Test-5

TEST - 05

Roll. No. ______________________

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Essay
Time Allowed: 1½ hrs. Max. Marks: 125

Instructions to Candidate

• Attempt one essay

• The test carries 125 marks.

• Write the essay in about 1000-1200 words.

• Any page left blank in the answer-book must be crossed out clearly.

(Examiner will pay special attention to the candidate's grasp of his/her material, its relevance
to the subject chosen, and to his/ her ability to think constructively and to present his/her
ideas concisely, logically and effectively).

Remarks

Name _______________________________

Mobile No.___________________________
1. Invigilator Signature _______________ Date ________________________________
2. Invigilator Signature _______________ Signature ____________________________
2

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

1. Environmental crimes are more serious through their additional costs.

2. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

Remarks
3

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
4

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
5

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
6

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
7

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
8

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
9

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
10

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
11

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
12

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
13

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
14

ESSAY TEST SERIES 2016

Remarks
 Hints: Essay Test - 5

1. Environmental crimes are more serious through their additional costs

• The environment is everything that isn't me. - Albert Einstein
• In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. - Aristotle
• Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.
- Stewart Udall
• Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived. - Sidney Sheldon
• Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. - Aldo Leopold

Approach
Here the statement is true regardless of the context. The environmental crimes due to human greed
is increasing and impacting not just the environment but whole mankind as it places additional cost
on the society.
The approach should be to discuss all the dimensions whether–environmental, economical, social, etc
with examples to justify the statement.
Introduction
Introduce with the importance of environment for the mankind. How the environmental crimes and
environmental degradation places more serious threats to our existence. The world is being dredged
of its natural resources, with much of what we rely on for our livelihoods, are at risk from a new
threat i.e. environmental crime.
Main Body
Define the term Environmental Crime both in narrow and broader connotation. The term in narrow
sense covers not only the illegal trade in wildlife, but also forestry and fishery crimes, illegal dumping
of waste including chemicals, smuggling of ozone depleting substances and illegal mining.
Illegal mining is not limited to illegal extraction of resources, it also has severe environmental impacts,
whether from mercury pollution or destruction of natural flora and fauna, pollution, landscape
degradation and radiation hazards, with negative impact on arable land, economic crops and trees.
A broad understanding of environmental crime includes threats that initiates due to the finance
coming from the exploitation of natural resources (such as minerals, oil, timber, charcoal, marine
resources) such as laundering, tax fraud and illegal trade in hazardous waste and chemicals, as well
as the environmental impacts of illegal exploitation and extraction of natural resources.
Next discuss whether these crimes have got the global attention or not. Mention that Environmental
crimes have in recent years received global attention due to its serious and deleterious impact on the
environment and ecosystems, as well as on peace, security and development. (As present global wars
are for gaining access of natural resources).
Hints: Essay Test - 5 [1]
Elaborate on the need to protect the environment. The environment provides the very foundation of
sustainable development, our health, food security and our economies. Ecosystems provide clean
water supply, clean air and secure food and ultimately both physical and mental wellbeing. Natural
resources also provide livelihoods, jobs and revenues to governments that can be used for education,
health care, development and sustainable business models. The role of the environment is recognized
across the internationally agreed seventeen sustainable development goals adopted in 2015.
Concept of Additional Cost
Define what are the additional costs that we need to pay due to environmental crimes. Unlike any
other known crime, environmental crimes are aggravated through their additional costs and cost to
future generations. Deforestation, dumping of chemicals and illegal fisheries causes loss of ecosystem
services such as clean air and clean water, extreme weather mitigation, food security and even health
and wellbeing. They also deprive governments of much-needed revenues and undermine legal
businesses.
Further mention the causes of Environmental Crimes. The root causes of environmental crimes vary
greatly, and subsequently the design, identification and implementation of appropriate responses must
be carefully planned. Root causes are primarily the low risks and high profits in a permissive environment
as a result of poor governance and widespread corruption, minimal budgets to police, prosecution and
courts, inadequate institutional support, political interference and low employee morale, minimal
benefits to local communities and rising demand in particular in developing nations due to rise in
population.
Discuss the Global efforts taken to curb environmental crimes. The international community is still
far behind in combating the rising role of environment-associated crimes. Resources allocated to
international enforcement efforts against environmental crimes are completely low for containing the
growth in environmental crimes.
Current global resources specifically allocated to international organizations such as INTERPOL,
UNEP, WCO, UNODC and relevant conventions specifically for combating these transnational
environmental crimes are low resulting in continued rising involvement of organized criminal networks.
This is also due to lack of capacities shared across agencies.
The sheer financial scale and sophistication of environmental crimes now require an entirely different
scale of coordinated responses and international collaboration, working across ministries and jurisdictions
at the national level, to international cross-UN and trans-border collaboration. Achieving this level of
sophistication will require significant donor support because the sites most affected by environmental
crimes are also in the countries with the least resources to address them.
Ex: The Montreal protocol has played important role in reducing the illegal trade in ozone-depleting
substances like CFCs and HCFCs through initiatives, including the "informal Prior-Informed Consent
- iPIC" launched by UNEP in 2006 and the Project Sky Hole Patching with countries participating
as members and with both the Regional Intelligence Liaison Office of the World Customs Organization
and the UNEP OzonAction Programme under the Montreal Protocol playing a coordinating role.
The Stockholm, Rotterdam and Basel conventions are the conventions responsible for helping prevent
the illegal trade in chemicals and waste. These conventions provide important platforms for
strengthening efforts against the illegal trade in hazardous chemicals and waste.
Suggest ways to contain environmental crimes such as:
• Reduce threats: This can be done by strengthening the information collection, analysis and
sharing across sectors, Sanctions Committees and across the UN as a whole in order to establish
holistic responses towards securing peace, security and sustainable development.
[ 2 ] Hints: Essay Test - 5
• Establish the Rule of law: The international community must recognize and address
environmental crimes as a serious threat to peace and sustainable development and strengthen
the environmental rule of law at all levels to prevent safe havens including disrupting overseas
tax havens, improve legislation at international and national levels, implement dissuasive penalties,
substantial sanctions and punishments, capacity building and technological support, in order to
enhance the enforcement and adjudication capacities in the area of environmental crime.
• Improved Leadership: Governments should establish central coordination and national cross-
sectoral plans, with unity of command and unity of efforts, in coordination with the relevant
UN entities, INTERPOL, and other relevant international treaty bodies and institutions, as
appropriate, to combat the involvement of criminal organized groups in environmental crimes.
• Financial support and Economic incentives and consumer awareness: Strengthen economic
incentives, relevant institutions and awareness. This requires that plans for alternative livelihoods,
economic incentives and consumer awareness are fully integrated and coordinated with
enforcement efforts.

Conclusion
Conclude your essay with the summary of arguments. Environmental crimes are alarmingly rising in
the present era. The criminals are becoming more advanced shifting from one wildlife species to
another, from smuggling ozone depleting CFC and shifting to HCFCs as this market emerge, shift
from regular VAT fraud to carbon credit fraud as the carbon credit market emerged, and shift to
laundering illegal tropical timber through pulp and paper when customs target round logs or furniture
and adopt a variety of "white collar" criminal methods including use of shell companies, tax havens,
internet hacking, dark webs and fraud.
Characteristics of progress needed for containing of environmental crimes are that environmental,
enforcement, economic incentives and development projects MUST be coordinated through a focal
cross-agency lead point in-country. Efforts must entail targeted intelligence and information gathering
on the smuggling routes, actors and causes in order to design the best response.
A system-wide strategy, within countries and across the international community, will be required.
This, in turn, will provide the foundation and framework imperative to the sustainable management,
protection, conservation and restoration of our ecosystems and the services they provide for the
economy, health and wellbeing of the planet.
2. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue
• Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the
driver. - Ayn Rand
• If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of
evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better. - Swami Vivekananda
• A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart. - Jonathan Swift
• Real riches are the riches possessed inside. - B. C. Forbes
• It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.
- Margaret Thatcher

Approach
This is a true statement thus needs to be seen regardless of the context. Thus, the objective of this
essay is to critically analyse the topic, and assess why so? Elaborate and establish it with some topical
examples.
Hints: Essay Test - 5 [3]
Money should be analysed as a means to wider end - source of happiness in life by following right
path.
Introduction
Take a broader view about wealth and how money is ingrained. Explain essence of money. Discuss
the term society's virtue (sign of goodness) as the virtues of the individuals like honesty and capacity
to think creatively.
Main Body
Try to establish the statement conditionally by justifying that money is the outcome of all that is
good in individual and in society. And the money generated further recycles in the economy through
right or wrong means. But at the root, it is a symbol of man's hard work and his inherent trait to
create and produce something new. This empowers society as well as individual. But the question is
- can all type of earned money empower society and individual?
Money is the product of the skills within you. A person with its innovativeness, hard work and
determination accomplish tasks in hand and earn money. Money earned with hard work brings respect
for oneself. Money can be the product of virtue i.e. personal qualities inherent in the human being,
but it will not give you virtue and will not redeem your vices too.
On the other hand we need to ask if it is true that money made by the strong is at the expense of
the weak? Is it correct to say that money made by the man who invents a motor is at the expense
of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By
competent at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Answer
is - Never! Money is also made by the effort of every honest man and not by the exploitation of
the weak. But in the capitalist economy this can not be a rule. There are examples of rich who are
minting money at the expense of weak and poor, by exploiting opportunities.
Source of Money is very important. Money should not be earned by suppressing the development
of vulnerable. Money is your means of survival. If the source is corrupt, you have disrespected your
own existence. There is a rule of thumb: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonourably;
the man who respects it has earned it.
Money should motivate people towards trusteeship. Men who have pride, men who have no moral
sense of their right to their money, that money will deteriorate the individual and consequently
society.
Therefore, people should earn wealth through honest work and by acquiring new skills and implementing
them at right time and right place.
Examples
Nobel Laureate Award money
The laureates are given a sum of money when they receive their prizes, in the form of a document
confirming the amount awarded. The amount of prize money depends upon how much money the
Nobel Foundation can award each year. The purse has increased since the 1980s. In 2009, the
monetary award was 10 million SEK. It is common for recipients to donate prize money for the
benefit of scientific, cultural, or humanitarian causes. The cash prize is awarded to acknowledge their
work and their service to the society.
Conclusion
The most current and important example like - With the end of the Rio Olympics 2016, PV Sindhu
and Sakshi Malik have become household names owing to their remarkable performances. After
winning the much-deserved medals, it's raining prizes for the winners. PV Sindhu has already been

[ 4 ] Hints: Essay Test - 5

rewarded 13 crores coming from different sources. Sakshi Malik's tally, on the other hand, hovers in
the vicinity of 5 crore, and includes a 2.5 crore cheque from the Haryana government. In addition
to the state governments, cash prizes have been poured in from entities such as Indian Railways,
Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Indian Olympic Association etc.
Nation building is a process, which demands nurturing of our human resource with skills and knowledge
that will enable India to become superpower. In this process, we must acknowledge that a people work
and labour must be rewarded appropriately to encourage them and propel their efforts in the right
direction. Scholarships and rewards are the much-needed incentives to support the mind and muscles
of India but the patriotism and loyalty towards the work and nation should be remained.
# If you want to put suggestions - you can.



Hints: Essay Test - 5 [5]