UGC NET Social Welfare Q50

Question

Read the given passage and answer the following questions.
Despite the fact that social security programmes in India are not responses to structural adjustment but have a long history of their own. Social expenditure in India is nevertheless particularly vulnerable to budget cuts. The social sector is a major spending area of the government, comprising poverty reduction interventions, health, education, nutrition, social assistance and social welfare. Most departments of government are in some way responsible for spending under this broad head.
The sector is highly divisible, thus facilitating incremental and piecemeal reductions in real expenditure. It has a weak political constituency, dominated by technical-expert persons, which the mass of evaluative research that has historically been critical of state interventionism has further weakened. Such work has been put to uses other than those originally intended not to reform the sector but as justification to abolish major components of it entirely. However, since 1991, social sector expenditure has not declined as much as had been anticipated. Despite, or because of, its departmental pervasiveness, it is an extremely-perhaps uncuttable-low proportion of GNP: 2.4 per cent as compared with 6.5 per cent in Malaysia, 12.2 per cent in Botswana and 15-25 per cent in OECD countries. Even though social sector

Accepted Answer

A