General Studies – I
Society
1) Women need to be assured they can safely voice their concerns about menopause without encountering prejudice. Explain (200 Words)
Refer - Business Line
General Studies – II
Government Policies
2) Indian Government needs to share data to respond to a wide range of complex challenges. Examine (200 Words)
Refer - Business Line
General Studies – III
Environment
3) For creating demand for green hydrogen, a combination of competitive procurement and subsidy is needed. Do you agree with this view? Comment (200 Words)
Refer - Business Line
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 2 years
KEY POINTS
· Menopause is one of “those things” in society that women have traditionally been expected to handle silently.
· Women avoid talking about it because of the stigma associated with menopause, ageism and concomitant symptoms, which can lead to prejudice and being labelled as elderly.
· Women take on leadership responsibilities as their careers and menopause progress. Throughout this stage of life, people, particularly women, balance various responsibilities.
· The economic case: It is costly to lose a senior female supervisor. If she is the organisation’s only female representative at that level, replacing her may take a long time and a lot of money.
· Creating awareness and support for women: Some women may not know that their symptoms are caused by menopause or that counselling and therapy can assist reduce discomfort.
· Organisations can also partner with FemTech ( female technology) firms that use technologies to support women’s health. This industry is developing creative ways to help menopausal women.
· More significantly, firms must ensure that managers obtain the training and information they need to build and preserve team and organisational culture.
· Women may feel more at ease knowing they can safely voice their concerns. Women in senior positions who normalise menopause can start a transition cycle.
KEY POINTS
· While sharing data between departments has always been a ‘North Star’, initiatives in this vein have not borne much fruit as the integration has often been done on aggregated data.
· The initial emphasis on digitisation in government was on making specific legacy functions more transparent through data.
· For instance, the formation of polling parties for panchayat elections in 1993 was computerised for the first time in Malda, West Bengal.
· The focus then was on using the data of a specific function to randomly assign personnel to booths — leading to gains in transparency and efficiency.
· Departments need to shift their mindset to treating data as a ‘product’ rather than just a by-product of their operations.
· In order to facilitate this, the following administrative steps need to be taken. First, the quality of publishing of curated data fields to the central catalogue needs to be tracked at the highest levels of government with departmental Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined.
· Second, data scientists need to be embedded in a distributed manner across departments and empowered by a direct reporting line to the head of the department.
· Finally, the centralised aspects of data governance should be carried out by a Central Metadata and Governance Authority.
KEY POINTS
· The National Green Hydrogen Mission is highly ambitious. The goal is ‘to make India the Global Hub for production, usage and export of Green Hydrogen’ and ‘to assume technology and market leadership’.
· At the same time this would also help their firms gain competitive advantage. India has joined the advanced economies in attempting this.
· As the production of green hydrogen begins, ensuring that demand for downstream uses is created to match production would be essential.
· This approach gave us exceptionally good results in the National Solar Mission when the price of solar power was initially about four times the price of thermal power and has now become clearly much cheaper.
· For the Hydrogen Mission, the minimum size of plants for least cost production would need to be determined for the production of green hydrogen and its downstream uses at the outset.
· Then working backwards from the fertiliser plant, supply and demand of green ammonia and green hydrogen would have to be matched for the supply chain.
· Similarly, government could enter into a long-term procurement contract for the entire production of a green steel plant.
· With creative policy instruments used with speed, flexibility and agility we could be at the global frontier in this decade and that too at affordable costs.
