MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 35 of 100

Correct — option (4), All of the above. Before the substance, deal with the layout, because this question is printed in a way that misleads a reader in a hurry. The four items labelled (a) to (d) are set out in a two-column grid, with (a) and (b) on one line and (c) and (d) on the next, so at a glance they look exactly like a set of four answer choices. They are not. They are the statements the stem is asking about, and the real options are the four numbered rows printed below them under the answer options label, also in a two-column grid. A candidate who marks one of the (a) to (d) items has answered nothing at all. On the substance, the National Policy on the Voluntary Sector of 2007 defines what it means by a voluntary organisation in deliberately wide terms. It describes voluntary organisations as organisations engaged in public service, based on ethical, cultural, social, economic, political, religious, spiritual, philanthropic or scientific and technological considerations, and it then states expressly that they include formal as well as informal groups, such as community-based organisations, non-governmental development organisations, charitable organisations, support organisations, networks or federations of such organisations, and professional membership associations. Every one of the four printed items appears in that enumeration: formal and informal groups in statement (a), community-based organisations in statement (b), charitable organisations in statement (c) and support organisations in statement (d). The breadth is not accidental. The policy was framed to cover the whole of organised voluntary activity in India, which ranges from an unregistered neighbourhood group with no bank account to a national federation with professional staff, and a definition that admitted only registered charitable bodies would have excluded most of the sector it was written for. The inclusion of informal groups is the most significant of the four, because it is the point at which the policy departs from the legal categories — a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, a trust, or a company registered for non-profit purposes — and recognises the far larger number of groups that carry on public service without any registration at all. Support organisations belong in the list for a different reason: they do not deliver services to a community directly but assist other voluntary organisations with training, research, documentation and capacity building, and a policy meant to strengthen the sector as a whole has to recognise the bodies that strengthen its members. With all four items named in the policy's own definition, option (4) is the answer.

• (1)Only (c) — This option accepts only statement (c), charitable organisations, and rejects the other three. It is the choice produced by the commonest misconception about the subject — that the voluntary sector means charity, and that a voluntary organisation is therefore a registered charitable body. The policy says the opposite in its own definition, which covers community-based organisations, support organisations, networks and federations, professional membership associations and, most significantly, informal groups that have no registration at all. There is a second reason this option is attractive and it is a printing one: because the four statements are laid out in a grid that looks like an option set, a reader may take the single-item option as a straightforward instruction to pick one of them, and charitable organisations is the item that best matches an untutored idea of what a voluntary organisation is.
• (2)Only (a) and (b) — This option accepts (a) and (b) — formal and informal groups, and community-based organisations — and rejects charitable and support organisations. The rejection of charitable organisations is difficult to defend on any reading, since they are named in the policy's enumeration and are the most conventional members of the sector; a candidate arriving here has usually over-corrected, having realised that the voluntary sector is wider than charity and concluded that charity must therefore be excluded from it. Breadth is not exclusion. The rejection of support organisations is a more understandable error, because they are the least visible part of the sector, working with other voluntary organisations rather than directly with communities, and a candidate who has not met the term may treat it as an invention of the examiner rather than as a category the policy names.
• (3)Only (a), (b) and (c) — This option accepts (a), (b) and (c) and drops only support organisations, which makes it the most plausible of the three wrong answers and the one a reasonably well-prepared candidate is most likely to choose. Everything in it is correct as far as it goes; the mistake is the exclusion. Support organisations are named in the policy's own definition, and their inclusion follows from what the policy was trying to do: it is a document about strengthening the voluntary sector, and a sector is strengthened as much by the bodies that train, research, document and build the capacity of voluntary organisations as by those that work with communities directly. Rejecting an unfamiliar but genuine category is a recurring way of losing a list question, and the remedy is to ask whether the item is the kind of thing the source document would have covered rather than whether the phrase is one you have read before.

The National Policy on the Voluntary Sector was approved in 2007 and prepared through the Planning Commission, and it is best understood as an attempt to define a relationship rather than to regulate an industry. It is a policy statement and not a law: it creates no offence, confers no right and imposes no new registration requirement. What it does is set out the government's view of the voluntary sector and four objectives for its dealings with it — to create an enabling environment that stimulates the enterprise and effectiveness of voluntary organisations while safeguarding their autonomy; to enable them to mobilise financial resources legitimately from within India and from abroad; to identify systems by which the government and voluntary organisations may work together on the basis of mutual trust, respect and shared responsibility; and to encourage voluntary organisations to adopt transparent and accountable systems of governance and management. The definition this question is built on serves the first of those objectives, because a policy meant to enable the whole sector must first say what the sector consists of. It therefore describes voluntary organisations by their motivation and their purpose — organisations engaged in public service on ethical, cultural, social, economic, political, religious, spiritual, philanthropic or scientific and technological grounds — rather than by their legal form, and then lists the kinds of body it includes: formal and informal groups, community-based organisations, non-governmental development organisations, charitable organisations, support organisations, networks and federations of such organisations, and professional membership associations. Legal form remains a separate matter, since an organisation that wishes to register may do so as a society, as a trust or as a non-profit company, and a body receiving foreign contributions comes under the separate foreign contribution law. The policy also addressed the practical relationship — simpler registration, a more predictable funding relationship including multi-year support, consultation on policy, and accreditation — and the later machinery of the government's portal for registering voluntary organisations belongs to the same effort to make the sector legible to the state.

Governance questions in MPSC papers reach beyond the formal organs of government into the bodies that work alongside them, and the voluntary sector is the largest of those. It is examined as a policy question of the kind used here, and also through the law on foreign contributions, the forms of registration available to a non-profit body, and the role of voluntary organisations in delivering government programmes. This item is worth studying as much for its layout as for its content. The four statements are printed in a two-column grid, which in this paper is also how options are usually printed, so the visual cue that normally separates a statement list from an option set is absent; the only reliable signals are the labels themselves — Latin (a) to (d) for statements and numerals (1) to (4) for options — and the answer options label printed above the true options. A candidate who has trained himself to read labels rather than positions will not be caught. This is the sharpest instance of the problem in the paper, but the general lesson recurs: this edition prints statement lists of two, three, four and five items, prints options in single columns, in double columns and in single rows of four, and places escape options in unpredictable positions. The one thing that never varies is the labelling scheme, and it is the only thing worth relying on.

• The National Policy on the Voluntary Sector of 2007 defines voluntary organisations as bodies engaged in public service on ethical, cultural, social, economic, political, religious, spiritual, philanthropic or scientific and technological grounds, defined by purpose rather than by legal form.
• The policy states that voluntary organisations include formal as well as informal groups, and names community-based organisations, non-governmental development organisations, charitable organisations, support organisations, networks or federations of such organisations, and professional membership associations.
• Its four objectives are to create an enabling environment that safeguards the autonomy of voluntary organisations, to enable them to mobilise financial resources legitimately from India and abroad, to identify systems for the government to work with them on the basis of mutual trust and shared responsibility, and to encourage transparent and accountable governance within them.
• The policy is a statement of intent and not a statute: registration remains a separate matter under the law relating to societies, trusts and non-profit companies, and the receipt of foreign contributions is governed by separate legislation.
• The inclusion of informal groups is the most consequential part of the definition, because it extends the policy beyond registered bodies to the far larger number of groups carrying on public service without any registration at all.

• Marking one of the labelled (a) to (d) items as the answer when they are printed in a two-column grid that looks like an option set, and the real options are the numbered rows below the answer options label
• Equating the voluntary sector with charity, and so excluding informal groups, community-based organisations and support organisations from a definition that expressly names them
• Rejecting an unfamiliar category such as support organisations because the term has not been met before, rather than asking whether the source document would have covered it
• Over-correcting from the charity misconception and excluding charitable organisations themselves, when the policy's definition is inclusive and not a replacement of one category by another

Policy documents are set in MPSC papers less often than schemes but in a more demanding way, because a policy has no launch amount, no beneficiary count and no ministry-specific branding to recall; what it has is definitions, objectives and principles, and those are exactly what an examiner turns into statements. The recurring shapes are the year of the policy, the body that framed it, its stated objectives, and — as here — the scope of a definition it contains. The efficient preparation is to read the first two pages of any major policy document, which is usually where the definition and the objectives sit, rather than the whole of it. On the voluntary sector specifically, expect questions to move between the policy, the legal forms of registration and the foreign contribution law, since those three together make up the framework within which the sector operates and an examiner can build a statement list from any of them.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  According to the National Policy on the Voluntary Sector of 2007, which of the following is true of the definition of a voluntary organisation ?

  • (a)It covers only organisations registered as societies or as public trusts
  • (b)It covers formal as well as informal groups, including community-based, charitable and support organisations and professional membership associations
  • (c)It covers only organisations receiving foreign contributions under the relevant law
  • (d)It covers only organisations engaged in relief and charity, excluding those working on development

  Answer(b) It covers formal as well as informal groups, including community-based, charitable and support organisations and professional membership associations. The policy defines the sector by the purpose of its organisations — public service on ethical, cultural, social, economic, political, religious, spiritual, philanthropic or scientific grounds — rather than by legal form, and it names informal groups explicitly. Registration under the law of societies, trusts or non-profit companies, and registration under the foreign contribution law, are separate matters that do not limit the policy's scope.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is one of the stated objectives of the National Policy on the Voluntary Sector of 2007 ?

  • (a)To bring all voluntary organisations under the direct administrative control of the Union government
  • (b)To create an enabling environment that safeguards the autonomy of voluntary organisations while encouraging transparent and accountable governance within them
  • (c)To prohibit voluntary organisations from receiving funds from sources outside India
  • (d)To replace voluntary organisations with statutory bodies in the delivery of welfare programmes

  Answer(b) To create an enabling environment that safeguards the autonomy of voluntary organisations while encouraging transparent and accountable governance within them. Autonomy and accountability are held together in the policy rather than traded against each other, and two of its other objectives — enabling organisations to mobilise resources legitimately from India and abroad, and identifying systems for the government to work with them on the basis of mutual trust — make clear that the document is about partnership rather than control.