(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

Despite the potential of improved cookstoves to reduce the adverse environmental and health impacts of solid fuel use, their adoption and use remains low. Social marketing - with its focus on the marketing mix of promotion, product, price, and place - offers a useful way to understand household behaviors and design campaigns to change biomass fuel use. We report on a series of pilots across 3 Indian states that use different combinations of the marketing mix. We find sales varying from 0% to 60%. Behavior change promotion that combined door-to-door personalized demonstrations with information pamphlets was effective. When given a choice amongst products, households strongly preferred an electric stove over improved biomass-burning options. Among different stove attributes, reduced cooking time was considered most valuable by those adopting a new stove. Households clearly identified price as a significant barrier to adoption, while provision of discounts (e.g., rebates given if households used the stove) or payments in installments were related to higher purchase. Place-based factors such as remoteness and nongovernmental organization operations significantly affected the ability to supply and convince households to buy and use improved cookstoves. Collectively, these pilots point to the importance of continued and extensive testing of messages, pricing models, and different stove types before scale-up. Thus, we caution that a one-size-fits-all approach will not boost improved cookstove adoption. Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

World University root node

Sociology

Fulltext

Journal of Health Communication

Piloting improved cookstoves in India

Discursive exercises to be practiced in relation to the time of departure.

MARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE (FORMERLY KNOWN AS BLACKMARKET) : LAST MINUTE EXERCISE.

Book Review: David L. Haberman. 2006. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. xiv + 277 pp. Figures, plates, notes, references, index. $24.95 (paperback).

Contributions to Indian Sociology

We consider implementation of a deterministic allocation rule using transfers in quasi-linear private values environments. We show that in multidimensional single peaked type spaces, an allocation rule is implementable if and only if it satisfies a familiar and simple condition called 2-cycle monotonicity. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.

Economics

Journal of Economic Theory

Multidimensional mechanism design in single peaked type spaces

International Relations and Governance Studies

India's Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases

Securing India: Gandhian intuitions

Individuals are randomly matched to play a 2X2 coordination game where the Pareto efficient and risk dominant equilibria differ. Players choose strategies by imitating the strategy of the most successful individual they observe. So, while individuals interact globally, their observation and hence imitation, as determined by their social network, may be local. When all individuals observe each other, the most successful individual in the entire population is imitated; here, in the stochastically stable state, the population coordinates on the Pareto-efficient outcome. While this outcome is always stochastically stable, even when observability is incomplete, the state where everyone plays the action of the risk-dominant equilibrium may be stochastically stable as well. Reasonably tight sufficient conditions for unique stochastic stability of the state where all coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium strategy include each individual observing at least four other individuals or when each individual observes the same number of other individuals. These properties are readily generalisable to larger mXm coordination games where the coordination outcomes can be Pareto-ranked. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

International Journal of Game Theory

Coordination under global random interaction and local imitation

In water-scarce regions of the world, water-saving technology adoption augments farm productivity. But so does social capital. In this paper, the issue of ensuring livelihood for farmers through the combined use of social capital and water-saving technology is modeled in the context of repeated droughts. The model presented here derives optimal resource conservation and accumulation strategies when the farmer must ensure minimum consumption during a set of repeated drought events in the future. Findings indicate that the path to drought resilience presents a complex trade-off between accumulating one form of capital over another and is influenced by farmers' wealth and water endowments, level of risk associated with the repeated droughts and the duration of the repeated drought event that the farmer plans to survive. A higher risk of repeated droughts leads to an increase in groundwater conservation efforts but delays technology adoption. Lower water endowments may also delay adoption and reduce social capital, however, a lower social capital or a slow rate of its growth is not a hindrance to adopting water-saving technology earlier. Finally, social capital evolves to higher levels when farmer is simultaneously faced with a higher level of risks and a longer span of drought events. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Natural Resource Modeling

Combining social capital and technology for drought resilience in agriculture

Surviving prolonged water scarcity in agriculture requires farmers to be resilient along multiple dimensions. Farmers may aim to attain resilience from financial as well as natural capital perspectives. In this paper, a model of multi-dimensional resilience is developed which incorporates risk reduction and wealth accumulation as farmers' key survival strategies. Findings indicate that the relative choice over risk reduction and wealth accumulation strategies varies depending upon whether the farmer is groundwater resilience seeking type or financial resilience seeking type. Also, as the level of risks increases, the financial resilience seeking type farmer may exhibit a non-linear pattern of tradeoff between risk reduction and wealth accumulation behavior. At lower levels of risks, the farmer's optimal response is to reduce risk further with a marginal increase in the exogenous component of the risk. However, at higher levels of risk, more wealth is accumulated as the exogenous component of the risk increases. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research

Multi-dimensional resilience in water-scarce agriculture

This article critically examines indigenism in the field of International Relations (IR) in India. Indigenism involves a claim that a select corpus of resources from early India—‘indigenous historical knowledge'— is relevant for understanding contemporary India's politics and international relations. It is also projected as a basis for reimagining IR in India. Contesting these claims, the article outlines the ahistorical and politically problematic nature of indigenism. It also argues that the appeal of indigenism reveals a predicament of imaginative capacity that marks the scholarship concerned with reimagining IR in India: despite considerable interest in lessening the dependence on the architecture of IR of the West, there is less clarity about the shape and substance of new scholarly frameworks. The enthusiasm for reimagining IR is not, as yet, matched by very substantive pathways to doing it. This too, inadvertently, encourages indigenism. The article concludes by arguing that closely studying the political modernization of South Asia and its implications for international relations of India and the region can resolve this predicament.

Studies in Indian Politics

Indigenism in contemporary IR discourses in India: A critique

In regions where common pool resources provide significant support to their surrounding communities, any climate change related shock could produce multiple livelihood repercussions. In this paper, a model explores how the health of common pool resources could impact upon human capital outcomes for communities that struggle to find alternate livelihood options when traditional means such as agriculture become unsustainable. The management of common pool resources is modeled as a strategic interaction process between two heterogeneous communities that are directly or indirectly dependent upon it. An unconstrained harvesting of common resources such as forestry not only depletes its stocks, but it also indirectly affects crop output through soil degradation. A number of situations are constructed where communities are able to successfully finance human capital accumulation through proper management of their common pool resources. However, results also warn that communities that are faced with limited opportunities towards accumulating human capital must plan ahead to prevent the depletion of their common resources below critical levels. When non-linear feedbacks to soil degradation emanate from low levels of common pool stocks, human capital outcomes as well as future livelihoods of such communities are threatened. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.