(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

This paper explores the design of a forestry-based payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme, which improves stream water supply while simultaneously helping conserve forests and supporting livelihoods in communities of Uttarakhand, India. Under a PES arrangement, upstream communities reduce fuelwood harvesting to restore forest quality and improve stream flow in the downstream communities. Results suggest that such PES projects can play a crucial role in supporting forest conservation efforts and mitigating water scarcity in the region. For instance, PES-based payments required to meet the water needs of downstream communities can be three times lower than the costs of municipal water supply. Whereas, if communities do not receive any monetary incentives for reducing fuelwood harvesting, it results in a significant degradation of the forests in the long run. However, hydrological and ecological constraints can reduce the effectiveness of PES programs in the region. A high displacement of oak forests by the pine forests would lower the benefits from PES participation for the local communities. When the shifting species composition of forests also increases the failure risk of PES projects, optimal response requires further restricting fuelwood harvesting. © 2019 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Economics

Water Economics and Policy

A Simulation Modeling of Forest Water Supply under Community-Managed PES Schemes

World University root node

International Relations and Governance Studies

Perspectives on Politics

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. By Helena Rosenblatt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 368p. $35.00 cloth.

In South Asia, local communities most often live near or amidst archaeological places. Their lives are in many ways framed and structured by these places. At the same time, these places too are impacted by the communities that live nearby. Archaeological sites in India are being destroyed at a rapid pace, due to increasing population and development pressures. This story gets further complicated by legislative practices of preservation related to monuments and archaeological sites, which are solely in the hands of the state through its institutions. It is this very act of protection that sometimes leads to conflict between the institutions of the state and local communities. At the same time, several archaeological sites have also survived due to local interests because they have been transformed into ritual spaces or are considered as ancestral places. Additionally, monuments have been converted into heritage hotels and have become an important means of livelihood for the families that own them. Thus, for protection to succeed, the critical intervention and involvement of local communities living in close proximity to monuments and archaeological sites is fundamental. Is it then education that can enable the survival of archaeological places? School education has the scope of involving and alerting children to their environs, whether it is the natural environment or a built one, and this could be a long-term solution. © The Author(s) 2019.

History

Fulltext

Journal of Social Archaeology

Archaeological places: Negotiations between local communities, archaeologists and the state in India

Global Governance and India's North-East: Logistics, Infrastructure and Society

Financialisation of infrastructure and the construction of a 'seamless Asia'

Engineering education, today, has changed with the evolving job requirements that demands for more than only a domain-specific knowledge. Engineers are expected to address more complex challenges of future that require knowledge from different disciplines. Also, in this era of market competition, the enterprises expect them to come up with innovative ideas to have an edge. Thus, conventional engineering education is going through a transition phase with rapidly changing technology and job demands. Acknowledging this evolving need, many technical institutes have taken the initiative to incorporate creative design education in engineering curriculum to give students a liberal, multi-disciplinary, holistic, and creative outlook for addressing complex multi-disciplinary problems. But, imparting design education to undergrads along with their engineering majors has its own practical challenges. Design education has a subjective and intuitive approach, which involves imagination, reflection, and iteration which is sharply in contrast with the objective technical engineering teaching. Hence, holding the attention and interest of students from non-design background is sometimes a tough task for the mentors. The paper aims at highlighting the problems faced by mentors while teaching design to the engineering UG students at Shiv Nadar University. Based on their experiences, the authors have put forward several insights that might help young mentors interacting with the students with non-design background. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2019.

Design

Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies

Teaching creative design to undergrade engineering students—Some experiences

Population growth, and excessive exploitation of resources (air, water, and land) for consumerism-driven economy are among the few reasons for environmental degradation. The growing concern over this in recent years have resulted in several remedial steps taken by both government and nongovernment organizations, often manifested through environmental laws, regulations, and policies.The philosophical bases of such remedial steps are generally biased toward anthropocentric (or techno-centric) worldview. However, this paper posits that the traditional Indian philosophy toward environmental protection is based on conservative-nurturing (or eco-centric) world view, often manifested through cultural practices. The paper is an attempt to explore Indian cultural practices from the environmental worldview (EWV) perspective. This paper, at first, presents a review of the most popular EWV available in the literature. Then it discusses two Indian cultural practices and attempts to draw a philosophical relationship with these worldviews. The study of these two cultural practices indicates the manifestation of either conservative-nurturing or eco-centric worldview. The paper advocates that cultural practices are potential tools for environmental stress mitigation. This is supported by a few recent cases of environmental protection through cultural practices. The paper concludes that cultural practices have a great potential for environmental protection and such practices should be recognized, strengthened, and nurtured through research. © 2019, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Indian cultural practices as a manifestation of environmental world view—an exploration as a tool for environmental stress mitigation

The article discusses Saritā, one of the best-selling Hindi magazines of the 1950s, and the part it played in the establishment of the Hindi 'middlebrow' reader. While a rich and vibrant journal culture in Hindi had existed since the nineteenth century, what distinguishes the post-1947 Hindi popular magazine is the emergence of the middle class as a burgeoning consumer. Saritā defied prescriptions of Nehruvian state building, as well as the right-wing discourses of nationalism and national language prevalent in the post-Independence space. In addition, it reconfigured biases towards gendered reading and consumption processes, as well as encouraging increased reader participation. This article argues for Saritā's role in the creation of a middlebrow reading space in the period immediately following Independence, since it not only packaged what was deemed wholesome and educational for the family as a unit, but also, most significantly, promoted readership in segments, with a focus on each individual's reading desires. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019Â.

English

Modern Asian Studies

Saritā and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader

Restoration of mangrove forests through community involvement offers the promise of reaping multiple environmental dividends while simultaneously helping local communities augment their livelihoods through generating payments from ecosystem services. However, there exist several challenges to the success of such restoration projects. In this paper, one such key challenge, that of the risk of extreme climatic events, is considered. Optimal rate of mangrove restoration on public coastal lands is derived in the presence of a future risk of extreme cyclones decimating the mangrove forests. Using the context of the Sundarbans region of India, which has the largest mangrove forests on the planet, we develop a model of community led restoration efforts where local inhabitants receive credit for carbon sequestered in the process. Results indicate that when communities do not receive outside support through wages or reimbursement of plantation costs, restoration efforts get spread over a longer time horizon. Presence of a risk of future cyclone events that could destroy the restored forests prompts speedier restoration, which may not be an optimal outcome from the perspective of global carbon mitigation efforts. An optimal plan that is primarily concerned with deriving sequestration benefits from newly restored mangroves leads to lower restoration levels in the presence of higher cyclone risks. However, irrespective of the institutional setting under which restoration is incentivized, given the relatively stable nature of underground carbon stored in mangroves, it is optimal to undertake higher restoration efforts when climatic risks are low. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Land Use Policy

Optimal mangrove restoration through community engagement on coastal lands facing climatic risks: The case of Sundarbans region in India

This paper addresses management challenges associated with conserving endangered wildlife facing multiple threats from illegal poaching, habitat encroachment, and climate and land-use change-induced flooding. While poaching and encroachment challenges in conservation parks are of immediate nature, climate-related risks exist in the long term. The park manager faces a utility function that includes as its arguments local community’s incomes, benefits to the larger society from preserving threatened species and the financial costs of monitoring and land-use change efforts. Using the case of single-horned rhinos in the Kaziranga National Park, India, an optimal mix of monitoring and land-use changes is designed in presence of tradeoffs between short- and long-term management efforts. As monitoring only addresses immediate challenges associated with poaching and encroachment, long-term climatic risks remain ignored. Land-use management offers riskprotection as well as risk-insurance benefits with respect to climate change-induced flooding of the park. Recommendations for Resource Managers • It is important to incorporate both short- and longterm risks posed to endangered wildlife while investing in conservation efforts. There may exist a tradeoff between mitigating short- and long-run risks due to financial and physical resource constraints. However, ignoring long-term risks to wildlife habitats can jeopardize past conservation efforts. • Land-use management, both within and outside of conservation reserves, enhances resilience to climatic shocks through reducing flooding risks and must be an essential part of wildlife conservation efforts. • Conservation efforts ignoring local community welfare considerations can become suboptimal as they lead to reduced cooperation and potential conflicts. When wildlife conservation efforts account for local community welfare implications, optimal management plans could result in lower species abundance in the short term. However, increasing the park size through additional land enrollment can mitigate some of this tradeoff. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Natural Resource Modeling

Shooting at the poachers while the rhinos drown: Managing short- and long-term threats to endangered wildlife in conservation reserves

Entrepreneurial ventures potentially offer a way out for farmers facing stagnant livelihoods in drought-ridden farming. We develop a model where entrepreneurial success of marginal farmers is linked to their ability to overcome the challenges posed by the existent socio-economic and environmental inequalities. Farmers with lower socio-economic status receive an unequal share of irrigation water from common reservoirs, which impedes their ability to accumulate financial capital and start an enterprise. Findings suggest that less endowed farmers could end up inefficiently dedicating resources towards reducing social inequality through a process of social friction, which adversely affects their livelihood prospects. When both farming and entrepreneurial ventures are prone to failure, farmers may stay within farming for longer despite higher failure risk. When agricultural exit risk is higher and enterprise failure risk lower, farmers are forced to invest more time in farming and mitigating such risks, which, in turn, delays their success in business. © 2018, European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).