(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

Teaching Odissi in the university space is not new to me. However, as a dancer-scholar located in India, teaching this dance form in a university in the United States expanded and deepened my understanding of this dance form and the ways it can be taught. This encounter, a collision of cultures, beliefs, and movement practices in the dance studio, engendered a pedagogical process that revealed itself as I taught this class over two semesters. The design of the class discussed in this article emerged from an intersection of my own training in Odissi with my guru and the institutional requirements of the program. This paper unpacks my pedagogical process of creating a syllabus, adopting teaching strategies, and assessing student work for negotiating the cultural chasm between me and my students, hoping to generate a sense of critical questioning, mutual curiosity, and respect. © 2022 National Dance Education Organization.

Art & Performing Art

Journal of Dance Education

Locating Odissi in the United States: Dancing through Curricula, Teaching Methods, and Assessment

This paper examines the unintended consequences of a policy aimed at improving the groundwater level on crop residue burning in India. The Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009 implemented in two Indian states bans the transplantation of paddy before mid-June to preserve groundwater. Theoretically, this leaves a short window of time for clearing the field before the next crop and thus increases the likelihood of farmers adopting time-saving methods like crop residue burning. Using a difference-in-difference framework we find that the ban results in both delay and an increase in crop residue burning in the winter months. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

World University root node

Economics

Economics Letters

Unintended consequences of Indian groundwater preservation law on crop residue burning

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

<p>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.</p>

Review of Development Economics

Crime, elections, and political competition

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.

Journal of Asian Economics

Measuring performance: Ranking state success over two decades in India

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.

Fulltext

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.