In India, the dissolution of the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) and state legislative assemblies is governed by specific provisions in the Constitution, aimed at ensuring democratic governance and political stability. Here’s an analysis of these provisions, the circumstances under which dissolution can occur, the implications for the political system, and a comparison with mechanisms in other parliamentary democracies:

Dissolution of the Lok Sabha (Parliament):
Circumstances for Dissolution:

Completion of Term: The Lok Sabha has a maximum term of five years from the date of its first meeting. It automatically dissolves at the end of this term, unless dissolved earlier.
Early Dissolution: The President can dissolve the Lok Sabha before the completion of its term if advised by the Prime Minister, usually when the government loses majority support in the house and cannot prove its majority.
Implications for the Political System:

Elections: Upon dissolution, elections must be held within six months to constitute a new Lok Sabha.
Political Stability: Dissolution can lead to political uncertainty and realignment of political alliances. It tests the strength of political parties and the government’s mandate.
Role of the President:

Discretionary Power: The President has discretion in deciding whether to dissolve the Lok Sabha based on the advice of the Council of Ministers led by the Prime Minister.
Constitutional Safeguards: The President ensures that dissolution is in accordance with constitutional provisions and political conventions.
Dissolution of State Legislative Assemblies:
Similar Provisions:

State legislative assemblies also have a maximum term of five years, unless dissolved earlier.
Governors have similar discretionary powers as the President to dissolve state assemblies based on the advice of the Chief Minister or Council of Ministers.
Implications and Role of Governors:

Governor’s Discretion: Governors play a crucial role in state assemblies’ dissolution, ensuring it aligns with constitutional provisions and political conventions.
Elections: Elections to state assemblies must be conducted within six months of dissolution to constitute a new assembly.
Comparison with Other Parliamentary Democracies:
United Kingdom:

Dissolution Mechanism: The UK Parliament can be dissolved either automatically at the end of a fixed term (five years) or earlier by the Prime Minister’s request to the monarch.
Role of Monarch: The monarch’s role is largely ceremonial in dissolving Parliament, following constitutional conventions.
Canada:

Dissolution Mechanism: The Canadian Parliament can be dissolved by the Governor General (representing the monarch) on the advice of the Prime Minister.
Fixed Terms: Parliament has fixed four-year terms, but elections can be called earlier through dissolution.
Australia:

Dissolution Mechanism: Similar to Canada, the Australian Parliament can be dissolved by the Governor General on the advice of the Prime Minister.
Fixed Terms: Parliament has fixed three-year terms, but elections can be called earlier through dissolution.
Conclusion:
The provisions for the dissolution of the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies in India ensure periodic renewal of democratic mandates while maintaining stability. The roles of the President and state governors in these processes are pivotal in upholding constitutional norms and ensuring democratic governance. Compared to other parliamentary democracies like the UK, Canada, and Australia, India’s mechanisms share similarities in terms of executive discretion in dissolution but differ in terms of specific constitutional provisions and political conventions. Each country adapts these mechanisms to its unique constitutional framework and historical context, reflecting the diverse practices within parliamentary democracies worldwide.

Answer: The National Programme of Mid-Day Meals (MDM) in schools is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) of the Ministry of Education, aimed at providing meals to students with a view to enhance enrolment, retention and attendance of children while simultaneously improving nutrition at all levels. It is the world’s largest school feeding programme, as the children covered under the MDM scheme are entitled to meals under the National Food Security Act, 2013. Apart from increasing enrolment, as per the government data, in the year 2018-2019, the MDM scheme served about 9.17 crore children in 11.35 lakh schools across the country before it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, India has recently slipped to 101st position (out of 116 countries) in the Global Hunger Index, 2021, from its earlier position of 94th (Global Hunger Index, 2020). As per the data released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, over 33 lakh children in India are malnourished and more than half of them fall in the ‘severely malnourished’ category. These highlight the ineffectiveness of the MDM scheme. Various reasons for the ineffectiveness of the MDM scheme are:

• Poor infrastructure: The MDM scheme suffers with respect to inadequate infrastructure in terms of cooking shed, water supply, utensils etc.
• Corruption and leakages: The CAG’s performance audit report of the MDM, 2015, found financial mismanagement by the then HRD ministry, diversion of funds by states and fake enrolments.
• Social discrimination: A study by the Institute of Dalit Studies in UP, Bihar, West Bengal, e.tc, found that social discrimination was prevalent in several schools on the basis of caste while preparing and serving food to students.
• Meagre allocation of resources: Salary of cooks and helpers is too low to incentivize them for proper implementation of the scheme.
• Quality of food: There have been reports that children were fed substandard or adulterated food leading to food poisoning at times.
• Inadequate monitoring: There are provisions for regular social audit, field visits and inspections but these are seldom carried out. Further, field visit reports are not available after FY14 and monitoring institutions’ reports are not available after FY15.

Remedial measures required to make the MDM more effective include the following:

• The government needs to establish a system to ascertain that the guidelines related to stipulated nutritional requirements in the meals are followed.
• There is a need to narrow the gap between enrolments versus actual number of children availing the MDM scheme.
• Monitoring and supervision mechanisms should be implemented effectively. The state government needs to strengthen the internal controls at all levels by building proper data systems to track the scheme.
• Quality of cooked food served needs to be enhanced through periodic training of cooks-cum- helpers on aspects of hygiene and health. In this context, Self-Help Groups can be roped in to ensure quality standards.

A comprehensive, periodical and systematic orientation is pertinent to sensitize all stakeholders including policy makers, implementers, teachers, central level officials and community members to make this scheme successful.

Answer: The government has undertaken various initiatives such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Right To Education Act, 2009, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme, Swachh Vidyalaya campaign, Swayam Prabha TV channel, Mid-Day Meal scheme, Samagra Shiksha programme etc. These initiatives have led to the attainment of various goals in the education sector, including:

• Universal enrolment has been achieved at the primary level.
• The annual average dropout rate at the primary level has come down from 9.11% in 2009-10 to only 1.5% in 2019-2020.
• The number of out-of-school children has shown significant reduction in the 6-14 years age group, from 134.6 lakh in 2005 to 35 lakh approximately in 2021.
• As of 2019-20, 97.5% of schools in India had established facilities for safe drinking water on the school premises, a substantial increase from 59% in 2017-18.
• About 95% of schools have functional toilet facilities on the premises.
• A remarkable improvement is seen from only 54.6% of schools with electricity in 2012-13 to 83.4% in 2019-20.
• Nearly 85% of schools have designated rooms for libraries and readings.

However, the education sector is still reeling from learning poverty. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, about 53% of children were not able to read a simple text by the age of 10, unfortunately, due to the pandemic, this has shot up to 70%. Further, there are persisting inequalities in the education system. For example, students from SC/ST backgrounds have had a higher dropout rate, the percentage of women who have completed at least ten or more years of schooling remains abysmally low at 41% as against 50.2% for men and only around 38.5% of schools in India having functional computers with mere 22.18% having internet access despite steep improvements. Thus, interventions are required to tackle the various issues plaguing the education sector in India: Learning poverty:

• Ensure clear goals and measures for literacy: National goals should be set with an understanding of how students are currently doing, and accordingly, achievable goals and interventions should be developed.
• Ensure effective teaching for literacy: Teachers need to be supported with learning materials and guides that have a step-wise plan, which strongly emphasize practicing specific-classroom skills.
• Teach children first in their local language: Students who are taught in their mother tongue in the early years have higher comprehension skills, thereby improving learning abilities in the future.
• Improve monitoring and accountability: State governments should develop and formulate robust mechanisms to enforce regulations on teachers’ qualifications, teacher absenteeism and learning outcomes.
• Individualized tracking: An electronic national educational registry for tracking each child’s learning outcomes will help monitor students requiring remediation, special attention as well as those who drop out after the elementary education level.

Persisting inequalities:

• Micro-planning by targeting an area: Contextualized strategies to promote distance learning are needed to ensure that the most marginalized children do not drop out.
• Adopting Minimum Levels of Learning (MLoL) framework: This will involve setting MLoL for all students with clear guidelines on the role of the teachers and the curriculum.
• Sensitisation and training of teachers: These are required as their attitude and competence directly determine the school experience of students, especially those from the marginalized sections.
• Reducing the digital divide: There should be an increase in access to technology through free or subsidized data for educational purposes and existing learning applications should be customized to work on slower internet connections.

Accessible and affordable education should be the priority of the government, since education directly impacts other issues such as poverty, inequality, low economic growth etc.

Answer: Social accountability has been defined as an approach in which ordinary citizens and citizen groups participate directly or indirectly in exacting accountability. In a public sector context, social accountability refers to a wide range of actions and mechanisms that citizens, communities, independent media and civil society organizations can use to hold public officials accountable. Challenges and vulnerabilities associated with social accountability initiatives

• Resistance to reform: Since Social Accountability initiatives upset the vested interests who have an incentive to maintain the status quo, there is much resistance to reform.
• Risk of collusion: There is always a risk of collusion between various actors in the form of false claims regarding conducting such initiatives, data manipulation, deliberate dereliction of duties etc.
• Co-option: Often times citizens, especially powerful members of the community, are themselves co-opted by those from whom accountability is demanded, resulting in citizens not speaking up against corruption, and refusing to co-operate in Social Accountability efforts.
• Disruption by powerful vested interests: Citizens engaged in Social Accountability initiatives risk being threatened by those who have benefitted from the lack of accountability. Thereby, making them hesitant in participating and speaking up.
• Lack of support from government agencies: Citizens are expected to challenge entrenched power dynamics and take risk but support from the government in case of any collective action is abysmal.
• Lack of effective grievance redressal: Timely, strict and unfailing follow-up action on Social Accountability findings through effective grievance redressal mechanisms is not done.

Policy measures required to institutionalize these initiatives

• Decentralization: For each scheme, a detailed activity mapping exercise should be carried out, following the “principle of subsidiarity.”
• Information and awareness: Compliance with Section 4 of RTI Act must be strictly enforced for proactive disclosure. Moreover, every scheme must have a comprehensively thought out information dissemination policy and a well maintained website to ensure citizen’s awareness.
• Capacity building and community mobilization: There should be a detailed training strategy for the officials, as well as citizens who are assigned roles in the initiatives.
• Grievance redressal: A clear procedure for grievance redressal should be established with strict timelines, 24×7 helplines at district level and facility to register grievances and track redressals online.
• Making social accountability mandatory: Every scheme document should include social accountability initiative mandatorily, along with specification about which social accountability tools should be used, and the guidelines for them as well.
• Assessment of social accountability: Periodic assessment must be undertaken. Independent assessors from the civil society must be made part of the assessment team.

Evidence from around the world suggests that social accountability mechanisms can contribute to improved governance, increased development effectiveness through better service delivery, and citizen empowerment. Thus, aforementioned measures should be undertaken in a fast-paced manner to reap the benefits of institutionalizing these initiatives.

Answer:
Space exploration is motivated by scientific curiosity and discovery. In recent years, space exploration has been scaled up through government agencies as well as through private companies and commercial space exploration looks like an immediate possibility.
However, commercial space exploration has various ethical implications, such as:

• Consequentialism: Space exploration would require a lot of resources and the outcome of such commercial space exploration is still not established. The resources could have been used for human development and welfare of the Earth.
• Uneven distribution of benefits: Benefits of space exploration and development will be accrued to those countries that have the resources to finance such commercial space exploration and underdeveloped and poor countries will remain behind in accessing resources and getting benefits in this regard.
• Space privatization: Privatization of space exploration might result in the polarization of space research and formation of an oligopoly in space. Instead of being industry-wide, growth can become lop-sided and biased. Also, absence of a government which provides a firm sense of accountability for space projects might be detrimental.
• Ecocide in outer space: Ecocide means mass damage and destruction of an ecosystem which is widespread, severe or systematic. Deliberate release of space debris and human activities will lead to damage, which will impact the future generations and their prospects of life on Earth.
  • It might lead to contamination of other terrestrial bodies with biomatter from the Earth and vice-versa. The results of such contamination are still unknown.
• Policy and legal issues: As outer space becomes commercialized and crowded, the current multilateral framework may become obsolete and can lead to disputes and issues of emerging nature.

However, commercial exploration must also be assessed in the light of economic endeavours, profits and proliferation of the industry. It will enhance innovation and advancement of scientific research and technology, which will potentially improve the quality of life. In the light of prospective benefits and ethical issues, mankind has to decide on the future of space exploration by drawing a balance between benefits to be accrued from it and its harmful consequences.