(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

Region is a dynamic concept dependent on particularities of space manifested through varying imageries, and South Asia is no exception. As a regional category, it was borne out of the USA’s need to demarcate the post-War world according to its geopolitical interests, and since then, the elites of all South Asian states have unexceptionally found it difficult to shed off the realist lens vis-à-vis each other. Even though it’s an incredibly diverse region, there is a remarkable consistency in the way the dictates of sovereign territoriality have guided the nation-building projects of all states, and as a result, alternate ways of imagining the region have been severely compromised. South Asia, therefore, remains one of the least integrated regions in the world despite carrying tremendous collaborative potential in various fields. In this context, this chapter explores the possibility of conceptualizing the region through the lens of Critical Theory, which focuses on the emancipatory project of human beings through an anthropological reading of identity and communities. It argues that for such an understanding to gain in prominence, the political culture of the region needs to undergo a fundamental transformation from the territorial, authoritative, and state-centric notion of power and control to a more empathetic, unfettering, and citizen-centric notion. However, it is easier said than done. The material realities of the region centered around the India-Pakistan rivalry, China’s inroads into the region, weakening of civil society institutions, and rise of majoritarianism and religious fundamentalism amidst growing economic distress have ensured that such a transformation is still some distance away. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Šumit Ganguly and Frank O’Donnell.

International Relations and Governance Studies

Routledge Handbook of the International Relations of South Asia

CRITICAL THEORY APPROACHES TO THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF SOUTH ASIA

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where ideologically motivated citizen groups form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties’ seat shares, the size of the rents from holding office and their ideologies. We show that governments may be minimal winning, minority or surplus. Moreover, coalitions may be ‘disconnected’. We then look at how the coalition formation game affects the incentives for party formation. In particular, we show that when the rents from office are low, the median citizen stands unopposed, and when rents are high, there is more political entry. For intermediate rents, we show that strategic dropouts can happen to influence the final policy. We show that the incentives for strategic dropout can be higher under proportional representation than plurality voting, contrary to Duverger’s law. Our model explains the diverse electoral outcomes seen under proportional representation and integrates models of political entry with models of coalitional bargaining. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

World University root node

Economics

Fulltext

Games

Party Formation and Coalitional Bargaining in a Model of Proportional Representation

Child malnutrition is remarkably high in India. The problem of food insecurity is also extremely alarming in the country. From a policy perspective, a question of paramount importance in this context is: are these two problems inter-related? Answering this question based on existing literature is difficult. This is because literature examining specifically the effect of food insecurity on child / adolescent malnutrition in India is scarce. Besides, the small number of studies that do examine this question empirically find mixed evidence. In light of this, here we reexamine the effect of food insecurity on child malnutrition using data from the Young Lives survey. Employing several contemporary econometric approaches, we not only estimate the mean effect but also the distributional effects of food insecurity on child malnutrition. We find evidence of sizeable negative average effects of food insecurity on children’s anthropometric indices for nutrition surveillance including weight-for-age z score (WAZ) and height-for-age z-score (HAZ). Further, we document important heterogeneity in the effect of food insecurity on children’s WAZ and HAZ across the outcome-distributions. Our results suggest that expansion of policies that could effectively reduce household food insecurity is vital to address the problem of malnutrition among Indian children. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Journal of Development Studies

Hunger and Health: Reexamining the Impact of Household Food Insecurity on Child Malnutrition in India

In this article, I examine the ways in which ideas of martyrdom are employed by Gujjars in Rajasthan to describe their experiences of participating in the 2006 and 2007 Gujjar Andolan (protest), serving in the army, and in their telling of the Devnarayan epic. I take as a starting point the manner in which the bodies of Gujjars killed in police firing during the andolan were laid out for 17 days at the site of the andolan while Gujjar men and women recited the Devnarayan epic. The laying out of the martyred bodies then becomes a site for the production of caste belonging and caste love. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

Sociology

Contributions to Indian Sociology

The theopolitics of protest: Martyrdom in the Gujjar Andolan, the army and the epic

Toys play an important role in kids cognitive and physical development. Before starting the formal education with alphabets and numbers, the kids learn and understand different phenomena around them by experiencing things through their senses. They learn about different natural objects, creatures and phenomena by touching them or perceiving them through their other senses i.e. through seeing, smelling, hearing or tasting. In this cognitive journey of learning new things, the toys play a vital role. They try to imitate the real creatures and provide the related information in an effective way much before they actually come across those entities. Designing such toys in itself is an insightful experience. The paper discusses the process of developing one such toy i.e. Crocodile toy. And details the process of how different features of the real creature have been integrated to deliver important information about it in an interactive way. The paper concludes with discussion on tentative strategies to evaluate the efficacy of the toy. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Design

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

Design for Cognitive Development of Kids: A Case Study of Developing Interactive Toy for Small Children

Northeast is one of the largest producers of pineapples in India. There are many small fruit processing units located across different northeastern states that process pineapples during peak harvest season. However, most of these units are very small and are engaged in preparing the juice and juice-related items rather than canning pineapple slices. Preparation of juice-related items could be carried with a small capital and space infrastructure. The process of extracting juice starts with peeling the fruit followed by chopping them into small chunks. These chunks are then pulped in a machine, put inside a cloth-like material, and pressed using a hydraulic press. The whole process is so tedious and time-consuming that it is considered a major bottleneck in the smooth operational flow. The paper elaborates on the various aspects related to juice extraction processes. The paper, then, discusses the process of designing an effective equipment for making the overall process of juice preparation easier. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on the subjective and objective assessment of the proof of concept of and the future scope of the research. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering

Design of Pineapple Peeling Equipment

The focus of the present paper is on the investigation of the deformation and forces of an isolated steel beam column sub-frame exposed to localized fire. The investigated frame is modelled using finite element software ABAQUS considering three dimensional solid elements. A sequentially coupled thermo-mechanical analysis, where the derived temperature distribution obtained from the heat transfer analysis used as an input for the mechanical analysis, is carried out. The input heat flux which acts as Neumann boundary condition for the heat transfer analysis is considered from widely recognized handbook of ‘Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SPFE)’ of fire. Elasto-plastic material model is used for steel where the temperature dependent material properties are followed according to the Eurocode 3. Different cases were investigated based on the location of the localized fire source in the floor below the exposed beam. It was observed that for asymmetrical location of the fire source beneath the beam, the rotation for the far end connection to the fire source was always higher than the near end. © 2022 ISEC Press.

Proceedings of International Structural Engineering and Construction

RESPONSE OF STEEL FRAME ASSEMBLY UNDER LOCALIZED FIRE EFFECT

In this paper, we analyse the education and wage gaps between Hindus and Muslims over the period 1983 to 2011–2012 in India. We find that Muslims are worse off than Hindus in terms of education and this disadvantage has increased over time. Our analysis shows that the wage gap is more pronounced at the higher end of the wage distribution which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. We find that the wage gap has increased over time and the increase is more pronounced at the upper quantiles. Our decomposition analysis shows that difference in education has a significant contribution to the Hindu-Muslim wage gap. We find that the Hindu-Muslim gaps are more pronounced in urban areas relative to rural areas. Comparing Muslims with different Hindu castes, we find that while the disadvantaged castes have improved their condition relative to Muslims over time, the condition of Muslims relative to the advantaged castes has worsened. Dividing the sample into younger (aged 16–35) and older (36–65) cohorts, we find that the Hindu-Muslim gap in education is more acute in the younger cohort while the Hindu-Muslim wage gap is more pronounced for the older cohort. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Applied Economics

Religion in the labor market: evidence from India

The Communist Party of China’s transition from a revolutionary party to a ruling party has been accompanied by challenges to its legitimacy owing to issues of corruption and poor governance. As a result, the Party’s leadership has time and again laid stress on discipline and unity on internal governance, in other words, as a way of overcoming its shortcomings. This article looks at two approaches towards internal governance under current General Secretary Xi Jinping. The first, it argues, is a stress on the fervour and ideals of a past revolutionary era as the Party tries to reinforce its legitimacy to rule. The second is a strategy of greater control over the work of the state. Essentially, the Party is integrating the state ever closely with itself as a way of validating the effectiveness of its internal governance. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

China Report

‘Carrying Forward the Great Founding Spirit’: Governance in the Communist Party of China Today

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004-05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3-6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks. © 2022 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.