(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

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.

Shiv Nadar University

An anthropological study on judicial practices in South Asia, this volume takes criminal cases as frameworks to examine power dynamics within a legal setting. Case studies in this book analyse a set of state and non-state institutions and the practices of people associated with them. The essays delve into the underlying tension in institutional contexts between legal practitioners such as police officers, lawyers and judges who orient their claims towards neutralism, objectivity and equality and a set of everyday interactions and decisions where cultural, social and political factors play a major role. This volume is based on the premise that the study of judiciary cases, in all their multifaceted complexity, provides a pertinent and original angle from which to access some issues of South Asia. The chapters examine the discourses and relationships around criminal cases that shape how ideas circulate in the public sphere and how mediation and negotiation between different actors characterize police and court practices.

World University root node

Sociology

Regime of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia

A persistent concern of social anthropology of death has been to map dying and death within the meaningful matrices of myth, ritual actions and communitarian regeneration. This article embedded within the said legacy, departs from the convention in minor ways. It seeks to locate the agency of the dead as a specific kind of subject–object, focusing on the newly dead rather than on the dying and the fresh ancestors. The newly dead are those for whom the transition from the material–spectral state into a new embodiment must be observed through the proper processing of the dead. The article maps this realm of the newly dead in relation to the institutional practice of cremation in Denmark, Europe. The entry into the ethnographic understanding of the Danish context is informed by my previous fieldwork on the subject of cremation at Banaras, India. This article mainly borrows from my fieldwork at Aarhus, while Banaras serves as an alert backdrop. The specific object of enquiry that guided my research in Aarhus was to locate the controversial initiative to redirect the heat generated during the cremation process, for civil, municipal use. Locating the controversy, I argue, enables one to address the nature of institutional imaginaries involved in the processing of the newly dead. It further helps us to show how these imaginaries persist within a multiplicity of shifts such as new scientific inventions, Nazi use of cremation techniques, aestheticisation of funerary objects and the availability of commercial merchandise as funerary objects. In the ethnographic contextualisation of this multiplicity, the emphasis is on highlighting both the imaginaries of the proper processing of the dead and the doing of the proper. In this regard, the article poses the question: Is there any link between the myth and the proper observance of funerary procedures? It argues that the biblical version of singularity appears integral to the institutional imaginary of processing of the newly dead in Aarhus, just as scientific vision and communitarian sentiments are constitutive of it.

Society and Culture in South Asia

Modes of Processing the Dead: Ethnography of Crematoria

Crop choices made by farmers can make important contributions toward the sustainable management of groundwater resources in drought prone regions. However, farmers who would tend to maximize profits under normal circumstances face a trade-off between the choices of risky but more profitable high water intensive (HWI) crops on one hand and the low risk but less profitable low water intensive (LWI) and drought resistant (DR) crops on the other. In drought-hit regions of South India, institutional programs, such as crop water budgeting and farmer schools, have been promoted to provide support and information to the farmers in helping them make judicious crop choices. A multivariate probit (MVP) analysis reveals that crop water budget exercise and farmer field school participation, in fact, are positively associated with HWI crop choices, whereas participation in soil moisture conservation efforts is positively associated with growing LWI and DR crops. Our findings indicate that the objective of groundwater augmentation through institutional interventions that are solely based on educating and training farmers have been ineffective and have even been providing perverse incentives, and that there is a need for adding water extraction compliance components to such support programs in order for them to be efficacious. © 2015 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Economics

Water Economics and Policy

Do Institutional Programs Aimed at Groundwater Augmentation Affect Crop Choice Decisions under Groundwater Irrigation? Empirical Evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India

We analyze the quality (informativeness and efficiency) of advice obtained from a committee of careerist experts where voting is secret but voting profiles are 'leaked' with an exogenously given probability. We show that fully informative voting is achievable only when the common prior is not too informative, the committee uses the unanimity rule and faces random leakage. It is then shown that informativeness and efficiency are mutually exclusive properties of committees with careerist experts. © 2015 Elsevier Inc.

Games and Economic Behavior

Committees with leaks

Because emissions from solid fuel burning in traditional stoves impact global climate change, the regional environment, and household health, there is today real interest in improved cook stoves (ICS). Nonetheless, surprisingly little is known about what households like about these energy products. We report on preferences for biomass-burning ICS attributes in a large sample of 2120 rural households in north India, a global hotspot for biomass fuel use and the damages that such use entails. Households have a strong baseline reliance and preference for traditional stoves, a preference that outweighs the $10 and $5 willingness to pay (WTP) for realistic (33%) reductions in smoke emissions and fuel needs on average, respectively. Preferences for stove attributes are also highly varied, and correlated with a number of household characteristics (e.g. expenditures, gender of household head, patience and risk preferences). These results suggest that households exhibit cautious interest in some aspects of ICS, but that widespread adoption is unlikely because many households appear to prefer traditional stoves over ICS with similar characteristics. The policy community must therefore support a reinvigorated supply chain with complementary infrastructure investments, foster experimentation with products, encourage continued applied research and knowledge generation, and provide appropriate incentives to consumers, if ICS distribution is to be scaled up. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

Energy Economics

Preferences for improved cook stoves: Evidence from rural villages in north India

International Relations and Governance Studies

Governing Agricultural Sustainability: Global Lessons from GM Crops

An analysis of the GM crop debate in India

The chapter explores India’s development paradox of economic growth with massive rural poverty and unemployment, using the innovation systems framework as a lens. The innovation systems framework is being promoted in Indian economic decision-making. The framework tells us that innovation happens only when both technological and institutional changes occur. Yet, reconciliation between the narrow S&T-based and broader institutional learning-based approach to innovation has been difficult due to limited appreciation of the stranglehold of institutions over the components of the national innovation system (NIS). This chapter enquires how institutions, the overarching rules or norms that shape economic decisions, were considered in India’s production investments and technological capacities in agriculture and industry, sectors critical to production and consumption opportunities for India’s massive rural population. Norms of surplus extraction from modern technology based agriculture, and of technologically determined linkages between industries govern India’s centralized technological capacities and techno-centric production investments. Based on an understanding of the institutional realities of the economy, India’s NIS should address the aggregate demand constraint and limited opportunities for labour-intensive industrialization, in order to ensure employment and incomes for the rural poor, instead of focusing exclusively on high-tech-based export markets. © Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) 2015.

Emerging Economies: Food and Energy Security, and Technology and Innovation

Technological and institutional change: India’s development trajectory in an innovation systems framework

Based on fieldwork in Udaipur district in Rajasthan, this article examines how Bhil tribal leaders of the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad (VKP), a branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation, profess an ethic of des seva, or work and care for the nation, while describing their work with the VKP. Focusing on the VKP and RSS campaigns to Ayodhya in 1990 and 1992 and to the Shabari Kumbh in 2006, I examine the shifts in the political and ethical repertoires that shape tribal VKP fieldworkers' modalities of action and forms of self-making during travel at these different moments in time. During these campaigns, non-tribal leaders sought to discipline tribal leaders, referring to historically constructed ideas and practices about the civilisational inferiority of tribals, in order to show that they can never properly engage in des seva. The article draws on incidents from these two campaigns in order to show how tribal leaders fashion themselves in relation to how others believe they should behave and reveals some of the ways in which tribals inhabit, resist and revise the ideas and practices of Hindu nationalism.

Contributions to Indian Sociology

The ethics of des seva: Hindu nationalism, tribal leadership and modes of sociality in Rajasthan

This dictionary provides a comprehensive and ready guide to the key concepts, issues, persons and technologies related to the nuclear programmes of India and Pakistan and other South Asian states. This will serve as a useful reference especially as the nuclear issue continues to be an important domestic and international policy concern.

Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and concepts

Rural entrepreneurship is often promoted as an effective tool with which to confront developmental challenges in rural communities. An important question that has not been considered thus far is how climate change-induced water scarcity in agriculture may promote or hinder rural entrepreneurship. In this paper, a model is developed to explore the conditions under which rural enterprise may or may not be undertaken by farmers struggling to adapt to climate change-related water scarcity. The results derived here highlight the potential inter-generational trade-offs climate change could create in the pathways towards promoting developmental goals through rural enterprise. When farmers take on entrepreneurial activity, it also affects the human capital accumulation capability of their future generations through affecting their educational efforts. The risk of future reduction in rainfall availability makes the decision over whether or not to avail of the entrepreneurial opportunity challenging. Such risks may force less efficient farmers into taking to enterprise early on, thereby leading to suboptimal outcomes. However, several situations emerge under which, despite the lure of higher expected profits, farmers may not avail of an entrepreneurial opportunity or may delay it. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.