuated by the fact their workplace falls within the privacy of the homes of people that are invariably more privileged than they are. Although successive governments have drafted policies, they are yet to become law. The ILO Convention on Domestic Workers: India is a signatory to the ILO’s 189th convention, known as the Convention on Domestic Workers; but has not ratified it yet. The convention mandates that domestic workers be given daily and weekly rest hours, their payment must meet the minimum wage requirement, and that they should be allowed to choose the place where they live and spend their leave. Ratifying states are also required to take protective measures against violence against such workers and are required to enforce a minimum age for employment. However, since these provisions are not binding on those countries that have not ratified the convention, India is not obliged to enforce these recommendations. Regulatory framework: India has only two laws that, in a roundabout way, construe domestic helps as workers. The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, (UWSSA) and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. While the former is a social welfare scheme, the latter is aims to protect working women in general. Neither of these recognizes domestic helps as rights-bearing workers. About half the states have included domestic workers as labourers under the Minimum Wages Act, which sets out terms of payment, hours of work and leave. Yet, this law is grossly inadequate. The law does not, for instance, require domestic workers and employers to register with any authority, which is crucial for monitoring whether both parties are fulfilling their contractual obligations and for adjudicating conflicts. Some states, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, do have welfare boards for domestic workers that attempt to do this, but they have meagre funds and do not go far enough. A national law should also regulate the numerous for-profit domestic workers’ agencies that have sprung up, some of which are suspected of putting children to work. Thus far, there is no national law that governs domestic employment. ‘Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Act, 2010’ Bill: Drafted by the National Commission for Women (NCW). It attempted to bring this large and vulnerable work force into the mainstream. But little progress has been made in passing this bill so far. The Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Bill, 2016: Drafted by the National Platform for Domestic Workers. Going beyond state-centric welfare measures, it calls for the compulsory registration of the employer and the employee with the District Board for regulation of domestic workers. Unlike the UWSSA, which puts the onus on the state, it mandates the collection of cess from the employer for the maintenance of a social security fund for domestic workers, whose access would be mediated through an identity card. This framework achieves both the objectives of police verification — security, and documentation of identification data. It provides for basic terms of employment like a minimum wage, hours of work, notice period and grounds for termination, as well as offences and penalties in the case of crimes. Draft National Policy for Domestic Workers: This policy not only calls for promoting awareness of domestic work as a “legitimate labour market activity”, but also recommends amending existing labour laws to ensure that domestic workers enjoy all the labour rights that other workers do. Way forward: To view domestic workers as a security threat is another way of denying them the status of workers. The policy mindset regarding domestic workers must shift from a law-and-order paradigm to one about workers’ rights. A good place to start would be to consider enacting a Domestic Workers Regulation of Work and Social Security Act. Such a law will, above all, recognise domestic work as labour, partly addressing society’s devaluation of housework. A national law also needs to oversee workers’ safety, provide for health emergencies and their children’s education, among other things. Some have attempted to justify the government’s reluctance to regulate domestic work on the grounds that the workplace is a private household which should not be encroached upon by the state. But this argument does not hold since the anti-sexual harassment law recognises the private household as a workplace. The ongoing conflict also suggests that laws can serve only as enabling frameworks, albeit crucial ones, for improving these employees’ abysmal working conditions and terms. To be able to use the law effectively, domestic workers also need to organise, given that their employers are in an economically and socially superior position. Conclusion: Estimates of the number of domestic workers in the country vary from 3.9 to 10 million. No liberal society, or modern economy, can allow such a large number to remain outside the law as “help”. It is perhaps past time that India revived debate on the Domestic Workers Security bill. Connecting the dots: With instances of exploitation of domestic workers increasing, we need to revive debate on the Domestic Workers Security bill. Discuss. Also read: Domestic workers need a law to safeguard their rights MUST READ The right to be left alone Indian Express Hard act Indian Express At half-way mark Indian Express For a greater role, take SDGs seriously Livemint High time India had a right to privacy law Livemint Bureaucracies in medical decisions Livemint  Hyderabad Blues Business Line  

Jul 31, 2017 RSTV Video

RSTV- The Big Picture: President Election: Symbolism V/S Empowerment and Aspirations

President Election: Symbolism V/S Empowerment and Aspirations Archives TOPIC: General Studies 2 Indian Constitution- historical underpinnings, evolution, features, amendments, significant provisions and basic structure. Appointment to various Constitutional posts, powers, functions and responsibilities of various Constitutional Bodies. In News: Two Presidential candidates will fight in a dalit vs dalit contest as intended by political classes and portrayed by media. The present government’s dalit calculation is there in nominating a President  elect as Dalit as it would be difficult for other parties to oppose his nomination as caste calculation that form an integral part of Indian politics. This is high on political symbolism in view of opposition’s intent to make an ideological statement. This makes one believe that present Presidential election is fought on ground on symbolism. In a democracy, consensus is desirable but contest is integral. Former PM Indira Gandhi also asked the legislators to vote as per their conscience as it is a secret ballot for voting in Presidential election. This time it is interesting that both sides have fielded candidates from the oppressed classes. Difference between both candidates- Former President Narayanan and present candidate Meira Kumar before coming to politics was in elitist services. Whereas Ram Nath Kovid’s entire life has been part of the social movement. He has 12 years in Rajya Sabha, most of the time, he has concentrated on issues of Dalit welfare and empowerment of dalit. So he has larger acceptability. Will the symbolism stop? In this case, the opposition party has fielded the candidate by a way of reaction. This has three inherent flaws The Presidential elections were reduced to a Dalit vs. Dalit contest The lady candidate is a result of political entitlement instead of personal capabilities The division in the ranks of the opposition while announcing the candidate for President from opposition. Did the plight of Dalits change under dalit President? There have been Dalit Presidents in the past as well- Dr. BR Ambedkar and KR Narayanan. The present nomination is considered to be a well thought out political move and an attempt of the government to cajole the plight of the Dalits which began declining since suicide of a dalit student in Hyderabad to incidents of mob lynching by ‘gau rakhshaks’. Although there is a symbolism attached to Kovind's election, Dalit activists don't foresee any improvement in the situation of one of India's most marginalized communities. According to India's National Human Rights Commission, every 18 minutes a crime is committed against a Dalit, with an average of three Dalit women raped and two murdered every day. Despite strict laws, caste-motivated killings, social exclusion and discrimination against Dalits are a daily occurrence. Thus, a dalit President is merely a political move unless the government takes staunch actions for Dalit empowerment and protection. Empowerment comes when people identify with their community leaders. There is a need for empowering dalit at a grassroots level. But when someone is attacked, then the dalit identity comes. Then it does not become law and order problem. This mentality needs to be changed. Political decisions like these are to garner the support for the run up to the upcoming state elections to woo certain communities. The opposition has fielded a candidate which brings support of like of BSP chief. So it is all political in reality. Conclusion The President is expected to be follower of constitution and not be ideologically related to any politically party during the tenure. The electoral collage constitutes of representatives of various political politics. The voting pattern is based on party system and not on system of caste. The constitution says that the President shouldn’t be a puppet nor the adversary of the government. The Indian presidency is not an executive presidency but constitutional presidency where the President acts on the advice of the council of ministers led by the PM. Hence, the identity politics shouldn’t rule over the Presidential elections as after all the President represents the 125 crore Indians and is also the custodian of the constitution and hence the position cannot be limited to identity politics. Connecting the dots: President is not mere a symbolic post in the Indian republic. Comment.  

Jul 31, 2017 IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs 29th July, 2017

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs – 29th July 2017 Archives NATIONAL WOMEN AND HEALTH TOPIC: General Studies 1 Role of women and women’s organization, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues Effects of globalization on Indian society, Social empowerment General Studies 2 Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health Amending MTP Act, 1971: Updating provisions for abortion In news: In July 2017 the Supreme Court of India declined the abortion request of a 10-year-old rape survivor who was reportedly 32 weeks pregnant. Doctors who examined the adolescent opined that an abortion at this stage posed a risk to her life. Under the circumstances, the court could not have done much else. In an earlier judgment in July, 2016 the Supreme Court allowed an adult mother to abort her over-20 week foetus. It relied on a report of a medical board which said that the infant was likely to suffer from a severe mental injury or cardiac problems that would require multiple surgeries. As is evident, leniency is not always extended from the existing legislation. Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971: The MTPA, 1971, came into force, following the recommendation of the Shantilal Shah Committee Report in 1966 that stated that abortion and reproductive rights need to be regulated by law. The MTPA was amended in 2002 that decentralised the law of abortion by allowing penal sanctions for unapproved forms of abortion, and the formulation of MTP rules in 2003. In 2006, in Nand Kishore Sharma v Union of India, the MTPA was challenged on the grounds that it violates the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Court, in this judgement, stated that the relevant provision of the MTPA was not unconstitutional and was in consort with Article 21. The Court, however, did not opine about whether the Act is in violation of the right to life of the foetus, stating that it would be difficult to pinpoint when the life of the foetus begins. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act stipulates a cap of 20 weeks within which an abortion can be performed. While advising an abortion, medical practitioners are expected to evaluate whether continuing with the pregnancy would involve a risk to the life of the mother or cause grave injury to her physical and mental health. Alternatively, the decision is based on whether there would be a substantial risk of the child being handicapped by physical or mental abnormalities. Section 5 provides for a legally-mandated exception that overrides the ceiling of 20 weeks provided by the MTPA, 1971, to allow an abortion in case it “is immediately necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman”. An arbitrary cap: The 20-week cap is somewhat arbitrary and has drawn rightful criticism. Foetal impairments often get detected at the ultrasound done between 18 to 22 weeks, when the foetus is said to have “substantially developed”. But in a country where a majority of expectant mothers still seek advice from midwives and Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), ultrasounds are only done when something “unusual” is suspected. Perhaps taking note of this, the government, in 2016, launched the Pradhan Mantri Surakshit Matritva Abhiyan under which doctors at private and government facilities are required to provide free antenatal care on the ninth of every month. While ultrasounds are also covered, some ASHAs report that free ultrasounds are often not offered. The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (Amendment) Bill, 2014: A step forward, it proposed increasing the abortion ceiling limit from 20 to 24 weeks. It introduced the concept of “substantial foetal abnormalities” — in which case the time period of pregnancy is irrelevant. It widened the scope of who could carry out the abortions by introducing the term “registered health care provider”, which included recognised practitioners of Ayurveda, Unani and homoeopathy. It states that a healthcare provider may “in good faith” allow abortion between 20 to 24 weeks of pregnancy, if there is substantial risk to the mother or the child, or if it is “alleged by the pregnant woman to have been caused by rape”. The draft law identified the current scenarios where rapes are rampant and states pregnancy resulting from rape “may be presumed to constitute a grave injury to the mental health of the pregnant woman”, and that such an injury could be a ground for allowing abortion. Unfortunately, the Bill is still awaiting approval. The Prime Minister’s Office believes that amendments to the Act are likely to give rise to illegal sex selection and abortion rackets. Downside to legal restrictions: In contrast to what PMO believes, the World Health Organisation notes: “Legal restrictions on abortion do not result in fewer abortions nor do they result in significant increases in birth rates." Conversely, laws and policies that facilitate access to safe abortion do not increase the rate or number of abortions. The principal effect is to shift previously clandestine, unsafe procedures to legal and safe ones. Restricting legal access to abortion does not decrease the need for abortion, but it is likely to increase the number of women seeking illegal and unsafe abortions, leading to increased morbidity and mortality. Legal restrictions also lead many women to seek services in other countries/states, which is costly, delays access and creates social inequities.” The WHO report also says that “laws and policies on abortion should protect women’s health and their human rights. Regulatory, policy and programmatic barriers that hinder access to and timely provision of safe abortion care should be removed.” Pro-choice versus Pro-life: The pro-life and pro-choice movements primarily come into conflict on the issue of abortion. The pro-life movement argues that even a non-viable, undeveloped human life is sacred and must be protected by the government. Abortion must not be legal according to this model, nor should it be practiced on an illegal basis. The pro-choice movement argues that in pregnancies prior to the point of viability – a point at which the fetus cannot live outside the womb –the government does not have the right to impede a woman's decision to terminate the pregnancy. The court has observed that in the case of pregnant women, there is a “compelling state interest” in protecting the life of the prospective child. Therefore, the termination of a pregnancy is only permitted when the conditions specified are fulfilled. But from a women’s rights perspective, should not a pregnant mother have the right to decide whether to go through full-term when there is even the slightest chance of a foetal infirmity and not “substantial foetal abnormalities”? It is fair to state that no woman who voluntarily chose to get pregnant is likely to seek an abortion unless there are compelling circumstances. Should not the wishes and desires of the person who will be the caretaker be considered? Way forward: The MTPA in 1971 did not foresee the changes in the medico-technological sphere with the regular use of ultrasound and MRIs to determine natal health and well-being. The MTPA in 1971 also did not make itself conducive to the sexual and reproductive health rights and empowerment of pregnant women and therefore, this seems the perfect time to push for these changes in the legislation. Given the advancements in medical science, a lot of abnormalities can be determined by an ultrasound midway through a pregnancy. Unfortunately, there appear to be no guidelines relating to the conduct of ultrasounds. As a starting point, we need uniformity in medical standards. Simultaneously, the long-pending Bill, which took into account some of the changed circumstances, needs to get passed. It would be helpful alongside to also lay down objective standards to be followed by health-care providers so that every case does not fall in the court’s cradle as it is not the desired route for the delivery of justice in abortion cases.  Conclusion: Abortion the world over is a sensitive topic. Arguments cut both ways. Each country has its own time limit within which the pregnancy may be terminated, but in most cases it’s more than 20 weeks. With the Supreme Court's judgement, the time is ripe to endeavour to amend the MTPA to allow for a revised legal limit for abortion. Connecting the dots: With Supreme court's recent judgements related to abortion in India, the time is ripe to amend the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 to allow for revised limit for abortion. Discuss. What do you mean by the terms pro-life and pro-choice. Discuss the deabte over it in Indian context. Also read: Medical termination of Pregnancy Act Also read: Medical termination of Pregnancy Act(Part II) MUST READ The state’s domain Hindu The making of American diplomacy Hindu Cinema & censorship Hindu Worries beyond China Indian Express Doklam is not about a road Indian Express

Jul 29, 2017 Daily Prelims CA Quiz

UPSC Quiz- 2017 : IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs Quiz [Day 15]

UPSC Quiz- 2017 : IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs Quiz [Day 15] Archives Q.1) Consider the following statements: The nation-wide ‘Soil Health Card Scheme’ aims at expanding the cultivable area under irrigation enabling the banks to assess the quantum of loans to be granted to farmers on the basis of soil quality checking the overuse of fertilizers in farmlands Which of the above statements is/are correct? 1 and 2 only 3 only 2 and 3 only 1, 2 and 3 Q.2) The office of the ‘Whip’ is mentioned in: Constitution of India Rules of the House In a separate Parliamentary Statute None Q.3) ‘Sagar Vani’ was launched recently. It is concerned with Missing and vulnerable children Rural electrification Postal Technology None of the above Q.4) Consider the following statements about Poland It is a land-locked country It is bordered by Germany and Czech Republic Select the correct statement(s) Only 1 Only 2 Both 1 and 2 Neither 1 nor 2 Q.5) Which one of the following is the most fundamental difference between Mahayana Buddhism and Hinayana Buddhism? Emphasis on ahimsa Casteless society Worship of gods and goddesses Worship of stupa Download The Solutions - Click here All The Best IASbaba

Jul 29, 2017 IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs 28th July, 2017

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs – 28th July 2017 Archives NATIONAL TOPIC: General Studies 1 Social empowerment Role of women and women’s organization, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues. Gender as growth driver Introduction: Empowering women to engage in productive employment is critical to achieving not only this SDG but is also pivotal to economic growth, poverty eradication, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and attaining universal primary education. Economic crises affect women more than men: Women are often laid off first as men are traditionally considered to be the main breadwinners. Economic shocks that worsen infrastructure, physical and human, affect women more than men by reducing their access to markets and basic services. Girls are often withdrawn from schools to help with household work and informal enterprises during times of economic crisis, reinforcing gender gaps in education. Gender as a new growth driver: It has begun to attract the attention of policymakers in recent years. Economic growth and development depend upon successfully utilizing the workforce, both male and female. Recent estimates suggest that increasing the female participation rate to that of men could potentially raise economic growth by as much as 5%. While achieving economic growth sometimes requires tough structural reforms and choices (e.g., progressive taxation that may discourage effort), the opposite is true for gender as a driver of growth. Multilateral global institutions have scaled up the importance of gender in their growth work. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has increased the focus on gender and growth in Article IV consultations in a diverse group of countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Egypt, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Iran, Jordan, Mali, Macedonia, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland and Rwanda. The World Bank has also increased its focus on gender-informed lending and advisory services. A range of structural policy reforms are being implemented to eliminate gender distortions to promote sustainable growth. The international community, under the aegis of the UN, has been pursuing gender equality since 2000, which now features as one of the primary Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Issues: India is simultaneously a leader in promoting women’s participation in government but also a laggard in gender issues in the workplace. Its growth rate for manufacturing has been disappointing compared to its potential. Gender-based segmentation has not subsided in India. India’s gender balance in entrepreneurship and jobs remains among the lowest in the world. Improving this balance is an important first step for India’s development and its achievement of greater economic growth and gender equality. Globalization and trade policy reforms have made a limited contribution towards India’s convergence in gender segmentation, while domestic pro-competitive reforms are strongly associated with lower segmentation among male employees. Policies targeting the domestic competitive environment have been more effective in mitigating gender discrimination in the labour market. Challenges in closing the gender gap: Lack of resources to implement promising gender policy initiatives. Governments mobilize resources for gender equality from multiple sources, including taxes, overseas development assistance and through public-private partnerships. But progress has been slow from mobilizing resources to close the gender gap. Domestic resources are particularly important for accelerating progress on gender equality. First, investing its own resources signals that a country is committed to achieving gender equality, which is important for both economic and ethical reasons. Second, only domestic resources can ensure longer-term sustainability for those interventions and activities that are needed to create the fundamental transformation in the way that societies conceive of and organize men’s and women’s roles and responsibilities. Eliminating the obstacles faced by women in economic participation: Fiscal and financial reforms that eliminate gender gap can play a vital role. Gender budgeting: Gender budgeting improves gender equality through well-structured fiscal policies and adequate and properly monitored spending on gender-related goals. In some countries, gender budgeting has inspired fiscal policies in key areas of the budget, such as education, health, and infrastructure, that contributes to the achievement of gender-related goals. It has also improved systems of accountability for public spending for gender-related purposes. Some 60 countries, including Rwanda and Mexico, have already introduced gender budgeting. Gender budgeting efforts need to address key gender-related education and health goals as well as public infrastructure deficiencies, such as household access to clean water or electricity, that impose high unpaid work burdens on girls and women. Gender budgeting efforts can also contribute to improved administration of justice, law, and order, to help reduce violence against girls and women. Gender-focused structural reforms: It can increase women’s contribution to productivity growth, job growth, and improve advancement practices that promote talented women into leadership and managerial roles. Increasing female labour force participation: National Sample Survey (NSS) data for India show that labour force participation rates of women aged 25-54 have stagnated at about 26-28% in urban areas, and fallen substantially from 57% to 44% in rural areas, between 1987 and 2011. Improved access to land and bank loans: Women disproportionately face financial access barriers that prevent them from participating in the economy and from improving their lives. Access to credit can open up economic opportunities for women, and bank accounts can be a gateway to the use of additional financial services. However, women entrepreneurs and employers face significantly greater challenges than men in gaining access to financial services. Higher levels of political representation: India ranks 20th from the bottom in terms of representation of women in Parliament, as per the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2012. To remedy the low participation of women electors, India in 1994 established quotas (reservations) vide the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments to reserve 33 per cent of the seats in local governments for women. The Women’s Reservation Bill (108th amendment) that seeks reserve 33 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats for women is yet to be passed. Though increasing the number of women in national government may not guarantee an impact on governance, a critical mass of women in power can bring about transformation in leadership. Conclusion: Empowering half of the potential workforce has significant growth benefits, that go beyond promoting just gender equality. While policy interactions can be country-specific, gender and growth are intimately linked. Policy and structural reforms to eliminate gender gap can be a powerful tool for accelerating growth. Simply put, empowering half of the potential workforce has significant economic benefits beyond promoting gender equality. Connecting the dots: Empowering half of the potential workforce has significant growth benefits, that go beyond promoting just gender equality. Analyze. AGRICULTURE TOPIC: General Studies 3 Government Budgeting. Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization of resources, growth, development and employment. Major crops cropping patterns in various parts of the country, different types of irrigation and irrigation systems storage, transport and marketing of agricultural produce and issues and related constraints; e-technology in the aid of farmers. Keeping the soil healthy is a challenge In news: Government estimates an all-time high total foodgrain production of 273 million tonnes in 2016-17 (8.67% higher than the last year). Link: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/58602047/Master.jpg The agriculture ministry estimates show that production of key crops like rice, wheat and pulses will be at record levels during the year. Factors that helped foodgrain production: Good rainfall during monsoon 2016 Various policy initiatives taken by the government Increasing penetration of agricultural inputs has helped Indian farmers achieve record food grain production year after year However, this does not automatically imply that all is well on India’s agricultural front. Major concern: Limited availability of agricultural land and declining soil fertility India’s land area is about 2.5 per cent of the global land area. India supports more than 16 per cent of the total human population along with around 20 per cent of the global livestock population. Clearly, the have in turn resulted in a persistent decline in soil fertility — a major challenge that Indian agriculture is currently facing. Soil is the principal medium of plant growth for providing nutrients in adequate manner. At the dawn of the civilization, agriculture based sedentary civilizations have been grown up in fertile soil of the river. Over time, with the increase of population and food demand, methods of agriculture and stress on soil have been accelerated simultaneously because of mismanagement of soil fertility. Over the years, increasing pressure on limited agricultural land in India has resulted in overuse of chemical fertilisers on soil, excessive tillage, jettisoning of age-old organic soil revival practices and lack of appropriate crop rotation. This has resulted in soil degradation and loss of fertility, which are emerging as major challenges for Indian farmers. In several agricultural regions across the country, there has been observed a gap between nutrient demand and supply including decline in organic matter status, deficiencies of micronutrients in soil, soil acidity, salinisation and sodification. Deterioration in chemical, physical and biological health of the soils. Conventional practices followed by farmers such as leaving the land fallow for some time to allow it to regain its lost nutrition, and appropriate crop rotation have been junked in favour of continuous cropping which has led to a decline in Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) content to 0.3-0.4 per cent in the country when it should ideally be at 1 to 1.5 per cent. Therefore, declining soil fertility has become a major threat in agricultural productivity and agro-economic scenario. India is under serious threat of losing its food surplus status in the near future. According to estimates, the demand for foodgrain is expected to increase from 192 million tonnes in 2000 to 355 million tonnes in 2030. If we do not take this disturbing trend into account and start acting now, our country might be saddled with vast swathes of land rendered infertile. What causes soil fertility loss? Apart from natural factors such as floods, volcanoes and earthquakes, a number of human-induced factors such as deforestation, ill management of industrial wastes, overgrazing by cattle, and urban expansion, are also responsible for the loss of soil’s productive capacity. Widespread land degradation caused by inappropriate agricultural practices has a direct and adverse impact on the food and livelihood security of farmers. Inappropriate agricultural practices that contribute to this include excessive tillage, frequent cropping, poor irrigation and water management, and unscientific rotation of crops. Decline in soil organic matter causes limited soil life and poor soil structure. The way forward: Experts say one of the main ways forward is to make agriculture more sustainable and revive the age-old practices of soil regeneration, while balancing the same with judicious use of agrochemicals. The agrochemical industry must also rise to the occasion and invest in producing organic biological products that help improve the health of Indian soil. Organic matter plays a key role in maintaining soil fertility by holding nitrogen and sulphur in organic forms and other essential nutrients such as potassium and calcium. The loss of organic matter is accelerated by frequent tillage. Organic carbon’s an enabler Soil organic carbon plays a key role in maintaining soil fertility by holding nitrogen, phosphorous and a range of other nutrients for plant growth, holding soil particles together as stable aggregates improving soil properties such as water-holding capacity and providing gaseous exchange and root growth, playing an important role as food source for soil fauna and flora and even suppressing crop diseases, and acting as a buffer against toxic and harmful substances such as sorption of toxins and heavy metals. As a result of human activities releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the carbon pool in the atmosphere has increased and the elevated carbon dioxide is considered to be a contributory factor to the danger of global warming and climate change. Soil organic carbon is the largest component of the terrestrial carbon pools, approximately twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and in vegetation. If more carbon is stored in the soil as organic carbon, it will reduce the amount present in the atmosphere, and therefore help to alleviate the problem of global warming and climate change. Therefore, in order to ensure that India’s growing foodgrain needs are met while at the same time soil health and fertility are nurtured and improved, it is important to focus on biological products to improve soil health, propagating the judicious use of agrochemicals, reducing excessive dependence on fertilisers and pesticides while also reviving practices such as intelligent crop rotation. Enhancing sustainable food production through improved soil health is not just the job of the Government and cultivators. The agrochemical industry also has a responsibility to invest with renewed vigour in biological products that can rejuvenate soil health organically. At the same time the need of the hour is to educate farmers about what they can do to improve the health of their nutrient-depleted soil by following practices such as crop rotation, and using organic manure boosters such as cow dung and dried leaves. It is also pertinent to educate them about the judicious use of agrochemicals and attain a fine balance between chemical and organic products — both of which are critical to India’s food sustainability goals. Connecting the dots: Discuss the challenges being faced by the agricultural sector in the area of foodgrain production. What measures should be taken to address these challenges? Examine. ”Even though Indian farmers achieve record food grain production year after year the fruits of agriculture may not be as sweet as it should be”. In the above context Critically examine the state of Indian agriculture and issues associated with it. MUST READ Public health, private players? Hindu   The elephant in the room Indian Express   Fair claims Indian Express No logic in extending length of patents Livemint Promises won’t kill the internal combustion engine Livemint Transporting goods is still a bumpy ride Business Line  

Jul 28, 2017 Daily Prelims CA Quiz

UPSC Quiz- 2017 : IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs Quiz [Day 14]

UPSC Quiz- 2017 : IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs Quiz [Day 14] Archives Q.1) The only land-locked country in South-east Asia is Laos Thailand Malaysia Cambodia Q.2) Consider the following statements with respect to Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) It is the main UN international body concerned with the setting of international food standards It is jointly funded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) Which of the following statements is/are correct? Only 1 Only 2 Both 1 and 2 Neither 1 nor 2 Q.3) The title given by British Government to Mahatma Gandhi which, he surrendered during the Non-Cooperation Movement, was Hind Kesari Kaiser-e-Hind Rai Bahadur Honorable Q.4) Mekedatu dispute is concerned with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh Karnataka and Goa Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Q.5) Montague-Chelmsford reforms or the Councils Act of 1919 was based on which of the following: Duke memorandum Nehru Report Congress Working Committee report Mueller report Download The Solutions - Click here All The Best IASbaba

Jul 28, 2017 IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs 27th July, 2017

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs – 27th July 2017 Archives HEALTH TOPIC: General Studies 2 Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health. General Studies 3 Inclusive growth and issues arising from it Price control of stents: Unintended consequences Background: In February, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority slashed prices of stents by up to 85 per cent. Pic credit: http://www.indialegallive.com/opinion/consumer-watch/stent-prices-stop-lootstent-prices-stop-loot-21639 What are stents? A coronary stent is a tube-shaped device placed in the arteries that supply blood to the heart. It keeps the arteries open in the treatment of coronary heart diseases.  The devices save thousands of lives globally, every year. Emergency angioplasty is the treatment of choice during an acute heart attack, wherein the clot is crushed with a balloon and a stent is placed. It improves the chance of the patient surviving by almost 30 per cent when compared to clot dissolving medication (thrombolysis). The need for price control: In India, emergency angioplasty was carried out in less than 10 per cent of patients mainly because of the cost involved in the procedure and the lack of access to stents. Bringing the devices under price control will enable more patients to make use of this life-saving procedure. Issues and unintended ramifications: Capping the prices of stents has had an unexpected outcome- Preference for stenting even in cases when it is not the best treatment. With cheaper stents and a fall in procedure costs, many more patients are opting for angioplasty. In patients with multiple blocks in all three vessels, open heart surgery is a better procedure than the use of multiple stents. However, with lower stent prices, ill-informed patients often choose multi-vessel angioplasty as it is cheaper (even with three stents) than open heart surgery. With the increasing use of the tiny metal tubes, the chances of a stent blocking with consequent damage to the heart muscle will only increase. The availability of latest generation stents. In April, this year, major international stent companies had filed for withdrawing their latest products from the Indian market. Discussions are still going on between major manufacturers and the government about the withdrawal of already available stents. If the logjam continues, newer and innovative stent technology will never be introduced in India. Research on indigenous stents has been hurt. Stent manufacturers typically spend millions of dollars on research before they can make the device and commercialise it. Some of the profit from sales is pumped back into research. Abruptly reducing stent prices will have adverse effects on the development of improved stents. Preference of imported devices over indigenous ones. Even before the price control move was instituted, only 40 per cent of the stents used in the country were indigenously manufactured; the rest were imported. With prices of imported stents and Indian stents now being the same, doctors and patients could prefer the imported devices. If the situation continues, the financial viability of Indian stent manufacturers could be hit. This will have a bearing on their capacity to do quality research. Lack of government funding for clinical research in India only aggravates the issue. As future generation stents come into clinical use, multinational companies may choose not to release their latest products in India because of the country’s price control regime. In fact, such an alarming scenario might pertain not only to stent technology but also to research and marketing of other implantable devices. We could end up with a situation where hospitals in the country would have older generation stents. Patients hoping to have advanced stents may have to travel abroad — of course, only a few will manage to do so. Medical tourism also will be hit. As it will become apparent that Indian hospitals do not have the latest generation stents. While the government must ensure that the common man has access to proper healthcare, it also cannot undercut market dynamics entirely. If companies do not have the resources to invest in research and innovation, it is ultimately the public that will suffer. Way forward: The best long-term solution is to encourage and support Indian stent manufacturers and medical device research so that we do no need to depend on imported stents. All aspects involving medical device development (clinical research, animal testing, human trials) must be fast-tracked and should be as transparent as possible. There must be a system to make sure that the latest medical devices, including stents, are priced differently. A more comprehensive regulatory framework that looks beyond price caps to ensure quality healthcare coverage for all citizens is required. As policymakers grapple with the issue of supporting public welfare versus medical innovation on limited resources, they must look at other key elements of the healthcare matrix, such as extending the insurance coverage (currently at 25%) and shoring up healthcare infrastructure. At the same time, the manufacturing industry should also reach out to the public and explain how there is more to its pricing strategy than just profits. This year, Johnson & Johnson has led the way with a report detailing its medicines’ price increases, while Allergan, Novo Nordisk and AbbVie have all pledged to limit price increases to a certain percentage. A little bit of transparency can go a long way. Conclusion: Price control of stents is a positive step, but more needs to be done. It should be seen as an opportunity to shore up healthcare infrastructure in country. The government needs to see that the domestic stent manufacturing industry is unhurt and rather competes with international market. Once such a level of competency is achieved, India could actually export stents making Prime Minister’s Make in India viable for medical devices. Connecting the dots: In February, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority slashed prices of stents by up to 85 per cent. Though the price control is a positive step, it has some unintended consequences. Discuss Indian healthcare framework needs a comprehensive regulatory framework that goes beyond price control. Other key elements of healthcare- insurance coverage, healthcare infrastructure etc.- must be stressed upon. Analyze. NATIONAL TOPIC:  General Studies 2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation. Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes; mechanisms, laws, institutions and bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of these vulnerable sections Who's challenging our privacy: Public sector, Private sector or Technology? In news: The Supreme Court has recently made preliminary observations regarding privacy as a fundamental right. It is no longer possible to decouple the idea of privacy from the mechanisms through which privacy is guaranteed. Since Aadhaar and many of the contemporary discussions on privacy are related to deep technological developments, the question of privacy should be rethought in the context of these technologies. Privacy as a way of protecting individuals or groups: We believe that our bank balance must be private. Companies do not normally make public the salaries of all their employees. Universities do not make public the marks or grades of their students in a way that violates the privacy of the student. These notions of privacy are based on the need for security and protection. We do not want to divulge certain things about our wealth or life practices since they may be used by others to potentially harm us. Private sector challenging our privacy: In any discussion on privacy, there is a deep suspicion of the government and state, most times rightly so. But this suspicion does not extend to technology and its private agents, those that are responsible for the breakdown of the value of privacy today. Today, in times of growing privatisation, the greatest challenge to privacy comes from the private sector. Information about individuals is arguably much more in the private domain today than it is within various governments. Also, the mining of this information is taken up far more assiduously by the private compared to government institutions. The idea of privacy has always had a troubled relationship with privatisation. Private companies often have rules that protect them from being transparent in hiring policies, in affirmative action or even making public the salaries of all their employees. Private groups know best the power of the idea of privacy. They use this notion to protect themselves from governments and the public. They also realise that the greatest market that is perennially available to them is the market of trading information on privacy. The state and private players: The government has begun to look more and more like the private sector. Today, almost all politicians are rich entrepreneurs and hold powerful business interests. The public-private binary does not function in any useful sense as far as the governing class is concerned. Thus, privacy is not only open to manipulation by the government but even more so by the private sector. This is so especially because it is the private sector that is at the forefront of developing technologies that facilitate this mining, storing and sharing of information. Technology and privacy: Contemporary technology has made possible many new innovations that have changed the very meaning and significance of privacy. From smartphones to the darknet, the fundamental trajectory is one to do with privacy. Some might argue that technology is only an intermediary tool that enables certain things, both good and bad. But to hold this view is to be blind to the changing modes of technological domination through digital and Internet technologies. Technology is no longer outside human and social processes; it co-creates and co-constitutes the human and the social Questions that needs to be answered: How will the Supreme Court judges be able to give a judgment on privacy as a fundamental right without also making possession, and the making, of technology as ‘rights’? How can they do this without imposing controls on predator technologies that enter the social world in the guise of making our lives comfortable? Indifference to our own privacy: It also stems from an indifference to our own privacy. We do not seem to value privacy today as in earlier times. Social experiments have shown that people are willing to have private information about themselves made public if they receive some monetary advantage. We do this all the time. When we search for a book or a ticket, we start getting advertisements related to these searches in our supposedly private emails. What we read, search, buy, talk and perhaps even think get stored, used and circulated. Everything is tracked and rerouted. We have no clue to the amount of information about our private lives that is out in the Web. Conclusion: Privacy is not a concept like the other fundamental rights. Moreover, our notions of privacy have changed and will continue to change. Technology has been one major catalyst for this change. Any judgement on making or not making privacy a fundamental right must be taken keeping these nuances in mind. Connecting the dots: Privacy of individuals is being challenged by various agencies including the private and the public sector. Critically analyze. Also discuss how technology risks individual's privacy. MUST READ Thirty years of soul searching Hindu Questions of age Hindu Ladies at Lord's Indian Express A jarring note Indian Express Reading the tea leaves Indian Express Why are there so few women mathematicians? Livemint Why India needs to be data democracy? Livemint India's well-timed Look west policy Business Line  

Jul 28, 2017 Important Articles

Motivation and Guidelines: IASbaba Welcomes you on ILP 2018!

Integrated Learning Programme, ILP-2018     Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. We dared to dream as children. We dared to jump higher and higher up to catch the clouds. We saw the possibility in the impossibilities as well. But with time, something changed. It happens to everyone. Your happiest memories dissipate, and your excitement about accomplishing your dreams suddenly takes a back seat. There is only one way to keep dreaming – DREAM BIG! Dreams are the only luxury an individual can afford that has no taxes on it. Every year you encounter a handful amount of candidates who clear the coveted civil services of our country. And suddenly you feel a certain high by just imagining your face in that crowd. You start preparing yourself to take that leap – from an individual with dreams to an individual who starts working hard towards their dreams. You take extra efforts to walk the road filled with difficulties. You invest all that belongs to you – your sleep, your social life, and your money. But every path needs to be fuelled with the right direction, at the right time. Every second counts. Every single point matters. Every turn that you encounter will decide your future path. Right guidance and focus towards your aim – are the two main ingredients of any success in this world. Guidance forms the foundation towards one’s success in life. And focus helps you keep climbing, even if the hill is too high or too steep. Since IASbaba’s inception, each step that we have taken has been towards bringing transformational guidance to students from each nook and corner of our country. We realized how important correct guidance is for your success in this examination, and also how it is difficult for most of the students to access right and active, either due to financial or some personal issues. IASbaba was born out of this realization. And since its birth, the love and respect from our civil services aspirants’ community is what that inspires us to keep going and breaking records, year after year. Here we are, once again, with our most awaited and biggest plan for CSE 2018; an integrated preparation plan to cater to your path towards acing the Civil Service Examination – 2018.   When we launched ILP 2016 and 2017, we had always kept four things in mind. First, most important thing for an UPSC aspirant is 'strategizing and planning'. Most people fail here, even after 3-4 years of preparation. And if you are a fresher or working professional, it becomes all more compounded. Second, 'what to read and how much to read'?  Where an aspirant with minimal notes will be able to get maximum score? You can read everything under the sun and clear UPSC or even prepare smartly with 4-5 hrs a day and clear the same. Third, would be regular guidance and revision and last thing would be a place where in he/she can connect with likeminded aspirants and synergise with them. Previous ILP’s were the perfect product designed for the same. And the result speaks for itself. This is not merely a Prelims Test Series where you get a Plan and appear for the Test. Many of you must have joined few Prelims Test Series before and have had the experience to share. Ask few questions to yourself and share it for others here! ILP prepares you for Prelims and Mains both- GS ILP is step wise guidance and learning ILP gives you a separate platform to prepare along with many sincere aspirants and make a cohort group for self study ILP gives you access to reach out to IASbaba ILP keeps you motivated and directed ILP provides loads of quality content and guidance throughout the preparation ILP keeps you on toes with its planning and forces you to be sincere and honest with your effort Why are we asking all this? Because we want you to feel part of ILP with complete dedication and take it as your pride. If you are not emotionally connected with ILP and IASbaba, and put your faith in us, the whole process will become redundant. Having said this, if there is disconnect between you and ILP, there will be disconnect between you and your preparation (growth) level. You all are here because of a common dream ‘to qualify for this examination’. However not everyone has the courage to live their own dream..... These are the four key reasons or say obstacles and if one can overcome them, success is hardly a step away. First, the idea of difficult things taught as something impossible. You grow up with this idea, and as years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. One day you accept it as a reality and move on. Even if you overcome this, you are faced by the second obstacle: Inconsistency ‘A thin rope can leave its mark on hard rock with constant rub’ There is always a disconnect between dreaming and achieving the same and most of the successful candidates have achieved their dreams through their consistent effort. Even if you are consistent, you are faced by the third obstacle: Fear of defeat! It is so obvious to suffer far more than others when you are working hard for your dream and it is not working in your favour. Who doesn’t have defeats? Is success a pack of positive achievements only? Ask yourself: are defeats necessary? Well, necessary or not, they happen. When you first begin fighting for your dream, you have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. So, why is it so important to live your dream if you are only going to suffer more than other people? Because once you have overcome the defeats-and you always will/do- you are filled with a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of your hearts, you know the worth of your efforts and will cherish it all of your life. Having empowered this fear, you come across another obstacle: the fear of realizing your dream for which you have been fighting all alone! Having overpowered above three obstacles and then falling prey to this fear is a sin one cannot afford. You start looking around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that you do not deserve to get what you want either. You forget about all the obstacles you overcame, all the suffering you endured, all the things you had to give up in order to get this far. With our experience we can give many examples of aspirants, who, went on to commit series of stupid mistakes at the doorstep of success and never reached their goal when it was only a step away. Friend, you should realize the importance of this journey and believe in yourself. If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become the agent of all above processes and achieve it easily. We hope you conquer all these obstacles smoothly and never let any of these succumb you. Before we begin, would like to address few important things. The whole journey ahead depends on your mutual cooperation and support. IASbaba will try its best to assist rather work hand in hand to substantiate our promises but we need to have the same commitment and few promises from all of you! If you work as hard as we do, you would surely succeed. We are here to guide you with your preparation but some well-established norms are necessary between us to effectively deliver our promises. We know that it’s golden to have no rules but it’s necessary to have some breaks on the roads we travel…  The whole idea behind a new platform and a separate grouping is to be able to cater with the best quality and capability from our side. We could have done the same on iasbaba.com ,but why not? Since iasbaba.com is an open platform, addressing everyone with the same vigor and attention would be impossible. So, we thought something unique and targeted. We created this platform for you so that, you are not deviated, lost and distracted by the online crowd. We spent our resources, be it for this platform or on content and guidance to be provided to specifically assist our aspirants so that we can assist you on individual basis, to not let you be alone in your journey, to share your agony, happiness and joy! Most importantly realize that we are investing our time on you through this program. From our side, we will be cent percent committed to exploit our potential but it will be in vain if the same is not received from you all. Hence we want to discuss few very important things with all of you as a family This platform is uniquely designed to cater few hundreds aspirants from technical point of view. This is the reason; we have given unique ids and password to all of you. The content, guidance and materials will let you know the amount of hard work, IASbaba will be doing to realize your dream but at the same time, if anything hinders our motivation or act as deterrence then you have to take responsibility for that. What Deterrence? Our past experience with trusting the serious players with our motivation, hard-work and faith seemed to have had fizzled out in one way or the other. Not adhering to the schedule, selling out the materials that are prepared for your success just for a small amount of money, and sharing the IDs with someone else (this time it is device and IP protected), affecting the load capacity of the website happened to literally break our heart. What is the point then—to have a specialized one-on-one course for you? Are you asking us to be selfish— No, of course not. But we will give you some insights into the issues that you will face if you do not adhere to the established norms: Suppose we are a family of 100 over here and the platform is envisioned to deliver best results for 100 people in terms of technical and quality perspective. If each one of you, just for the sake of assisting a friend share his/her Id and Password, the load on this platform will become 200 or 300. This will affect the speed as well as our resource management for the same. Who will be the loser? We had a technical way of solving this. But we have detested from the same as it might impact user experience. Secondly, if non- registered users start accessing the platform then he/she will also start posting queries/doubts to which we will reply and since every time we cannot confirm with our database to check- we cannot confirm who is registered or not. This will lessen your chances of interacting and using this opportunity for the betterment of yours. Thirdly in the era of competition pseudo UPSC exam takers (read as competitors) purposefully register and then in the name of free speech create a negative atmosphere (we were able to catch many of them last year based on the others aspirants indication). But this will only take away our energy and time. Be and use it as the likes of Rank 4, Rank 6 and others who made ILP as the sole guardian and relied on it completely not as a black sheep waiting to spread negativity. While interacting with many of them the thing that hit us most was ‘They had already put faith on ILP and the ultimate thing for them was to follow it sincerely’ We have put honest and faithful association with all our registered users by providing you a close and meaningful platform where we will be in touch with you throughout this journey. We hope the seat belts remain fastened even during the journey for your success. Think and Cross examine all the above points and take your call! If you share the same emotions and connections, we welcome you in our Family :) Let us discuss few important things regarding this platform and its effective utilization Look at the top Menu Bar- From LHS   Plan & Updates:  Daily outcome oriented plan “The plan is the heart and soul of ILP” 3 Months Plan is given. Full Plan will be put on 31st July Look at the Plan carefully and start your preparation Value Add Notes (VAN) All the update on VAN will be posted on this page. The concept of value adds notes evolved with the pure reason to assist aspirants to understand certain core topics.  Value Add notes will be provided to fill the gaps in your preparation. Do not expect us to provide all the minute details. The purpose is to give quality feed of notes in the form of Mind Maps and other related materials that will help you in revision and will take care of issues you may miss while your study. For Prelims, frequency of value adds will be on broad coverage of important issues from Prelims point of view. For Mains, we will try to cover all the portions that are not available in books and have more analytical perspective. Forum: Forum was designed with the strategic purpose that people who would want to connect through ILP are serious candidates .They would require a platform where in they can talk, raise their doubts and get them cleared. How to use it? The 4th Tab in the Menu Bar is ‘Forum’. Once you click on it, it will direct to a page saying “Ask Question” Once you click on Ask Question- it will ask for the “Title” of the question. There are certain categories like- Economy, Polity, Geography, History, S&T; and Environment, Query Regarding Test Series, Optional and Miscellaneous.  Now, let us suppose, you need to clarify something related to Economics. Write your Subject in the Title– In one sentence and give the category as “Economics”. Now, write your exact doubt in the description section in detail and then post. Before that, check if similar questions are already been posted by other users. All other aspirants can then, read your doubt. This way, if you follow the same procedure, all the doubts related to respective subjects can be clubbed under same threads for different domains. Whenever you have to look for queries related to “only Polity”, you can search Polity and get all the clarifications at one place. It will save your time and will also you can see that whether your doubt has already been answered already or not. (The Title Box acts as Google Search :) ) Daily Confession This is a new feature for ILP 2018. It’s a sort of SELF TRACKER Why not track yourself by jotting daily routine at the end of the day? You can do it in 5 minutes only. Suppose there are 3 Aspirants- A (Working Professional), B (Fresher) and C (Veteran) All the three will have different daily routine and capacity to follow daily schedule. Since all of them trying to be in line with ILP, their effort and strategy to complete the schedule will be a learning experience for others and to them also. A can be more productive on X-Day but less productive on Y-Day. This way A can track or know his/her follow ups. Same for B Same for C Daily confession (honest ones) will put pressure on you looking at others consistent efforts. It will also motivate you to perform better and be consistent and sincere. More than anything, this daily confession will let you know the sincerity and loopholes in your preparation as well as of others over the period of time.   Babapedia (Prelims Current Affairs) Babapedia is designed to prepare you for Current Affairs for Prelims 2018. It covers all important issues for Prelims from various newspapers and articles like The Hindu, Indian Express, Business Standard, Times of India and PIB etc. More than number of newspapers it focuses on relevant articles and content is prepared keeping UPSC’s demand in mind. We have given you the access to last year’s Babapedia content too. For 2018, Babapedia will be updated from 31st July to 31st May 2018. All you need to do is finish that alone along with your note making. We have given the access of last years content on Babapedia. You can check the previous updates. It will be a very good assistance for all of you. You should follow it sincerely. An Hour of quality learning on Babapedia should be your motto.   Profile You can edit your name and change your password from here. To summarize: Preparation Methodology Integrated preparation: We do not see Prelims or Mains as a separate entity requiring an altogether different identity. In the entire preparation, one thing stays constant—Perspective building. It is not just an attribute, but a continuous process that evolves a person from a layman to a man/woman with an idea to not just understand but analyse, and come up with solutions. This is the golden secret that will set you apart from the rest and only when we do an integrated study/analysis of the important subjects would we be able to build and work upon the personality that is expected out of a solution-seeker to possess. Current Affairs: This is a very important part of the preparation process and leads most of the aspirants on a ‘lost path’. By this we do not want to magnify the issue of its difficult existence in our lives but we want to bring to your attention the importance it deserves. Never ignore it. Keep a tab on our ‘Daily news Analysis’ which is extremely important to fill up the gap in your Mains preparation and our recent initiative on Babapedia that covers current affairs on a daily basis. All you need to do is update the database of your mind with these on a daily basis and come back to both on a weekly and monthly basis for revising the same to retain it. You would not want to mess up something that you are already aware of and lose out on clearing the exam, isn’t it? Value of our Value-add notes: We understand that note-making and information scouting becomes a very difficult exercise especially when one prepares from home. In order to ease the pressure, we have our experts to scout the needed and required information for you and prepare concise notes in order to equip you with the demanded information and employ ways to also remember (memory tools like mind-maps) the knowledge gained. Again, these notes will be an amalgamation of the texts from the most sought after and standard books for your benefit. It is also a request to bring to our notice if you find any misspelt information (if any), so that we can rectify the errors immediately. We do not appreciate mistake-shaming so kindly refrain from that. Art of Discussion: We have made available a facility called ‘Forum’ to help you tide over the factor of sitting away from the population. As per your Optional, you will have the chance to make a peer group and discuss in detail the preparation and doubts. You may also find sincere and senior aspirant and get to share doubts for effective study. You can make a peer group and start your discussions and let other follow it. Share, learn and co-operate :)  Do not make us work like Google for you. Email should only contain any personal issue or issues with respect to preparation not concept clarity or asking concept related doubts. If we start doing that the whole process will become ineffective. We are already working to provide you VAN, Babapedia, Tests and many more things that takes great effort and dedication. You will know this soon! This platform is to ensure the connectivity between you and your mentor not a rote learning platform or doubt clarification modus operandi. For that you have Forum to connect with peers, Babapedia, Value Add and Tests. Asking doubts like ‘Babaji please let me understand about global warming and its positive effects’ will be too much to ask for and will only make our effort redundant in time to come. You should realize the worth of self-exploration also.  We do not want to ignore your genuine emails so please cooperate accordingly. Remember that motivation cannot be contained in an email and its reply— Come on, look within, it is already there. You just need to keep it ignited. Let us work so hard that no luck factor for your success and no excuse for your failure!! We believe that our thinking, our strategies, our processes, our learning in the failures before success during the exam, our successes in UPSC exam, experiences post success, our karma and our ability to connect to you is through this ILP. Very Important: Every member of ILP 2018 should actively participate on the platform. We are working hard for you and do not expect your silent participation. It is for you only so at least be visible through comments :)  Note- Every one will be on board by 30th July. Full Plan and First VAN will be updated on 31st July along with first update on Babapedia. There will also be a write up on 'How to follow the Plan?' Are you ready for this journey? Comment below and take this pledge with every member of ILP 2018 family! Also introduce yourself in the comment section.  Let god bless one and all!!

Jul 28, 2017

Motivation and Guidelines: IASbaba Welcomes you on ILP 2018!

Integrated Learning Programme, ILP-2018       Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.   We dared to dream as children. We dared to jump higher and higher up to catch the clouds. We saw the possibility in the impossibilities as well. But with time, something changed. It happens to everyone. Your happiest memories dissipate, and your excitement about accomplishing your dreams suddenly takes a back seat. There is only one way to keep dreaming – DREAM BIG! Dreams are the only luxury an individual can afford that has no taxes on it. Every year you encounter a handful amount of candidates who clear the coveted civil services of our country. And suddenly you feel a certain high by just imagining your face in that crowd. You start preparing yourself to take that leap – from an individual with dreams to an individual who starts working hard towards their dreams. You take extra efforts to walk the road filled with difficulties. You invest all that belongs to you – your sleep, your social life, and your money. But every path needs to be fuelled with the right direction, at the right time. Every second counts. Every single point matters. Every turn that you encounter will decide your future path. Right guidance and focus towards your aim – are the two main ingredients of any success in this world. Guidance forms the foundation towards one’s success in life. And focus helps you keep climbing, even if the hill is too high or too steep. Since IASbaba’s inception, each step that we have taken has been towards bringing transformational guidance to students from each nook and corner of our country. We realized how important correct guidance is for your success in this examination, and also how it is difficult for most of the students to access right and active, either due to financial or some personal issues. IASbaba was born out of this realization. And since its birth, the love and respect from our civil services aspirants’ community is what that inspires us to keep going and breaking records, year after year. Here we are, once again, with our most awaited and biggest plan for CSE 2018; an integrated preparation plan to cater to your path towards acing the Civil Service Examination – 2018.   When we launched ILP 2016 and 2017, we had always kept four things in mind. First, most important thing for an UPSC aspirant is 'strategizing and planning'. Most people fail here, even after 3-4 years of preparation. And if you are a fresher or working professional, it becomes all more compounded. Second, 'what to read and how much to read'?  Where an aspirant with minimal notes will be able to get maximum score? You can read everything under the sun and clear UPSC or even prepare smartly with 4-5 hrs a day and clear the same. Third, would be regular guidance and revision and last thing would be a place where in he/she can connect with likeminded aspirants and synergise with them. Previous ILP’s were the perfect product designed for the same. And the result speaks for itself. This is not merely a Prelims Test Series where you get a Plan and appear for the Test. Many of you must have joined few Prelims Test Series before and have had the experience to share. Ask few questions to yourself and share it for others here! ILP prepares you for Prelims and Mains both- GS ILP is step wise guidance and learning ILP gives you a separate platform to prepare along with many sincere aspirants and make a cohort group for self study ILP gives you access to reach out to IASbaba ILP keeps you motivated and directed ILP provides loads of quality content and guidance throughout the preparation ILP keeps you on toes with its planning and forces you to be sincere and honest with your effort Why are we asking all this? Because we want you to feel part of ILP with complete dedication and take it as your pride. If you are not emotionally connected with ILP and IASbaba, and put your faith in us, the whole process will become redundant. Having said this, if there is disconnect between you and ILP, there will be disconnect between you and your preparation (growth) level. You all are here because of a common dream ‘to qualify for this examination’. However not everyone has the courage to live their own dream..... These are the four key reasons or say obstacles and if one can overcome them, success is hardly a step away. First, the idea of difficult things taught as something impossible. You grow up with this idea, and as years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. One day you accept it as a reality and move on. Even if you overcome this, you are faced by the second obstacle: Inconsistency ‘A thin rope can leave its mark on hard rock with constant rub’ There is always a disconnect between dreaming and achieving the same and most of the successful candidates have achieved their dreams through their consistent effort. Even if you are consistent, you are faced by the third obstacle: Fear of defeat! It is so obvious to suffer far more than others when you are working hard for your dream and it is not working in your favour. Who doesn’t have defeats? Is success a pack of positive achievements only? Ask yourself: are defeats necessary? Well, necessary or not, they happen. When you first begin fighting for your dream, you have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. So, why is it so important to live your dream if you are only going to suffer more than other people? Because once you have overcome the defeats-and you always will/do- you are filled with a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of your hearts, you know the worth of your efforts and will cherish it all of your life. Having empowered this fear, you come across another obstacle: the fear of realizing your dream for which you have been fighting all alone! Having overpowered above three obstacles and then falling prey to this fear is a sin one cannot afford. You start looking around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that you do not deserve to get what you want either. You forget about all the obstacles you overcame, all the suffering you endured, all the things you had to give up in order to get this far. With our experience we can give many examples of aspirants, who, went on to commit series of stupid mistakes at the doorstep of success and never reached their goal when it was only a step away. Friend, you should realize the importance of this journey and believe in yourself. If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become the agent of all above processes and achieve it easily. We hope you conquer all these obstacles smoothly and never let any of these succumb you. Before we begin, would like to address few important things. The whole journey ahead depends on your mutual cooperation and support. IASbaba will try its best to assist rather work hand in hand to substantiate our promises but we need to have the same commitment and few promises from all of you! If you work as hard as we do, you would surely succeed. We are here to guide you with your preparation but some well-established norms are necessary between us to effectively deliver our promises. We know that it’s golden to have no rules but it’s necessary to have some breaks on the roads we travel…  The whole idea behind a new platform and a separate grouping is to be able to cater with the best quality and capability from our side. We could have done the same on iasbaba.com ,but why not? Since iasbaba.com is an open platform, addressing everyone with the same vigor and attention would be impossible. So, we thought something unique and targeted. We created this platform for you so that, you are not deviated, lost and distracted by the online crowd. We spent our resources, be it for this platform or on content and guidance to be provided to specifically assist our aspirants so that we can assist you on individual basis, to not let you be alone in your journey, to share your agony, happiness and joy! Most importantly realize that we are investing our time on you through this program. From our side, we will be cent percent committed to exploit our potential but it will be in vain if the same is not received from you all. Hence we want to discuss few very important things with all of you as a family This platform is uniquely designed to cater few hundreds aspirants from technical point of view. This is the reason; we have given unique ids and password to all of you. The content, guidance and materials will let you know the amount of hard work, IASbaba will be doing to realize your dream but at the same time, if anything hinders our motivation or act as deterrence then you have to take responsibility for that. What Deterrence? Our past experience with trusting the serious players with our motivation, hard-work and faith seemed to have had fizzled out in one way or the other. Not adhering to the schedule, selling out the materials that are prepared for your success just for a small amount of money, and sharing the IDs with someone else (this time it is device and IP protected), affecting the load capacity of the website happened to literally break our heart. What is the point then—to have a specialized one-on-one course for you? Are you asking us to be selfish— No, of course not. But we will give you some insights into the issues that you will face if you do not adhere to the established norms: Suppose we are a family of 100 over here and the platform is envisioned to deliver best results for 100 people in terms of technical and quality perspective. If each one of you, just for the sake of assisting a friend share his/her Id and Password, the load on this platform will become 200 or 300. This will affect the speed as well as our resource management for the same. Who will be the loser? We had a technical way of solving this. But we have detested from the same as it might impact user experience. Secondly, if non- registered users start accessing the platform then he/she will also start posting queries/doubts to which we will reply and since every time we cannot confirm with our database to check- we cannot confirm who is registered or not. This will lessen your chances of interacting and using this opportunity for the betterment of yours. Thirdly in the era of competition pseudo UPSC exam takers (read as competitors) purposefully register and then in the name of free speech create a negative atmosphere (we were able to catch many of them last year based on the others aspirants indication). But this will only take away our energy and time. Be and use it as the likes of Rank 4, Rank 6 and others who made ILP as the sole guardian and relied on it completely not as a black sheep waiting to spread negativity. While interacting with many of them the thing that hit us most was ‘They had already put faith on ILP and the ultimate thing for them was to follow it sincerely’ We have put honest and faithful association with all our registered users by providing you a close and meaningful platform where we will be in touch with you throughout this journey. We hope the seat belts remain fastened even during the journey for your success. Think and Cross examine all the above points and take your call! If you share the same emotions and connections, we welcome you in our Family :) Let us discuss few important things regarding this platform and its effective utilization Look at the top Menu Bar- From LHS   Plan & Updates:  Daily outcome oriented plan “The plan is the heart and soul of ILP” 3 Months Plan is given. Full Plan will be put on 31st July Look at the Plan carefully and start your preparation Value Add Notes (VAN) All the update on VAN will be posted on this page. The concept of value adds notes evolved with the pure reason to assist aspirants to understand certain core topics.  Value Add notes will be provided to fill the gaps in your preparation. Do not expect us to provide all the minute details. The purpose is to give quality feed of notes in the form of Mind Maps and other related materials that will help you in revision and will take care of issues you may miss while your study. For Prelims, frequency of value adds will be on broad coverage of important issues from Prelims point of view. For Mains, we will try to cover all the portions that are not available in books and have more analytical perspective. Forum: Forum was designed with the strategic purpose that people who would want to connect through ILP are serious candidates .They would require a platform where in they can talk, raise their doubts and get them cleared. How to use it? The 4th Tab in the Menu Bar is ‘Forum’. Once you click on it, it will direct to a page saying “Ask Question” Once you click on Ask Question- it will ask for the “Title” of the question. There are certain categories like- Economy, Polity, Geography, History, S&T and Environment, Query Regarding Test Series, Optional and Miscellaneous.  Now, let us suppose, you need to clarify something related to Economics. Write your Subject in the Title– In one sentence and give the category as “Economics”. Now, write your exact doubt in the description section in detail and then post. Before that, check if similar questions are already been posted by other users. All other aspirants can then, read your doubt. This way, if you follow the same procedure, all the doubts related to respective subjects can be clubbed under same threads for different domains. Whenever you have to look for queries related to “only Polity”, you can search Polity and get all the clarifications at one place. It will save your time and will also you can see that whether your doubt has already been answered already or not. (The Title Box acts as Google Search :) ) Daily Confession This is a new feature for ILP 2018. It’s a sort of SELF TRACKER Why not track yourself by jotting daily routine at the end of the day? You can do it in 5 minutes only. Suppose there are 3 Aspirants- A (Working Professional), B (Fresher) and C (Veteran) All the three will have different daily routine and capacity to follow daily schedule. Since all of them trying to be in line with ILP, their effort and strategy to complete the schedule will be a learning experience for others and to them also. A can be more productive on X-Day but less productive on Y-Day. This way A can track or know his/her follow ups. Same for B Same for C   Daily confession (honest ones) will put pressure on you looking at others consistent efforts. It will also motivate you to perform better and be consistent and sincere. More than anything, this daily confession will let you know the sincerity and loopholes in your preparation as well as of others over the period of time.   Babapedia (Prelims Current Affairs) Babapedia is designed to prepare you for Current Affairs for Prelims 2018. It covers all important issues for Prelims from various newspapers and articles like The Hindu, Indian Express, Business Standard, Times of India and PIB etc. More than number of newspapers it focuses on relevant articles and content is prepared keeping UPSC’s demand in mind. We have given you the access to last year’s Babapedia content too. For 2018, Babapedia will be updated from 31st July to 31st May 2018. All you need to do is finish that alone along with your note making. We have given the access of last years content on Babapedia. You can check the previous updates. It will be a very good assistance for all of you. You should follow it sincerely. An Hour of quality learning on Babapedia should be your motto.     Profile   You can edit your name and change your password from here.   To summarize: Preparation Methodology   Integrated preparation: We do not see Prelims or Mains as a separate entity requiring an altogether different identity. In the entire preparation, one thing stays constant—Perspective building. It is not just an attribute, but a continuous process that evolves a person from a layman to a man/woman with an idea to not just understand but analyse, and come up with solutions. This is the golden secret that will set you apart from the rest and only when we do an integrated study/analysis of the important subjects would we be able to build and work upon the personality that is expected out of a solution-seeker to possess. Current Affairs: This is a very important part of the preparation process and leads most of the aspirants on a ‘lost path’. By this we do not want to magnify the issue of its difficult existence in our lives but we want to bring to your attention the importance it deserves. Never ignore it. Keep a tab on our ‘Daily news Analysis’ which is extremely important to fill up the gap in your Mains preparation and our recent initiative on Babapedia that covers current affairs on a daily basis. All you need to do is update the database of your mind with these on a daily basis and come back to both on a weekly and monthly basis for revising the same to retain it. You would not want to mess up something that you are already aware of and lose out on clearing the exam, isn’t it?   Value of our Value-add notes: We understand that note-making and information scouting becomes a very difficult exercise especially when one prepares from home. In order to ease the pressure, we have our experts to scout the needed and required information for you and prepare concise notes in order to equip you with the demanded information and employ ways to also remember (memory tools like mind-maps) the knowledge gained. Again, these notes will be an amalgamation of the texts from the most sought after and standard books for your benefit. It is also a request to bring to our notice if you find any misspelt information (if any), so that we can rectify the errors immediately. We do not appreciate mistake-shaming so kindly refrain from that.   Art of Discussion: We have made available a facility called ‘Forum’ to help you tide over the factor of sitting away from the population. As per your Optional, you will have the chance to make a peer group and discuss in detail the preparation and doubts. You may also find sincere and senior aspirant and get to share doubts for effective study. You can make a peer group and start your discussions and let other follow it. Share, learn and co-operate :)    Do not make us work like Google for you. Email should only contain any personal issue or issues with respect to preparation not concept clarity or asking concept related doubts. If we start doing that the whole process will become ineffective. We are already working to provide you VAN, Babapedia, Tests and many more things that takes great effort and dedication. You will know this soon!   This platform is to ensure the connectivity between you and your mentor not a rote learning platform or doubt clarification modus operandi. For that you have Forum to connect with peers, Babapedia, Value Add and Tests. Asking doubts like ‘Babaji please let me understand about global warming and its positive effects’ will be too much to ask for and will only make our effort redundant in time to come. You should realize the worth of self-exploration also.    We do not want to ignore your genuine emails so please cooperate accordingly.   Remember that motivation cannot be contained in an email and its reply— Come on, look within, it is already there. You just need to keep it ignited.   Let us work so hard that no luck factor for your success and no excuse for your failure!!   We believe that our thinking, our strategies, our processes, our learning in the failures before success during the exam, our successes in UPSC exam, experiences post success, our karma and our ability to connect to you is through this ILP.   Very Important: Every member of ILP 2018 should actively participate on the platform. We are working hard for you and do not expect your silent participation. It is for you only so at least be visible through comments :)    Note- Every one will be on board by 30th July. Full Plan and First VAN will be updated on 31st July along with first update on Babapedia. There will also be a write up on 'How to follow the Plan?'     Are you ready for this journey? Comment below and take this pledge with every member of ILP 2018 family!     Also introduce yourself in the comment section.        Let god bless one and all!!