Which one of the following is the underlying idea of the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Empowerment is about providing opportunities to individuals to achieve their aspirations while ensuring that community objectives are met. An empowered India is a country that provides opportunities for every child to achieve its potential through education, health care, nutrition, shelter and employment. At the same time, we must ensure that these children advance the interests of the country. To achieve this dream of empowerment, it is necessary to take tough, unpopular and unpleasant decisions.
To push these decisions through, India needs strong political leaders: the leaders who have the courage of conviction, the courage to dream big, to take difficult decisions, and to make sacrifices. The leaders have to be people who can straddle several worlds—the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate. They have to appreciate the aspirations of all these worlds. They should not believe that development is a zero-sum game where gains to one world mean losses to another.
Politicians often complain that IT sector has created a great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and that it should be checked. Sadly, they believe that the solution is to restrict the growth of the IT industry instead of encouraging the creation of a larger number of such jobs. The leaders have to believe that the only way of our solving the problem of poverty is to create more jobs and shift a large number of people from agriculture to manufacturing and services. They must be open-minded, and willing to learn from the experiences of the leaders across the world. They must aspire to bench-mark India globally. They must be action oriented. We have become too much of a rhetoric satisfied society. Success is about execution.
It is for the top leaders of every political party to demonstrate leadership by example. They must come together and resolve to promote these values for the good of the future generations. This is tough and seems virtually impossible. But ‘a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility’. There is no other way to do this. In the beginning, we may see a few good leaders being cast away quickly. But, once we see this behaviour from a generation of successive leaders, it will become the norm. For example, at one time, it appeared impossible to stem the mass defection of Aayarams and Gayarams from one party to another. The practice came to an end because all our political leaders came together and stopped it. (Excerpted from A Better India A Better World)

Question

Multiple choice

Which one of the following is the underlying idea of the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Empowerment is about providing opportunities to individuals to achieve their aspirations while ensuring that community objectives are met. An empowered India is a country that provides opportunities for every child to achieve its potential through education, health care, nutrition, shelter and employment. At the same time, we must ensure that these children advance the interests of the country. To achieve this dream of empowerment, it is necessary to take tough, unpopular and unpleasant decisions.
To push these decisions through, India needs strong political leaders: the leaders who have the courage of conviction, the courage to dream big, to take difficult decisions, and to make sacrifices. The leaders have to be people who can straddle several worlds—the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate. They have to appreciate the aspirations of all these worlds. They should not believe that development is a zero-sum game where gains to one world mean losses to another.
Politicians often complain that IT sector has created a great divide between the haves and the have-nots, and that it should be checked. Sadly, they believe that the solution is to restrict the growth of the IT industry instead of encouraging the creation of a larger number of such jobs. The leaders have to believe that the only way of our solving the problem of poverty is to create more jobs and shift a large number of people from agriculture to manufacturing and services. They must be open-minded, and willing to learn from the experiences of the leaders across the world. They must aspire to bench-mark India globally. They must be action oriented. We have become too much of a rhetoric satisfied society. Success is about execution.
It is for the top leaders of every political party to demonstrate leadership by example. They must come together and resolve to promote these values for the good of the future generations. This is tough and seems virtually impossible. But ‘a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility’. There is no other way to do this. In the beginning, we may see a few good leaders being cast away quickly. But, once we see this behaviour from a generation of successive leaders, it will become the norm. For example, at one time, it appeared impossible to stem the mass defection of Aayarams and Gayarams from one party to another. The practice came to an end because all our political leaders came together and stopped it. (Excerpted from A Better India A Better World)

India needs to compete in global market and to do that it would be important to shift focus from agriculture to manufacturing and service sectors, create more job opportunities and shed its antipathy towards IT.
Indian leadership must realize that IT and other manufacturing and service sectors are necessary for economy as they create more jobs to meet the aspirations of individuals that could lead to empowerment of the country.
Individual aspirations need to be so designed that they do not go against the community interests and that which finally lead to empowerment of India by creating opportunities for individuals.
For long India has remained a nation living by the rhetorics when they should have created success stories by executing schemes and programmes aimed at creating jobs for the teeming millions.

Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself

Accepted Answer

India's immediate need is to find a leader who can lead by example, who is open-minded and bold in executing measures that are tough, unpopular and unpleasant but necessary for competing globally.

Keep practicing — related questions