National Policy on Voluntary Sector (2007) covers which of the following voluntary organizations ?
(a) Formal and Informal Groups
(b) Community-based organizations
(c) Charitable organizations
(d) Sup

Question

National Policy on Voluntary Sector (2007) covers which of the following voluntary organizations ?
(a) Formal and Informal Groups
(b) Community-based organizations
(c) Charitable organizations
(d) Support organizations

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (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.  (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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2022 Q35 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q35 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer