PGDBA 2017 Question Paper

In each of the questions a word has been used in sentences in four different ways. Choose the option corresponding to the sentence in which the usage of the word is incorrect or inappropriate

For the following questions answer them individually

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow:
Passage I
There arc two main kinds of development agency: the one which trace to introduce specific changes and is mainly interested in material development: and the other which is primarily interested in people. On the whole the first wants to "get things done"; the other to develop the people's own abilities for leadership, wise judgement and co-oprative action. For agencies of the second kind, the material result is less important than the way it is achieved.

Agencies and workers, who themselves decide the specific form development should take, assume, of course, that they know better than the people what the people need. Most social development workers and technical officers have worked on this assumption in the past, and although they were often right they were not always right, for they sometimes made the mistake of assuming that what was good within their own culture was certain to be good in other cultures too. Missionaries, for instance, insisted on their converts wearing clothes because they were used to them themselves, and they established schools with syllabuses that suited the missionaries' own countries, rather than the countries where the schools were built.
Agencies and their workers tend to be more careful nowadays, but experts and specialists trained in Western ways still often make mistakes in cultures other than their own. Agencies everywhere are now realizing that they are risking failure if they assume that their own ideas are right in environments and cultures other than their own. The East African Groundnut Scheme failed because it did not take the local conditions of soil and climate sufficiently into account. The West African Anchau Rural Development Scheme illustrates, less spectacularly, the result of failing to consider the human factor when working in a different culture.

This Scheme was started in 1937 to eradicate sleeping sickness from a part of the Zaria province of the Northern Region of Nigeria. The people in charge made a detailed survey of the area, made detailed studies of the farming conditions in sample hamlets and made a careful census of the people. Indeed, they scientifically examined in minute detail every aspect of the situation that seemed to them important. But it failed because people were thought of as being there "to be done good to" in the mass, but they were not envisaged as persons, each with one's own small world of hopes and fears, who might in some way be consulted.

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow:
Passage II

Humans are pretty inventive creatures. That might be cause for optimism about the future of global change. We've found solutions to lots of problems in the past. And with a much larger and better-educated population than the world has ever seen — the supply of good ideas can only increase. So innovation will figure out a way to sustainable futures.

But what is innovation? The media and companies routinely equate innovation with shiny new gadgets. In the same spirit, politicians charged with managing economies frequently talk as if all innovation is good. The history of almost any technology, however — from farming to applied nuclear physics — reveals a mixture of good and bad.

The study of the concept of innovation, and of whether it can be steered, is a relatively recent academic effort. There are three ways that scholars have thought about innovation. The first was basically linear: science begets invention that begets innovation. Physics, for instance, gives us lasers, which give us —eventually — compact discs. Result: Growth! Prosperity! Rising living standards for all! From this perspective, it's assumed that science is the basis for long-term growth, and that innovation largely involves commercialisation of scientific discoveries. There is a role for the state, but only in funding the research. The rest can be left to the private sector.

By the 1970s, economists interested in technology and some policy-makers were talking about something more complicated: national systems of innovation competing with each other. Such "systems" included measures to promote transfer of technology out of the lab, especially by building links between centres of discovery and technologists and entrepreneurs.
The key failing of these two approaches is that they treat less desirable outcomes of innovation as externalities and are blind to the possibility that they may call for radically different technological priorities. The environmental effects of energy and materials-intensive industries may turn, out to be more destructive than we can handle.

Radical system change is a third way to think about innovation. Technological trajectories aren't pre-ordained: Some paths arc chosen at the expense of others. And that's harder because it needs more than incremental change. The near future is about transformation. The more complex historical and social understanding of innovation now emerging leads to a richer concept of infrastructure, as part of a system with social and technical elements interwoven.

An emphasis on the new, the experimental, the innovative - and on promoting social and technical solutions to global problems must overcome the sheer inertia of the systems we have already built - and are often still extending. Aiming for transformation leads to another take on creative destruction. It isn't enough to promote innovation as creation, the existing system has to be destabilized as well. System shifts of the radical kind envisaged will call for creation of a new infrastructure. But that won't do the job unless the old systems are deliberately removed on roughly the same time-scale. Achieving that will call for a lot more thought about how to if not destroy the old systems, at least set about dismantling them.