15. Read the following Passage and answer the question:
Public policy in India is in a state of flux. The nature of the policy process has changed dramatically with an increasing role of different actors, both locally and globally. A case is made to listen to the multiple voices that are emerging in governance processes; it is argued that it is necessary to create a space for dialogue among civil society and citizens. The demand for stronger links between research and policy has grown, as much as efforts to mainstreaming public policy education to professionalize the bureaucracy.
New discourses have emerged that shape policy choices. Several discourses have been nevertheless reduced to status of rhetoric and cliché. Emerging demographic trends at the national level-such as urbanization and environmental trends at the global level, such as climate change have redefined the contours of public policy and governance, posing new challenges for policy formulation as well as engendering debates on appropriate forms of governance. Governance refers to all manners of exercising control and authority in the allocation of resources. Governance issues are thus closely tied to the processes and mechanisms through which people access resources. However, the extent to which they have improved the control of resource users, remains a moot question. Often, this has been a question of efforts at changing control relation between the state and civil society; while policies have succeeded in creating management capacity at lower levels.
The gap between 'governance' and 'government' is understood to have widened in the Indian context, as well as globally. Actors other than the state have come to acquire a greater role in the exercise of control and authority in the allocation of resources. The locus of policy making has moved from the state to other actors; markets and civil society have created greater space for themselves. State authority has been diluted by a greater influence of other actors, both at local and global levels. New discourses such as those of neo-liberalism and good governance have altered the relationships between state, markets and civil society. While the discourse of neo-liberalism was founded on the narrative of the inefficient state, the neo- liberal paradigm evoked criticisms on account of the exclusion of the poor from the provision of service delivery.
Q. Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other is labelled as Reason (R). (NET March 2023 Shift II)
Assertion (A): Neo-Liberal paradigm was founded on the narrative of the inefficient state.
Reason (R): Neo-Liberal paradigm is inclusive in nature.
In light of the above statements, choose the correct answer from the options given below: