(a) How do you account for the increasing significance of religion in public and personal spheres in the context of…

(a) Rising significance of religion against the secularisation thesis

The classical secularisation thesis (Weber, Durkheim in part, and modernisation theorists) held that industrialisation, urbanisation and science would shrink religion's public role and privatise belief. India has not followed that path. Peter Berger himself later spoke of "desecularisation", José Casanova of the "de-privatisation" of religion, and Eisenstadt's "multiple modernities" shows modernity taking local religious forms.

Public sphere. Democratic mobilisation made religious identity a political resource, seen in the Shah Bano case, the Ayodhya movement, the Sabarimala dispute and debates over personal laws. Religion is also the idiom of caste and community mobilisation, and Indian secularism, with its principle of "principled distance" (Rajeev Bhargava), keeps the state engaged with religion rather than separate from it.

Personal sphere. Urbanisation and market uncertainty have not erased belief. Religion adapts through pilgrimage tourism, televised and online gurus, astrology apps, and rituals of consumption, as Srinivas's Sanskritisation and Yogendra Singh's modernisation of tradition suggest. Faith gives comfort and belonging against anomie.

The resulting view is that modernity in India restructures religion instead of extinguishing it: secularisation as decline is weak, but secularisation as differentiation of state from faith remains a constitutional project under strain.

(b) Relevance of the Chipko Movement and its Gandhian tone

Chipko began in the Garhwal Himalaya in the early 1970s, with the Reni village action (1974) led by Gaura Devi, Chandi Prasad Bhatt's Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh and Sunderlal Bahuguna's padyatras; it won a 15-year ban on green felling in the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya in 1980. Gadgil and Guha read it as an ecological peasant movement tied to subsistence rights over forests, and Guha's Unquiet Woods treats it as a resistance of the commons.

Its Gandhian tone, satyagraha, non-violence, gram swaraj and trusteeship, matters for today's climate concerns. It asserts community stewardship and indigenous knowledge against technocratic extraction, it shows women as ecological agents, and it anticipates climate justice, in which the poor who depend on commons bear the cost of degradation.

Analytically, limits remain. Its scale was local, the gendered labour burden fell on hill women, leaders differed over commercial versus subsistence use (Bhatt versus Bahuguna), and feminist critics such as Bina Agarwal and Vandana Shiva debate whether it was ecofeminist or a class and livelihood struggle. Climate change is global and needs state, scientific and international action, which Chipko's local moral appeal alone cannot provide. Its lasting value is as an ethic and a model of community forest governance, linking to Joint Forest Management and the Forest Rights Act 2006.

(c) Measures to curb child labour

Census 2011 recorded about 10.1 million working children aged 5–14. Practical measures:

• Close the family-enterprise loophole in the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act 2016, which allows children to work in family businesses after school, and enforce the ban on hazardous work up to 18.
• Extend the Right to Education beyond 14 and run bridge schools and residential schools to bring rescued children back, with the National Child Labour Project.
• Raise adult earnings through MGNREGA, minimum wages and social security, since poverty and debt drive child work.
• Strengthen labour inspection, with the PENCIL portal for tracking, district task forces and convergence with ICDS and education departments.
• Provide crèches at worksites so that older siblings, mostly girls, stay in school.
• Enforce supply-chain accountability in carpets, bricks, zari and cotton seed, and support community vigilance through panchayats, as in the Bachpan Bachao Andolan's "child-friendly villages".