UPSC Mains 2013 GS Paper 2 Q14: model answer
The basis of providing urban amenities in rural areas (PURA) is rooted in establishing connectivity. Comment.
What the question wants
Comment on why PURA treats connectivity as the foundation for bringing urban amenities to villages.
How to structure it
Comment: explain the logic, then test it.
- Idea
- Four connectivities
- Why connectivity is the root
- What went wrong
- Today
How to think it through
Kalam's insight was economic geography: you cannot give every village a hospital, but you can link thirty villages to one. Connectivity turns a cluster into a market. Then show what happened: PURA stalled and gave way to the Rurban Mission.
Model answer
Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's idea of Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas rests on a simple calculation: an individual village cannot support a college or a hospital, but a ring of villages, linked well, can.
The four connectivities
- Physical: roads and transport linking a cluster of villages to a growth centre.
- Electronic: telecom and internet for telemedicine, e-learning and market prices.
- Knowledge: schools, vocational institutes and training centres.
- Economic: markets, credit and enterprises, which follow when the first three exist.
Why connectivity is the base
- It creates economies of scale: a cluster of 20–30 villages becomes a viable market for services.
- It reduces migration to cities by bringing jobs closer.
- It turns isolated farmers into suppliers to agro-processing units.
- Kalam's model at Periyar (Vallam, Tamil Nadu) linked over 60 villages with a ring road, buses and an engineering college.
How it fared
The pilot launched in 2004 and restructured in 2012 as a PPP struggled: private partners found rural returns too low, and departments worked in silos. Its spirit passed to the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (2016), which develops 300 clusters with integrated planning and convergence of schemes.
Today
BharatNet, PMGSY and Common Service Centres now supply much of the connectivity Kalam spoke of.
Kalam called it a bridge between the 'two Indias'. Connectivity is a necessary foundation; convergence and local enterprise make it sufficient.
Draw: Four concentric rings around a growth centre labelled physical, electronic, knowledge, economic.
Keywords, cases and data to drop in
PURA 2004, Kalam's four connectivities, Periyar PURA, cluster approach, PPP model 2012, Rurban Mission 2016, BharatNet, PMGSY.
Where most answers lose marks
- Writing only about roads. Kalam's 'connectivity' had four types.
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Question text as printed in the official UPSC Civil Services (Main) question paper. The model answer is original Battle IAS work; use it to learn structure, not to memorise.
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