(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

This paper proposes new composite measures of relative and dynamic state performance to improve governance and delivery of public programs in developing countries with a federal structure. We illustrate the use of the indices to rank the performance of 19 major Indian states on two large development programs launched by the Indian government over the last two decades using publicly available data. Although we find volatility in performance over time, there exists a positive correlation between measures of initial (administrative) state capacity, development and accountability with program outcomes. Our findings have important implications for both the design and implementation of large-scale public programs across developing countries. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

World University root node

Economics

Fulltext

Journal of Asian Economics

Measuring performance: Ranking state success over two decades in India

This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

History

Children's Geographies

Caste, space, and schooling in nineteenth century South India

Yasmeen Arif’s speculative essay scrutinises the temporal frame of the contemporary to outline the sets of responses to the question of scientific method in the social sciences. An important entry point for Arif is the recent ‘shifts’ in sociology/social anthropology towards the study of conventionally ‘objective’ realms. She problematises the simplistic binary between scientificity and subjectivity, since the question of method in sociology/social anthropology cannot be posed in these limited and pregiven range of responses. She points out right at the outset that the dividing lines between positivism, empiricism, objectivity, and arguments of reliability and validity, on the one hand, and intricacies of narrative structure, subjectivity, authenticity, plurality, representation, languages, and modes of writing on the other are increasingly blurred. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Gita Chadha and Renny Thomas.

Sociology

Mapping Scientific Method: Disciplinary Narrations

BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL: Speculations on the Indian Contemporary

Are elections immediately preceded by periods of increased violent crimes? In this paper, we test the link between criminal activity and electoral cycles. We use annual data from 1981 to 2007 on crimes and data from the parliamentary elections in India for the same period. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that election years have significantly higher incidence of violent crimes even after accounting for poverty and inequality. This effect is statistically significant and consistent across specifications. The effect is magnified in districts that are more competitive. Similar regressions using economic crimes and elections show either a decline or no effect. Our results are strongly indicative of a close link between violent crimes and elections, and are critical for the growing debate on the criminalization of politics in developing countries. © 2022 John Wiley &amp; Sons Ltd.

Review of Development Economics

Crime, elections, and political competition

We empirically examine whether violation of hypergamy—which occurs when the wife's economic status equals or exceeds that of her husband's—causally affects domestic violence using microdata from India. Identifying the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence, however, is challenging due to unmeasured confounding and reverse causality. To overcome these difficulties, we utilize a non-parametric bounds approach. Employing this approach, we find strong evidence that violation of hypergamy leads to a significant increase in domestic violence. Furthermore, we provide suggestive evidence that this result arises because violation of hypergamy is likely to undermine patriarchal beliefs and norms about gender roles, and also because it is likely to increase men's likelihood of using domestic violence as an instrument to sabotage their wives' labour market prospects. Our findings suggest that policies that seek to empower women and promote gender equality might paradoxically increase women's exposure to domestic violence. © 2022 Royal Statistical Society.

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society

Don't cross the line: Bounding the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence in India

Despite large-scale financial development and banks being the most important credit source globally, banking continues to be plagued by asymmetric information. This uncertainty makes credit risk assessment decisions complex and expensive. In this context, we show how discretionary borrower characteristics, such as the borrower’s network (which can co-insure), help mitigate risk and reduce costs by altering lending decisions. The literature on loan pricing remains focused on objective credit scoring models, while the network literature remains empirical, and borrower based. We fill this void by being the first to theoretically model the lender’s internal decision-making problem when borrowers display discretionary default risk-mitigating attributes such as network strength. We find that the interest rate reduces as the network strength increases. As constraints set in and borrowing becomes more competitive, banks rely even more on network information to parse out better borrowers. Finally, banks substitute monitoring effort with network strength for a more feasible interest rate. This will increase lending, even to borrowers outside the banks’ purview earlier. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Finance, Accounting and Control

(SME) School of Management and Entrepreneurship

Applied Economics

Mitigating credit risk: modelling and optimizing co-insurance in loan pricing

This chapter explores the complex encounter between the missionaries of the Basel German Missionary Society (BM) and local children raised in their boarding schools/orphanages based at various parts of British-ruled Malabar in present-day south India. The BM played an instrumental role in establishing the earliest residential institutions for the children of the labouring poor in the Malayalam speaking region where they sought to also forge ‘model’ Christian communities. Poor, colonized children belonging to lower caste communities were targeted for conversion, which resulted in varying contestations about childhood. In their attempt to erase previous caste-inscribed markers, the missionaries negotiated with local power dynamics and sites of authority, and the children themselves. Often, ‘orphans’ were not always without parents, and the BM employed coercive measures to admit poor children into their orphanages, by arguing against the so-called ‘barbarity’ of Indian parenting, and reorienting norms of childhood. They were not entirely successful as children also influenced decision-making processes and resisted the rigorous disciplinary order and labour regime inflicted on them. This chapter attempts to trace the politics of these boarding institutions and demonstrates ambiguity and racial tension marking the missionary project of schooling poor children in colonial south India even as Christianity brought new ideas of morality and self. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Recasting Poor Children: Basel Mission Boarding Schools in Colonial Malabar

Special issue: modernity, schooling, and childhood in India: trajectories of exclusion

This is a chapter published in Eswaran Sridharan (ed.), Eastward Ho: India’s Relations with the Indo-Pacific, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, June 2021. The chapter studies perceptions of various stakeholders in Bangladesh regarding relations with India after the coming to power of a new regime in India. It surveys the dual narratives of conventional and human security challenges and identifies the possible areas of convergences in the bilateral ties between Dhaka and New Delhi. It also audits the federal affects on India;s neighbourhood policy.&nbsp;

International Relations and Governance Studies

India-Bangladesh Relations: Geopolitics or Human Security?

As we live and die through the continuing pandemic, one particular affect that relates us globally is of the dead awaiting their funerary repose. Assessing the pandemic, Arif (2020) in an early reflection proposes that we might benefit in our assessment of the ‘bio-social’ of the pandemic by admitting to the sovereignty of the virus. Borrowing this premise, I suggest further that the sovereignty of the virus is acutely manifested in the commingled presence of the living and unreposed dead in the temporary, improvised morgues. Although the continuing pandemic is quite unprecedented, it can be partially recognised in knowledges gained in mourning that register how disasters force a ‘descent’ (Das 2006) and ‘fall’ (Rosaldo 2014) into accepting improvisation of life and death forms. This descent and fall can be towards an abyss risking the very continuum of life, but what we also gain from discerning the relation of mourning with knowledge is that life can be regained at many levels of the fall. Just as the unreposed dead manifest the sovereignty of the virus, I suggest this descent and fall can be ethically attested in improvisation as the social surface of regaining life. It is my contention that this full-time improvisation, which in turn must be its own source, energy and end, must operate facing the unreposed dead. Deriving and extending from my own work of studying the dead, the present essay shows this improvisation and regaining of life through two brief assemblages of bacteriophage virus and media morgue. The relation of mourning and knowledge is built through the essay to arrive at the conclusion that the classic trope of life cycle in anthropology has to be seen as part of a complex texture of the social where vitality and the unreposed dead are concurrent and overlapping. &nbsp;