(a) Explain the emerging challenges in establishing gender equality in the informal sector. 10 (b) Critically examine the…

(a) Emerging challenges to gender equality in the informal sector Around nine in ten working women in India are in informal work, where several structural problems persist.

• Care burden: unpaid domestic and care work confines women to home-based, piece-rate or part-time work with low earnings.
• Wage and status gaps: occupational segregation, lower pay for the same work, and invisibility of home-based and unpaid family work in statistics.
• Lack of protection: no maternity entitlements, social security or safe-work provisions, and exposure to harassment with weak redress.
• Platform and gig work: algorithmic ratings and discontinuous work histories penalise women, while safety concerns restrict their hours.
• Post-pandemic shocks: job loss and slower return to paid work.

Remedies so far are partial: SEWA's collective organisation, the Street Vendors Act, 2014, and the labour codes' extension of social security to gig and platform workers. Real equality needs care infrastructure, universal social protection and recognition of women's work.

(b) Relevance of Pareto's circulation of elites Pareto saw history as "a graveyard of aristocracies", with elites alternating between "foxes" (cunning, innovative, Class I residues) and "lions" (force, conservative, Class II residues).

Relevance:

• It explains the turnover of political and business elites, such as changes of ruling parties and leaders, and corporate shifts between disruptors and stabilisers.
• It draws attention to elite psychology and to the way new elites are co-opted.

Limits:

• It overlooks structural and mass-based change. Universal franchise, mass movements and constitutional checks in democracies have widened elite recruitment beyond mere circulation (Mosca stressed the organised minority; Mills stressed power structures).
• Its categories are vague and hard to test, and it ignores class and institutions.

It remains a useful lens on elite replacement, but not a full account of democratic change.

(c) Tylor and Max Müller on religion: a critical comparison

• Tylor: religion originates in animism, belief in souls and spiritual beings, arising from reflection on dreams, shadows and death. It evolves from animism to polytheism and monotheism.
• Max Müller: religion originates in naturism, awe before natural phenomena such as the sun and dawn. Myths arose from a "disease of language" in which descriptive words for nature were taken as personal gods. His comparative philology of Indo-European languages supported this.

Common ground: both are evolutionist and intellectualist, treating religion as early people's attempt to explain the world.

Criticisms: both reduce religion to a cognitive error and ignore its social role (Durkheim's collective sacred, Malinowski's functions). Evidence of early stages is thin, and later scholars (Geertz) treat religion as a system of meaning and symbols.

(d) Cults and their growth in the contemporary world A cult, in the sociology of religion, is a small, loosely organised, non-traditional religious group centred on a charismatic leader and a novel teaching, usually outside established churches and sects (Troeltsch, Becker, Stark and Bainbridge). It is a value-neutral term in sociology, though used pejoratively in popular speech.

Reasons for growth:

• Anomie and alienation in rapid change, and a search for meaning, community and identity.
• Secularisation and individualisation, which weaken traditional religion and create a "spiritual marketplace".
• Relative deprivation and the wish for therapeutic, personal solutions.
• Charismatic leadership, globalisation, mass media and online recruitment.
• Examples of new religious movements include ISKCON and the Brahma Kumaris, which provide urban, educated followers with community and structured spiritual practice.

(e) Is Parsons's theory of social change adequate? Parsons presented an evolutionary, equilibrium-based model. Change occurs through structural differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion and value generalisation, with the movement from particularism and ascription towards universalism and achievement (pattern variables). He also pointed to evolutionary universals such as bureaucracy and money and markets.

It is not adequate:

• Emphasis on equilibrium and normative consensus cannot explain conflict, revolution or sudden change (Marx, Dahrendorf, Coser).
• It is Western-centric and linear, and ignores colonialism and exploitation (Wallerstein, dependency theory).
• It underplays agency and power, and uses abstract categories that are hard to test.

It remains useful as a typology of modernisation but not as a full theory of change.