The Treaty of Versailles and World War I had significant and interrelated effects on Germany. Here are some of the common effects:

1. Economic Burdens:
   • The Treaty of Versailles imposed heavy financial reparations on Germany, requiring it to pay substantial sums in war damages to the Allied powers.
   • This crippled the German economy, leading to hyperinflation, high unemployment, and widespread economic hardship, which were further exacerbated by the aftermath of World War I.
2. Territorial Losses:
   • The Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of significant territories, including Alsace-Lorraine, which was ceded to France, and parts of West Prussia and Posen, which were given to the newly formed Poland.
   • These territorial losses reduced Germany’s industrial and agricultural capacity, weakening its economic and military power.
3. Military Restrictions:
   • The Treaty of Versailles severely limited Germany’s military capabilities, including the reduction of its armed forces, the prohibition of certain weapons, and the demilitarization of the Rhineland.
   • These restrictions undermined Germany’s ability to defend itself and project power, leaving it vulnerable to external threats.
4. National Resentment and Nationalist Sentiment:
   • The harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which many Germans perceived as unfair and humiliating, fueled a deep sense of resentment and nationalism within the German population.
   • This resentment contributed to the rise of extreme nationalist movements, such as the Nazi Party, which ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II.
5. Political Instability and the Weimar Republic:
   • The aftermath of World War I and the burdens imposed by the Treaty of Versailles weakened the Weimar Republic, the democratic government established in Germany after the war.
   • This political instability created an environment conducive to the rise of authoritarian and extremist movements, further exacerbating the challenges faced by Germany in the interwar period.
6. Threat to National Pride and Identity:
   • The territorial losses, military restrictions, and economic burdens imposed on Germany through the Treaty of Versailles struck at the heart of the country’s national pride and identity.
   • This sense of humiliation and loss of status contributed to the German public’s receptiveness to the nationalist and revanchist rhetoric of the Nazi Party.

Advancements in AI and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies present significant opportunities to enhance productivity and sustainability in the agricultural sector, particularly for smallholder farmers in India. Here are some ways technology missions in agriculture can leverage these advancements:

1. Precision Agriculture:
   • AI-powered analytics and IoT-enabled sensor networks can help smallholder farmers optimize resource usage, such as water, fertilizers, and pesticides, by providing real-time data on soil conditions, crop health, and environmental factors.
   • This precision agriculture approach can increase yields, reduce input costs, and minimize environmental impact, leading to improved productivity and sustainability.
2. Automated Decision Support Systems:
   • AI-based decision support systems can analyze vast amounts of data, including weather patterns, crop performance, market trends, and pest/disease forecasts, to provide smallholder farmers with personalized recommendations for planting, irrigation, pest management, and harvesting.
   • This can help farmers make more informed decisions, leading to better resource management and increased resilience to climate variability.
3. Remote Monitoring and Early Warning Systems:
   • IoT-enabled sensors and satellite imagery can be used to remotely monitor crop health, soil moisture, and other environmental factors, allowing for early detection of issues and timely intervention.
   • This can help smallholder farmers proactively address challenges, such as pests, diseases, and extreme weather events, thereby improving crop yields and reducing losses.
4. Knowledge Dissemination and Capacity Building:
   • Technology missions can leverage AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and mobile applications to provide smallholder farmers with easy access to educational resources, best practices, and real-time market information.
   • This can enhance the knowledge and decision-making capabilities of farmers, empowering them to adopt more sustainable and productive farming techniques.
5. Equitable Access and Inclusive Deployment:
   • Technology missions should prioritize the development of affordable and user-friendly AI and IoT-based solutions that are accessible to smallholder farmers, regardless of their economic or technological literacy.
   • This can involve partnerships with local communities, non-governmental organizations, and government agencies to ensure equitable access and provide training and support to smallholder farmers.
6. Blockchain-based Traceability and Supply Chain Optimization:
   • Integrating blockchain technology with AI and IoT can enable transparent and secure traceability of agricultural products, helping smallholder farmers access premium markets and ensure fair prices for their produce.
   • Furthermore, AI-powered supply chain optimization can improve logistics, reduce post-harvest losses, and connect smallholder farmers to wider markets, enhancing their overall economic sustainability.

In recent years, India has enjoyed consistently high rates of growth. However, the country faces a critical challenge of high growth accompanied by persistent poverty and inequality. The Human Development Index (HDI) of India, which is a composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, is ranked 129th out of 189 countries in 2019. According to this index, Inequality and deprivation continue to be high in the country.

Consistent High Economic Growth And Lower Human Development Indicators

1. India’s economic growth post liberalisation remained high. In the last decade, GDP growth rate remained more than 5% reaching up to 11% in 2010.
2. With an approximately $2.9 trillion economy, India is one of the largest economies of the world.
3. Despite these economic achievements, India is home to 28 per cent of the 1.3 billion multidimensional poor in the world.
4. India ranked 94 among 107 countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2020 and continues to be in the “serious” hunger category.
5. In gender inequality, India has a GII value of 0.501, ranking it 122 out of 162 countries in the 2018 index. The decline in women’s labour force participation from 31% to 24% means that India is among the countries with the lowest.
6. Only 39 per cent of adult women have reached at least a secondary level of education compared to 63.5 percent of their male counterparts.

Issues In Achieving Balanced And Inclusive Development

Economic Issues

Jobless growth and disguised employment: India created fewer jobs as compared to economic growth. Similarly, more than 40% of the workforce is employed in the agriculture sector with a GDP contribution of merely 16%. Such a huge workforce engaged in agriculture makes it disguised employment.

1. Unequal Distribution of Wealth: India’s richest 1% of the population hold 42.5% of national wealth while the bottom 50%, the majority of the population, owns a mere 2.8%. Such huge inequality leads to poor human development.

Social Issues

1. Casteism is a historic and cultural issue plaguing Indian society, which leads to social exclusion and pushes communities such as Dalit and Adivasis into the vicious cycle of poverty.
2. Gender inequality is also another social menace affecting the social and economic growth of India. Defined gender roles and gender-based discrimination affect the health and education of women.

Poor Education And Health

1. The commercialisation of education and declining quality of education in public schools produce an unemployable and unskilled workforce.
2. Due to huge inequality and resource scarcity, access to quality health and education services becomes unaffordable for a large part of the population.
3. India is home to one of the largest number of malnourished children in the world and 50% of the Indian women are anaemic. Such poor health conditions affect the ultimate productivity and trap people in poverty.

Political Issues

1. Indian politicians resort to Communal politics rather than a development agenda. Corruption and diversion of public money towards political gains rather than public welfare is a huge issue.
2. Due to the lack of political will in critical aspects such as agriculture and migrant workers issues, we are not able to trickle-down economic growth to all the sections of the society.
3. Passage of important bills such as the labour code bill is also pending due to misplaced political priorities.

Way Forward

1. Development initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (for financial inclusion) and Ayushman Bharat (for universal health-care) are crucial in ensuring inclusive growth with improvements in human development.
2. A recent initiative to implement One Nation One Ration is also going to help in the elimination of hunger and malnourishment.
3. Strategy planned under IndiaYash Thakur for inclusive growth, school and higher education, and universal health coverage, etc must be implemented on a mission mode.
4. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, such as zero hunger, no poverty and gender equality with inclusive and sustainable growth, India should play the role of a welfare state in letter and spirit.

Ayushman Bharat, a flagship scheme of the Government of India, was launched as recommended by the National Health Policy 2017, to achieve the vision of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). This initiative has been designed to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and its underlying commitment, which is to “leave no one behind.”

Features Of Ayushman Bharat

Ayushman Bharat adopts a continuum of care approach, comprising of two interrelated components, which are

1. Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) : 1,50,000 Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) by transforming the existing sub-centres and Primary Health Centres. These centres are to deliver Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC) bringing healthcare closer to the homes of people. They cover both, maternal and child health services and non-communicable diseases, including free essential drugs and diagnostic services. 2.
2. Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY): This is the largest health assurance scheme in the world which aims at providing a health cover of Rs. 5 lakhs per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization to over 10.74 crores poor and vulnerable families (approximately 50 crore beneficiaries) that form the bottom 40% of the Indian population. PMJAY is fully funded by the Government and the cost of implementation is shared between the Central and State Governments.
3. National Health Authority (NHA) : The apex body responsible for implementing the scheme at the national level. To implement the scheme at the State level, State Health Agencies (SHAs) in the form of a society/trust have been set up by respective States. SHAs have full operational autonomy over the implementation of the scheme in the State including extending the coverage to non-SECC beneficiaries.

Critical Evaluation

1. Underspending: As per Govt., more than 10 crore e-cards (for health insurance) were issued, and Rs 7,490 crore worth of treatments pre-authorized in just 365 days. But this amounts to just over Rs 16,000 per person: much lower than the Rs 5 lakh limit per family under this program.
2. The shift of burden: The health insurance scheme is helping millions reduce their expenditure on health. But the burden has not been lifted. Instead, it has shifted to the Indian government’s shoulders, which is already facing challenges in meeting the needs of the population.
3. Not hitting the root of the problem: Govt. is spending only 1.15% of the gross domestic product or GDP (with plans to increase this to 2.5% of GDP by 2025) on health and most of it is for curative services as compared to preventive services.
4. Increased burden on private hospitals: Despite the HWCs including non-communicable diseases in comprehensive care, the loopholes in the basic infrastructure and services in HWCs have remained almost the same. This will increase the burden on public hospitals and super-speciality clinics and also force the poor to opt for private services, which after a point, aren’t affordable for them.
5. States participation and underpricing issues: The rates set for different procedures under Ayushman Bharat are low. This might eventually reduce the quality of services provided or even make them unviable for hospitals. Looking at this scenario, states such as Odisha, Delhi, Telangana, Kerala, and Punjab have opted out of the program.
6. Fraudulent cases: A program this large has much room for fraud. India’s poor artificial intelligence or AI-based monitoring has encouraged fraud from families who forge papers of adoption or relationship with the beneficiaries.
7. Exclusion: Ayushman Bharat does not at this time cover the middle-income section of society. Huge or unexpected medical expenditures can push these families below the poverty line.
8. Transparency issues: Even after a year, the cost revisions in PM-JAY for package procedures, for example, an angioplasty, or a knee replacement have not been made public
9. Out of pocket expenditures: Patients still have to spend a lot from their pocket. In many cases, they have to get diagnostic services, drugs, and implants from outside as they are often not available in the hospitals.

Way Ahead

1. Innovate ways to reduce the cost of diagnosis and diagnostics.
2. To have a ‘technological solution’ to measure and track the quality of healthcare.
3. Maximizing beneficiary awareness.
4. Enhance the quality and security of data.
5. Reduce infection rates at hospitals.
6. Build and maximize the capacities of the health workforce.
7. Develop robust and real-time fraud detection systems.

Ayushman Bharat has put India on an irreversible path towards universal healthcare. The scheme will keep evolving, taking into account the experience of evidence generated from its implementation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the first year of the scheme has been one of Sankalp (action), samarpan (devotion), and seekh (learning). Given the highest level of political support for these reforms, failure is not an option.

India is now entering the final stages of demographic transition, with the country nearing replacement -level fertility. Of late, the demographic scenario in India has been viewed more optimistically as compared with the widespread anguish that was evident a few decades earlier; the changing India’s demographic structure includes the following change in dimensions.

Changing Demographics Structure

1. The demographic transition pattern that denotes the change that countries undergo from a regime of high fertility and high mortality to one of low fertility and low mortality help to analyse the demographic structure of any country vividly. As this phenomenon tends to occur in an asynchronous fashion, with death rates declining first and birth rates following later, countries often experience a transitional period of rapid population growth as indicated in birth and death rate.
2. Birth rate as per TFR variations: India has recorded a growth rate of 1.6% per year during the 2001–2011 census periods, adding around 181 million people to the total during the decade. Although the UNPD projection assumes India will achieve replacement-level fertility [total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1] around 2040.
3. Death as per infant, maternal deaths: There has been an acceleration in the rate of decline in mortality since independence in 1947. The crude death rate is as low as around 8 per 1000 population by 2010–2015 and is expected to go up in the future because of age structure changes. The infant mortality rate (IMR) remains high in India at around 50 per 1000 live births as of 2009. From an estimated level of around 200 to 225 infant deaths per 1000 live births at the time of India‘s independence in 1947, IMR has declined to about 80 during 1990– 1992, which is a decline of around 1.4% per year.
4. Migration: As a result of outmigration, the population density of the place of origin is reduced, and the birth rate decreases. Similarly, emigration in large numbers can alter demographic profiles of communities, as most of the young men move out, leaving only the women and the elderly to work on the land. The demographic heterogeneity is also leading to huge inter-state migration. There has been a relatively large inflow of migrants from the northern belt having a high fertility rate to the southern region with below replacement level of fertility, particularly in unskilled occupation.

Impact Of Demographic Change On Social Advancement And Development

1. Male marriage squeeze: A shortage of women implies a male marriage squeeze. When fertility declines rapidly and is accompanied by female-biased sex selection, a far lesser number of women are born and enter the “marriage market”. The “shortage of brides” has become one of the most significant negative impacts of the sex ratio imbalance. Due to this shortage, there is a switch from endogamy to exogamy as endogamous marriages restrict and limit the choice of the people to choose their life partner.
2. Inclusive development for old age: The share of the population over the age of 60 is projected to increase from 8 percent to nearly 20 percent in 2050. Fulfilling needs for services and social protection for senior citizens, protection of their rights, and enabling them to contribute to the development process has now become priorities for India.
3. Fertility: There is migration from rural to urban and it is observed that migrants had a 14 percent higher and a 16 percent lower fertility when compared, respectively, to the urban and rural standards. There is a necessity of creating smart villages wherein fertility is high.
4. North-south divide: Indian population is growing much faster in the north compared to the south causing adverse scenarios. The southern region has fertility rates lower than the replacement rate, meaning that fewer babies are being born than the number of people dying – a trend that would eventually result in a declining population. The north with Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – two states that together make up a quarter of India‘s population recording very high fertility rates of 2.74 and 3.41, respectively.
5. The economic growth: Brought about by increased economic activities due to a higher working-age population and lower dependent population that will be manifested as :

1. The rise in women’s workforce that naturally accompanies a decline in fertility, and which can be a new source of growth.
2. The feminisation of labour owing to the rural out-migration trend and changed demographic profile.
3. A massive shift towards a middle-class society, that is, the rise of the aspirational class.
4. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation because of a higher number of employment seeking population that would force higher economic.

India’s demographic pattern generates broad optimism but also strange paradoxes. It creates an unbalanced economic growth pattern and recent experiences show the potential for larger migration of unskilled labourers from north to demographically advanced southern states. Therefore, further enhancement of demographic advantage depends upon the faster demographic changes in these states. At the same time, the demographic changes provide other major challenges to the nation. It is important that the government and the people at large pledge themselves to take care of these emanating challenges. India is on the right side of a demographic structure that provides a golden opportunity for its rapid socio-economic development if policymakers align the developmental policies with this demographic shift.