Q6 · UPSC Civil Services Mains 2020 · Essay · 125 marks · 1 min read

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There can be no social justice without economic prosperity but economic prosperity without social justice is meaningless.

Topic: Philosophical and ethical quotes. Syllabus: Philosophical and ethical quotes Same official PYQ from year-wise 2020 and Philosophical and ethical quotes.

Essay map

Opening scene

Anecdote

A godown with nothing cannot run a ration. A godown with grain and a lock that only one caste can open is a full emptiness. The line is both rooms: prosperity as a condition, justice as the meaning.

Keep this in every paragraph

One stand

Social justice needs resources and power. Economic prosperity needs legitimacy or it rots. Write the order as a spiral, not as a one-way wait until ‘we are rich’.

Use once, in a scene — do not dump names

Quotes to earn

  • Ambedkar

    Political democracy without social and economic democracy is incomplete.

  • Rawls

    A surplus that does not improve the least advantaged fails the test — one line.

Turn each heading into a full paragraph in the hall

Heading map

What the line is asking

  • No SJ without prosperity: schools, hospitals, a wage — someone must produce.
  • Prosperity without SJ meaningless: a skyline beside a slum is a failure of meaning, not only of PR.
  • DPSPs plus growth — the republic’s old double brief.

Economy

  • 1991 enlarged the godown. The key remains a politics.
  • Peg: jobs, a Gini we should not fake; talk quality of the road (cousin of journey 2025).

Caste and gender

  • Who is allowed to produce, to own, to enter a mill. Justice is also a production function.

Welfare

  • NFSA, a scholarship, a disability pension: justice that spends the surplus.
  • A subsidy captured by the wrong lock.

Ecology

  • A prosperity that eats the forest is a desert (cousin of 2024). Justice to the unborn.

The counter

‘Wait for growth’ has been a farce for those outside the lock. Some justice (a right, a vote, Art. 17) cannot wait for a GDP date. And a purely redistributive politics on an empty godown is another cruelty. Hold both clauses in every paragraph.

Drop one peg where it fits — not a data dump

Value addition

  • NFSA / MGNREGA Justice that spends a godown — and still needs the godown.
  • 1991 A larger godown; the key is still politics.
  • DPSPs / Art. 38 The constitutional double brief — welfare and a just order.

Last 8–10 lines in the exam

Last paragraph

  • Close: fill the godown, copy the key. Expand — this is only the map.

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