UPSC Essentials brings to you its initiative for the practice of Mains answer writing. It covers essential topics of static and dynamic parts of the UPSC Civil Services syllabus covered under various GS papers. This answer-writing practice is designed to help you as a value addition to your UPSC CSE Mains. Attempt today’s answer writing on questions related to topics of GS-3 to check your progress.

What is Fair and Remunerative Price for Sugarcane? Discuss how FRP differs from MSP.

What is a Large Language Model, or LLM? How many types of LLMs are there and how do they work?

Introduction

— The introduction of the answer is essential and should be restricted to 3-5 lines. Remember, a one-liner is not a standard introduction.

— It may consist of basic information by giving some definitions from the trusted source and authentic facts.

Body

— It is the central part of the answer and one should understand the demand of the question to provide rich content.

— The answer must be preferably written as a mix of points and short paragraphs rather than using long paragraphs or just points.

— Using facts from authentic government sources makes your answer more comprehensive. Analysis is important based on the demand of the question, but do not over analyse.

— Underlining keywords gives you an edge over other candidates and enhances presentation of the answer.

— Using flowcharts/tree-diagram in the answers saves much time and boosts your score. However, it should be used logically and only where it is required.

Way forward/ conclusion

— The ending of the answer should be on a positive note and it should have a forward-looking approach. However, if you feel that an important problem must be highlighted, you may add it in your conclusion. Try not to repeat any point from body or introduction.

— You may use the findings of reports or surveys conducted at national and international levels, quotes etc. in your answers.

Self Evaluation

— It is the most important part of our Mains answer writing practice. UPSC Essentials will provide some guiding points or ideas as a thought process that will help you to evaluate your answers.

QUESTION 1: What is Fair and Remunerative Price for Sugarcane? Discuss how FRP differs from MSP.

Introduction:

— The Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) of sugarcane is decided by the Centre’s Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).

— The FRP is based on the recovery of sugar from the cane. Sugar recovery is the ratio between sugar produced versus cane crushed, expressed as a percentage. The higher the recovery, the higher the FRP, and the higher the sugar produced from the cane.

Body:

You may incorporate some of the following points in the body of your answer:

— Sugar mills are legally required to pay this price to sugarcane farmers for procurement. Cane commissioners have also threatened to take action if farmers do not satisfy FRP dues within 14 days of selling their cane. Non-clearance may result in the attachment of mill properties as arrears of land taxes.

How does FRP differ from the MSP?

— MSPs serve as a basic, guaranteed payment for farmers given the various vulnerabilities involved in agriculture, such as unfavourable weather conditions.

— In such scenarios, fluctuations in production could lead to price changes, shortage of food items for consumers and a lack of income for the farmers to support themselves.

— The government announces the MSP every year for certain crops. It is the price at which the government is supposed to procure/buy that crop from farmers if the market price falls below it.

— MSPs set a floor for market pricing and ensure that farmers receive a “minimum” payment sufficient to cover cultivation costs (and some profit). The price is fixed in accordance with the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) guidelines.

— While recommending the MSP, the following factors are considered:

(a) the demand and supply of a commodity;

(b) its cost of production;

(c) the market price trends (both domestic and international);

(d) inter-crop price parity;

(e) the terms of trade between agriculture and non-agriculture (that is, the ratio of prices of farm inputs and farm outputs);

(f) a minimum of 50 per cent as the margin over the cost of production; and

(g) the likely implications of an MSP on consumers of that product.

Conclusion:

— The central government implemented MSP for sugar in 2018. This was one of the measures announced to stop the continual sugar drop and keep the demand-supply ratio within a safe range.

— The Centre has also set mill-specific sales quotas. Mills that violated either of the standards were subject to action under the Essential Commodities Act of 1955, which could result in a fine, a prison sentence (varying from 3 months to 7 years), or both.

(Source: Govt announces Fair and Remunerative Price for sugarcane: How FRP differs from MSP)

Points to Ponder

Why does sugarcane have both the FRP and MSP?

Related Previous Year Questions

What do you mean by Minimum Support Price (MSP)? How will MSP rescue the farmers from the low income trap? (2018)

What are the challenges and opportunities of the food processing sector in the country? How can the income of the farmers be substantially increased by encouraging food processing? (2020)

QUESTION 2: What is a Large Language Model, or LLM? How many types of LLMs are there and how do they work?

Introduction:

— Google defines LLMs as huge general-purpose language models that may be pre-trained and then fine-tuned for specific tasks.

— These models are trained to address typical language problems such as text classification, question answering, cross-industry text production, document summarization, and so on.

— The LLMs can also be tailored to solve specific problems in a variety of domains such as finance, retail, entertainment, etc., using perhaps a relatively small size of field datasets.

Body:

You may incorporate some of the following points in the body of your answer:

Types of LLMs

— There are various ways to categorise LLMS:

(i) On the basis of architecture, there are three types — autoregressive, transformer-based, and encoder-decoder.

(ii) Based on training data, there are three types of LLMs — pretrained and fine-tuned, multilingual or models that can understand and generate text in multiple languages, and domain-specific or models that are trained on data related to specific domains such as legal, finance or healthcare.

(iii) They can also be classified as open-source or closed-source based on their availability; some are publicly available, while others are proprietary. LLaMA2, BlOOM, Google BERT, Falcon 180B, and OPT-175 B are some open-source LLMs, whereas Claude 2, Bard, and GPT-4 are proprietary LLMs.

How do LLMs work?

— It is based on a process known as “deep learning”. It entails the development of artificial neural networks, which are mathematical models thought to be inspired by the structure and functioning of the human brain.

— This neural network trains to predict the likelihood of a word or string of words given the words that come before it in a sentence for LLMs.

Conclusion:

— LLM can predict the most likely next word or sequence of words based on inputs also known as prompts.

— LLMs have a wide range of cross-domain uses. They can create text and human-like content for a variety of uses, such as articles, songs, poems, and stories. They can act as virtual assistants or strike up a discussion.

(Source: What is an LLM, the backbone of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini? by Bijin Jose)

Points to Ponder

ChatGPT

Gemini

What are the advantages of LLMs?

Related Previous Year Questions

Introduce the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How does AI help clinical diagnosis? Do you perceive any threat to privacy of the individual in the use of AI in healthcare? (2023)

What do you understand by nanotechnology and how is it helping in health sector? (2020)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 1 (Week 39)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 1 (Week 38)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 2 (Week 39)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 2 (Week 38)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 3 (Week 39)

UPSC Essentials: Mains answer practice — GS 3 (Week 38)

Subscribe to our UPSC newsletter and stay updated with the news cues from the past week.