IAS -2014 PRELIMS GENERAL STUDY SOLUTION BY SAMVEG IAS ,DEHRADUN

Dear Aspirants

SAMVEG IAS DEHRADUN PROVIDING SOLUTION FOR  IAS 2014 GENERAL STUDY SOLUTION.DISCUSS IT ,IF FOUND WRONG SUGGESST BETTER ANSWER.

Serial no.	Questions hint	remark
1	Mahattar and pattakila	B,village headsman
2	lichens	B,algae and fungi
3	Moving in Himalayas,seeing plants	A,1,2
4	Pollutants in stell industry	D,all
5	Kingdom,buddha	C,3,4
6	Tribal festivals*	D
7	Salex tax	D,state
8	Venture capital	B,long term
9	Main objective  of 12th pla	D,faster,inclusive,sustainable
10	BOP,CURRENT A/C	C,1,3
11	MSFR & NDTL	A,BANKING
12	BUSSINESS CORRESPONDENT	B,2 ONLY
13	STATUTORY RESERVE REQUIREMENT	A,1 ONLY
14	ARAB SPRING	D,TUNISIA
15	ARCTIC COUNCIL	D,DEN,RUSSIA,USA
16	CHECHNYA	A,RUSSIA
17	AGNI IV	A S TO S
18	COAL BED METHANE &SHALE GAS	D
19	CHANGPA	B,2&3
20	CLUSTER BEAN,GUAR	B,SHALE GAS
21	PARTITION OF BENGAL	B,1911
22	1929 CONG SESSION	B,PURNA SWARAJ
23	SATTRIYA DANCE	B,1& 2
24	CHAITRA 1	A,21ST MARCH
25	AJANTA,MOUNT ABU,MAMALLAPURAM*	c
26	GHADR	A,SAN FRANCISCO
27	KALARIPAYATTU	D,MARTIAL ART  INSOUTH INDIA
28	GARBA,YAKSHGAN	C,1& 3
29	BUDDHIST HISTORY	A,1,2,3
30	BIJAK,PUSHTI MARG	D,NEITHER
31	MANGANIYARS	B,MUSIC,NORT WEST
32	QUEEN VICTORIA PROLIFERATION	A,1&2
33	IBADAT KHANA	D
34	SEED REPALEMENT RATES	C,2,3
35	ECO SENSITIVE ZONE	D
36	ANIMAL WELFARE,NTCA,NGRBA	B,2&3
37	VITAMIN C,D,E	A,1,2
38	NANOPARTICLES	D,1,2,3
39	WORLD ECONOMIC OUTLOOK	A,IMF
40	NON PLAN EXPDT	C,ALL
41	INTEREST RATE  DECREASE	C
42	PRESIDENT POWER	A,1ONLY
43	NO CONFIDENCE MOTION	B,2ONLY
44	NEEM TREE	D
45	PHOTOSYNTHESIS PROCESS	B
46	BIO METRIC IDENTIFICATION	d,all
47	VEGETATIVE PLANTS*	c,13
48	MESSENGER, VOYAGER	B,2,3
49	KINNAUR,MEWAT	d,none
50	CHEMICAL CHANGE	B ,3ONLY
51	POWER OF SUPREME COURT	C,ORIGINAL
52	BUDDING,GENESLICING	A
53	MAIZE RELATED	D,ALL
54	ORGANISM NOT BELONG TO THREE	A
55	NO. OF JUDGES	B,PARLIAMENT
56	SAREE	B
57	NATIONAL HIGHWAY	D,NONE
58	INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS	A,1,2
59	EARTH HOUR	C,2,3
60	FOOD CHAIN SEQUENCE*	a
61	SUSTAINABLE SUGAR CANE INITIATIVE	B,12,4
62	MOTREAUX RECORD	A
63	TEN DEGREE CHANNEL	A
64	DPAP,DDP,NWDP	D,NONE
65	BNHS	C,2,3
66	GLOBAL ENV FACILITY	D,BOTH
67	SOLAR CELL,PHOTOVOTAIC	A
68	KANNAD,TELGU	C,2,3
69	DAMPA,SARAMATI	C,1,3
70	WETLAND INTERNATIONAL	B,2 ONLY
71	BRICS	B,2ONLY
72	CHEKEN POX,SMALL POX*	B
73	EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM	C,BOTH
74	DOLPHINS IN GANGA	C,1,3,4
75	RADCLIFF COMMTT	C,INDO-PAK
76	BROMINATED FLAME RETARDANT	C,BOTH
77	HIBERNATION	C,ALL
78	LARGEST COMMITTEE	B,PAC
79	ADD CARBON DIOXIDE	C,1,2,4
80	WALK COUNTRY SIDE	B,MYNA
81	CORAL REEFS	A,1,2,3
82	SOIL ERROSION	B,2ONLY
83	SEASONAL REVERSAL	C,MONSOON
84	6 SYSTEM INDIAN PHILOSOPHY	C
85	MAHEDEO,MIKIR HILLS	C,3,4
86	ANTI DEFECTION	D,10TH SCHEDULE.
87	PANCHAYATAN	D
88	BARAK,LOHIT SUBANSIRI	B
89	HARIKE,KOLLERU WETLANDS	A,
90	CONSRVATION OF BIODIVERSITY	A
91	TURKEY	B,BLACK ,MEDITT
92	SOUTH EAST ASIA	C,3412
93	GLOBAL WARMING 3DEG	B,1,2
94	SATMAVA JAYATE	D,MUNDAK
95	INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY	B,DPSP
96	IWDP	C,134
97	PLANNING IN INDIA	C,25
98	CABINET SECRETARIATE	C
99	CONSTITUTIONAL GOVT	B
100	POWER OF GOVERNOR	B,1,3

uttarakhand pcs-2010 final result out

congratulations to all qualified student.
visit the result
http://ukpsc.gov.in/files/PCS_result.pdf

U.R. Ananthamurthy dead

Kannada writer and one of the most acclaimed public intellectuals in the country, U.R. Ananthamurthy passed away at a private hospital here on Friday. He was 82.

Dr. Ananthamurthy, a Jnanpith award winner, had a kidney ailment and had been on dialysis for a long time. He was put on ventilator on Thursday night.

Manipal Hospital director H. Sudarshan Ballal said Dr. Ananthamurthy’s condition worsened on Thursday night. “There was a sudden drop in his blood pressure around 6.30 p.m. on Friday following which his heart stopped functioning. Despite efforts by doctors to resuscitate him, he could not be revived,” he said.

Long illness had never come in the way of Dr. Ananthamurthy’s continued writing, critical thinking and public engagement. He had always been a critic of Hindutva politics and had incurred the wrath of the supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election for stating that he would not wish to live in a country with Mr. Modi at the helm. He was deeply influenced by Ram Manohar Lohia’s political movement.

Mr. Modi condoled the death, saying it is a loss to Kannada literature. “My condolences to his family. May his soul rest in peace,” he tweeted.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi said the void created by his demise in the Indian literary space and social conscience would be hard to fill.


He had a kidney ailment and had been on dialysis for

a long time

‘Elementary particles may be thought of as small black holes’

Ashoke Sen, String Theory expert from Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, is one of the three recipients of the Dirac Medal awarded by International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) this year. Professor Sen, who receives this prize for his work on black holes and symmetries of string theory, communicates his thoughts in an e-mail interview with Shubashree Desikan.

How do you feel on receiving this prize?

I certainly feel very honoured and happy to receive this prize. This prize is particularly important for me because this is given by ICTP which has played a significant role in the development of science in the developing countries. My own association with ICTP goes back to about 30 years.

Can you explain your work on symmetries of string theory?

My work on symmetries of string theory is on what is known as strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality.

A symmetry refers to a transformation under which an object looks the same. For example a square has 90 degrees rotational symmetry; if we rotate it by 90 degrees about its centre, it looks the same. Before my work, it had been suspected for a while by a few people (Montonen and Olive; Osborn; Duff and his collaborators; Font, Quevedo, Lust and Rey; myself; Schwarz and others) that string theory, and its close cousin, quantum field theories, had some unusual symmetries which are not easily visible. However because such symmetries were not easily visible, it was hard to decide if they are really there, and very few people took this idea seriously.

In my work in 1994, I showed how one can do concrete calculations to test whether such symmetries are really there and I worked out an explicit example which gave non-trivial evidence for such a symmetry. Later this technique was used in many other cases, and led to the discovery of many such symmetries. Eventually based on these results string theorists came to realise that what people thought earlier as different theories are all different ways of describing the same underlying theory. This unified all string theories into one theory.

The citation also mentions your work on black holes, what was this work?

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

Normally we think of elementary particles as tiny objects. On the other hand, black holes can come in all sizes but normally we think of them as big objects from which even light cannot escape. My work indicated that if we consider smaller and smaller black holes, at some stage the properties of black holes become indistinguishable from those of elementary particles. Thus elementary particles may be thought of as small black holes and vice versa.

This work was preceded and followed by many important developments. The suggestion that black holes may behave like elementary particles had been there before my work — notably by 't Hooft and a little later by Susskind and his collaborators. But the calculations based on black holes and elementary particles did not match, [People] attributed it to the fact that the calculations for black holes were not reliable when the black holes are small.

As a result one could neither verify nor refute their proposal reliably. My contribution (in 1995) was to identify a specific system with large amount of symmetry that allowed us to do this calculation reliably. The results from black holes indeed matched those of the elementary particles in that system, giving concrete evidence that small black holes indeed describe elementary particles.

But string theory often faces a lot of flak as being a theory that can never be probed by experiment. So what is the justification for studying it?

String theory tries to give a unified description of all particles and forces operating between them.

One of the main successes of string theory is that it has been able to unify the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics.

Unfortunately a direct test of string theory requires colliding extremely high energy particles and observing the result of this collision. It is impossible to achieve this with present technology.

This problem is not unique to string theory.

Any direct experimental test of quantum nature of gravity will require such high energy collisions. Given that such energies are not available today, we have two choices: either give up attempts to find a quantum theory of gravity or try to use existing knowledge to do the best we can. String theory follows the second path.

Requiring that the theory is mathematically consistent has led to many new results in mathematics. Without these mathematical relations, string theory would fail to be a consistent theory.

But so far all such new relations found in string theory have proved to be correct, providing further evidence for the underlying consistency of the theory.

Learning from NREGA

Corruption in NREGA works has steadily declined in recent years. There are important lessons here that need to be extended to other domains

One neglected aspect of the debate on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) relates to the process aspects of the programme. In the process of planning works, organising employment, paying wages or fighting corruption, many valuable activities take place: Gram Sabhas are held, workers agitate for their rights, social audits are conducted, technical assistants are trained, administrators find out how to speed up wage payments, and so on. These activities, aside from being valuable in themselves, are also a great opportunity to learn.

Prevention of corruption
One productive area of learning has been the prevention of corruption. The principal method of embezzlement in labour-intensive public works programmes is well known: muster rolls are inflated and middlemen pocket the difference. Before the Right to Information Act (RTI) came into force, muster rolls were beyond public scrutiny and the crooks had a field day. Things improved after muster rolls were placed in the public domain, and even displayed page by page on the internet. Even then, an enterprising middleman might fudge the muster rolls and hope that no one will bother to verify them. So, further safeguards were introduced one by one including mandatory social audits of all NREGA works.

A major breakthrough was the transition to bank (or post office) payments of NREGA wages. This was a painful affair — the system was not ready for it and the overload led to long delays in payments. Five years later, banks and (especially) post offices are still not equal to the task. For the prevention of corruption, however, this was a step forward: the new system makes it much harder to embezzle NREGA funds since the money now goes directly to workers’ accounts.

One major qualification is that village post offices are still vulnerable to capture by powerful middlemen. Extracting money from someone else’s bank account without his or her knowledge is very difficult because banks have strict norms of identity verification. But for a suitable commission, a village postmaster can often be persuaded to use the accounts of illiterate workers as a conduit to siphon off NREGA money. Over time, workers learn to collect their wages in person from the post office and verify the passbook entries. But it will take a while for many of them to protect their account from fraud. And the crook’s next refuge is to involve workers themselves in the scam.

How much progress has been made in this step-by-step battle against corruption? The second India Human Development Survey (IHDS) conducted in 2011-12 provides a tentative answer. Early tabulations of IHDS data, kindly shared by project director Sonalde Desai, suggest that 25 per cent of all rural households did some NREGA work in 2011-12. The average number of days of NREGA work was 49 per employed households, or 2.53 days per person for the whole sample. Multiplying this by the rural population total from the 2011 census yields an estimate of 210 crore person-days of NREGA employment in 2011-12. This compares with 219 crore person-days of employment being generated by NREGA in 2011-12 according to the Ministry of Rural Development. In other words, the bulk of official NREGA wage expenditure is fully reflected in this independent household survey.

Survey findings
One survey is not conclusive evidence, but it certainly gives some reason for hope. The IHDS findings are consistent with those of another recent survey: the Public Evaluation of Entitlement Programmes (PEEP) survey. This was a relatively small survey (covering about 2,000 households), conducted in May-June 2013 in ten States: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. In this survey, too, the number of days of NREGA work reported by the respondents (22 days on average, in 2012-13) was very close to the corresponding average for the same households (24 days) from official records.

The picture emerging from National Sample Survey (NSS) data is a little different. According to recent estimates by Clément Imbert of Oxford University, 68 to 78 per cent of official NREGA person-days of work are reflected in NSS data for 2011-12. The corresponding estimates for 2007-08 (prior to the introduction of bank payments of NREGA wages) are much lower: 42 to 56 per cent. Thus, NSS-based estimates of NREGA employment are consistently lower than the official figures, but the gap is narrowing over time. I suspect that the IHDS figures on NREGA employment are more accurate than NSS data because the collection of social statistics is one of the primary objectives of the IHDS survey, but not of NSS surveys. There are precedents of patchy collection of social statistics in NSS surveys, e.g. gross underestimation of the coverage of midday meals.

The good news is that each of these three surveys points to a sharp reduction in the extent of embezzlement of NREGA funds in recent years, at least in the wage component of the programme. However, it is not clear whether this also applies to the material component. Preventing an entrepreneur from submitting an inflated bill for materials is much harder than preventing fake muster roll entries. This problem, of course, is not specific to NREGA — it is endemic in the entire construction sector. This is one reason why the corporate sector loves government-sponsored “infrastructure” projects: there is plenty of scope for padding the costs.

Productive value of NREGA
This point has a bearing on recent concerns about the productive value of NREGA works. There is a widespread belief that NREGA works can be made more productive by raising the material-labour ratio, because material-intensive works lead to the creation of tangible assets instead of earth structures that get washed away. This belief has no basis. It is all the more dubious, bearing in mind that material-intensive works are more vulnerable to corruption. Thousands of useless pucca structures have been built under programmes such as the Integrated Action Plan (IAP), Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF) and Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) — more for the purpose of siphoning off material funds than to create productive assets. On the other hand, some labour-intensive works can be very productive, e.g. land levelling and contour bunding. Even a good earth road is often much better than a pucca road built with sub-standard material by a corrupt contractor. Judging from recent experience, there is nothing wrong with the current 60:40 norm for the labour-material ratio in NREGA works. Lowering the norm to 49:51 (an odd figure, perhaps borrowed from the stock market) would severely dilute the employment objective of NREGA without doing anything to make NREGA works more productive. A far better way of enhancing the productive value of NREGA works would be to provide more technical assistance to Gram Panchayats.

Much remains to be done to ensure that NREGA is corruption-proof — not just the wage component but also the material component. Meanwhile, the transparency safeguards that have been painstakingly built into NREGA are crying to be extended to other domains. In this and other respects, the programme is a great learning tool. This process aspect of NREGA deserves more recognition than it has received so far.