CAT 2018 Question Paper | Verbal Slot 2

CAT Questions

This is one of the direct questions you can expect in the CAT Exam based on the general understanding of the passage. This question is a medium difficulty level question that appeared in the CAT 2018 Question Paper Slot 2. Reading during your CAT Online Preparation alone can help you understand the context of the passage which is required to ace the CAT Exam. Solve this question and see the text and video explanation below.

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Will a day come when India’s poor can access government services as easily as drawing cash from an ATM? No country in the world has made accessing education or health or policing or dispute resolution as easy as an ATM, because the nature of these activities requires individuals to use their discretion in a positive way. Technology can certainly facilitate this in a variety of ways if it is seen as one part of an overall approach, but the evidence so far in education, for instance, is that just adding computers alone doesn’t make education any better.

The dangerous illusion of technology is that it can create stronger, top down accountability of service providers in implementation-intensive services within existing public sector organisations. One notion is that electronic management information systems (EMIS) keep better track of inputs and those aspects of personnel that are ‘EMIS visible’ can lead to better services. A recent study examined attempts to increase attendance of Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANMs) at clinics in Rajasthan, which involved high-tech time clocks to monitor attendance. The study’s title says it all: Band-Aids on a Corpse. E-governance can be just as bad as any other governance when the real issue is people and their motivation.

For services to improve, the people providing the services have to want to do a better job with the skills they have. A study of medical care in Delhi found that even though providers, in the public sector had much better skills than private sector providers their provision of care in actual practice was much worse.

In implementation-intensive services the key to success is face-to-face interactions between a teacher, a nurse, a policeman, an extension agent and a citizen. This relationship is about power. Amartya Sen’s report on education in West Bengal had a supremely telling anecdote in which the villagers forced the teacher to attend school, but then, when the parents went off to work, the teacher did not teach, but forced the children to massage his feet. As long as the system empowers providers over citizens, technology is irrelevant.

The answer to successfully providing basic services is to create systems that provide both autonomy and accountability. In basic education for instance, the answer to poor teaching is not controlling teachers more. The key is to hire teachers who want to teach and let them teach, expressing their professionalism and vocation as a teacher through autonomy in the classroom. This autonomy has to be matched with accountability for results—not just narrowly measured through test scores, but broadly for the quality of the education they provide.

A recent study in Uttar Pradesh showed that if, somehow, all civil service teachers could be replaced with contract teachers, the state could save a billion dollars a year in revenue and double student learning. Just the additional autonomy and accountability of contracts through local groups—even without complementary system changes in information and empowerment—led to that much improvement. The first step to being part of the solution is to create performance information accessible to those outside of the government.

Question 5 : The main purpose of the passage is to:

1. critique the government’s involvement in educational activities and other implementation-intensive services.
2. argue that some types of services can be improved by providing independence and requiring accountability.
3. analyse the shortcomings of government-appointed nurses and their management through technology.
4. find a solution to the problem of poor service delivery in education by examining different strategies.

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Video Explanation

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Explanatory Answer

This passage argues that the key to successfully providing basic services is not technology but the creation of systems that provide both autonomy and accountability (see paragraph 4). Option 2 sums this up.

Option 1 is clearly incorrect. The passage does not focus on critiquing the government’s involvement in education or other implementation intensive services. Options 3 and 4 limit the main idea of the passage to healthcare and education, respectively. The passage is more general, and only cites examples from these fields.

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The question is " The main purpose of the passage is to:"

Hence, the answer is argue that some types of services can be improved by providing independence and requiring accountability.

Choice B is the correct answer.