(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

Human muscular strength is extensively used in Indian agriculture for operating various push-pull type farm tools and equipment. Incompatibility between operators' physical capabilities (anthropometric and biomechanical) and demands of physical task to operate tools/equipment often leads to poor performance, low productivity and safety problems. Although anthropometric data are generally being considered, an inadvertent negligence of using strength database for agricultural tools/equipment design is very common in developing countries like India. Therefore, in present paper an attempt has been made to statistically analyze available strength data (pooled and regional/state wise data) of male and female Indian agricultural workers to understand nature of variability of those data in terms of difference between pooled Indian data vs. individual state data; difference between male vs. female data across various states of India; and for determining safe operational force limits for handling various agricultural tools/equipment. Critical evaluation of male and female strength data revealed that there are significant differences (p&lt;0.01 or p&lt;0.05) between mean values of pooled Indian data vs. individual state data for almost all strength variables under study. It has also been observed that average muscular strength of female is significantly lower (in general 2/3rd of male) than their male counter parts across all states. Thus, present study concluded that regional variations and gender variation of isometric strength data are crucial ergonomic consideration for using percentile strength data during calculation of operational force limits for designing various agricultural tools/equipment to be used by targeted user populations from various parts of a country like India with huge ethnic diversity.

World University root node

Design

Agricultural Engineering International: CIGR Journal

Isometric muscular strength data of Indian agricultural workers for equipment design: Critical analysis

In this paper, a mathematical model of optimal management of prolonged and consecutive drought events is developed to evaluate circumstances under which the adoption of a water-efficient technology may offer long-term drought resilience. The decision over technology adoption and its timing is affected by the objective of surviving a certain number of consecutive droughts besides being influenced by the costs of technology and the farmer's endowments. A key finding is that planning for surviving through a longer drought period may discourage early technology adoption among poorer farmers faced with groundwater scarcity. Compared with wealthy farmers, the tendency to conserve groundwater for the poorer farmers when the drought planning horizon is longer gets reversed with an increase in the risks of repeated droughts. At low risks, groundwater conservation increases with the drought-planning horizon, but at higher risks, groundwater is depleted faster as the drought-planning horizon increases. Technology adoption may be discouraged when the possibility of repeated droughts is imminent or when the risk of an irreversible loss of groundwater is present. © 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Economics

Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management

Technology adoption for long-term drought resilience

Affirmative action, in the form of reservation policies, to address the issues of inclusion has been in place in India for a long time. While its scope has enlarged with inclusion of new social groups, the efficacy remains a matter of debate. This paper explores if parental education is an appropriate criterion for affirmative action. Empirical results using three rounds of the National Sample Survey data suggest that parental education as a determinant of participation in higher education not only transcends the impact of caste, religious, and economic status, it is also very attractive for the ease of implementation. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

World Development

Parental education as a criterion for affirmative action in higher education

This paper explores the role of socio-religious affiliations in determining participation in higher education in India, and whether the importance of these affiliations changes over time. Using National Sample Survey data it follows the change in the hierarchy of participation within a binary probit framework over the years. Since being eligible for higher education is found to be the key f actor in par ticipation, it also explores the ro le of supply-side constraints by controlling for the distance to a secondary school. Econometric estimations for rural and urban areas indicate a vast rural-urban divide in the role of socio-religious affiliations. Eligibility seems to be the key factor in participation, and a better understanding of the constraints on school education is critical if par ticipation in higher education is to be increased.

Economic and Political Weekly

Access to higher education in India

The case of the local people's grievance against the mining of iron ore for the Bhilai steel plant from Rowghat in the reserved forest area of Ch hat ti sga rh, a Fifth Schedule Area, is just one more example of the infringement of constitutional rights and guarantees. It also portends what is to come with the polity poised to take a decisive right-wing turn.

International Relations and Governance Studies

Democracy and its inconvenient questions

The threat of release of methane sequestered in the circumpolar Arctic regions of the world creates the possibility of triggering additional feedback effects from the terrestrial and the deep ocean systems which could potentially add large amounts of carbon (C) into the atmosphere. This paper analyses the implications for C mitigation policy under the threats of a substantial permafrost methane release. Several insights emerge from the analysis. First, the presence of non-linear feedbacks creates a bifurcation zone in the C emissions-stock space, on one side of which large accumulations of atmospheric C materialize leading to significant damages. Second, the bifurcation line does not have a steep slope, implying that it would be possible to avoid falling on the wrong side of this zone even if the current atmospheric stock of C were higher than what they are today. Third, when the release of permafrost C is uncertain, there is benefit in reducing anthropogenic C more than what would be optimal under a certain release of the same. Fourth, higher abatement cost scenarios do not necessarily imply significantly reduced abatement efforts. On the contrary, abatement efforts, which are only reduced marginally under this scenario, ensure that long run carbon path is stabilized. This is done in order to avoid incurring substantial costs of abatement in the future when non-linear feedback effects kick in. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change

Optimal carbon mitigation strategy under non-linear feedback effects and in the presence of permafrost release trigger hazard

Inspired by the behavior in repeated guessing game experiments, we study adaptive play by populations containing individuals that reason with different levels of cognition. Individuals play a higher order best response to samples from the empirical data on the history of play, where the order of best response is determined by their exogenously given level of cognition. As in Young’s model of adaptive play, (unperturbed) play still converges to a minimal curb set. Random perturbations of the best response dynamic identifies the stochastically stable states. In Young’s model of adaptive play with simple best-responses, the set of stochastically stable states are sensitive to the sample size that individuals from a population can draw. In generic games with higher order best-responders in both populations, the sample size is rendered irrelevant in determination of the stochastically stable set. Perhaps counter-intuitively, higher cognition may actually be bad for both the individual with higher cognition and his parent population. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Fulltext

International Journal of Game Theory

Cognitive hierarchies in adaptive play

Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among potential users in many low-income settings, including India, remains slow, despite decades of promotion. This paper explores the variation in perceptions of and preferences for ICS in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as revealed through a series of semi-structured focus groups and interviews from 11 rural villages or hamlets. We find cautious interest in new ICS technologies, and observe that preferences for ICS are positively related to perceptions of health and time savings. Other respondent and community characteristics, e.g., gender, education, prior experience with clean stoves and institutions promoting similar technologies, and social norms as perceived through the actions of neighbours, also appear important. Though they cannot be considered representative, our results suggest that efforts to increase adoption and use of ICS in rural India will likely require a combination of supply-chain improvements and carefully designed social marketing and promotion campaigns, and possibly incentives, to reduce the up-front cost of stoves. © 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Sociology

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

How do people in rural india perceive improved stoves and clean fuel? evidence from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand

Farmers in the rainfed districts of South India are faced with repeated drought conditions, which adversely affect their livelihoods, placing their survival at stake. In this chapter, we empirically assess the drought survival potential of such households in three drought-prone districts of Andhra Pradesh, and evaluate the roles of human, physical, social, financial, and natural capitals in determining their resilience to repeated droughts. The key findings indicate that within the human capital category, health is not considered relevant for future drought survival, whereas higher skills are considered important by the households. Further, level of education and number of earning members in the household positively influence perceived drought survival. In addition, reliance on government intervention programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for drought survival is higher among households with better health; such households also show greater reliance on common property resources for their income, implying that households with better health are able to better access or utilize livelihood opportunities outside of farming. The study also finds that watershed programs may have contributed to increased inequality in these regions; when compared to untreated regions, watershed-treated areas show improved drought resilience in some regions while there is no improvement in others. Results also indicate that the perceived resilience of farmers seems to have improved in terms of financial and health indicators in the watershed-treated regions despite a decline in their net crop incomes. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Integrated Assessment of Scale Impacts of Watershed Intervention: Assessing Hydrogeological and Bio-Physical Influences on Livelihoods

Evaluating the Determinants of Perceived Drought Resilience: An Empirical Analysis of Farmers' Survival Capabilities in Drought-Prone Regions of South India

In response to prolonged drought situations, water collectives have been promoted and exist in most water scarce farming regions to help them sustainably manage groundwater resources. However, the sustainability of the collectives itself is prone to groundwater depletion and to the risk of its irreversible future loss. The role of groundwater loss risk in determining the success or failure of groundwater collectives is inadequately understood. In this paper, a stylized dynamic optimization model of institutional participation is developed and results are analyzed for several cases of collective and non-collective farming behaviour. Results indicate that risk of groundwater loss may increase the tendency to free ride and exacerbate its depletion. This tendency may increase with a larger collective size when there are no deterrence mechanisms in place. However, when staying out threatens institutional stability, it is optimal for the profitmaximizing farmer to join the collective and help with groundwater conservation. © 2014 The Author.