(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

Borders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at the local level. Constituted of processes of identification and networks of interdependences, localized construals of the borderland and subsequently positioned engagements, comes to shape notions of accessibility and restriction as well as perceptions of the “other”. These engagements are not always reflective of statist positions on the border which are often uniform in the conceptualization of its capacity to contain. They subsequently come to reflect the variations of divergent historical and locational realities. There is a need to further extend the analysis of borderlands beyond statist framing as passive recipients of policy as well as recognize the critical positioning of local adaptive processes as antithetical to state demarcations of territoriality and sovereign authority. Based on a survey of three districts in the state of West Bengal, India, this study posits an analysis of the multiple perceptions both within and outside of statist framing of borderland identity and territoriality, which color its inhabitants’ understanding of the border and perceptions surrounding and interactions with the communities that lie beyond it.

International Relations and Governance Studies

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Borders in Globalization Review

Borders, Citizenship, and the Local: Everyday Life in Three Districts of West Bengal

‘Imperialism, International Law and War: Enduring Legacies and Curious Entanglements’ in Lothar Brock and Hendrik Smith ed. The Justification of War and International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp.45-64

A reflection piece on travelling, testing and quarantine during the pandemic.&nbsp;

Sociology

Society and Culture in South Asia

The Unwittingly Wilful State Subject: Travelling and Testing in the Terrain of Threat

I study the evolutionary stability of behavioural rules in a bargaining game. Each individual bargains in a pairwise manner with all other individuals over the division of a pie of fixed size by claiming a share for himself; individuals in a pair receive their respective claims if and only if the sum of the claims does not exceed unity. Each individual is associated with a behavioural rule which determines the share he chooses to claim. A behavioural rule is a correspondence that maps from a set of demands that were claimed by individuals in the recent history of the game into a set of shares, and each share in the latter set is chosen by the individual with positive probability. The evolutionary fitness of a behavioural rule is determined by the shares obtained by individuals who follow that particular rule, and fitter behavioural rules are selected over rules that are less fit. A state, i.e. a profile of claims made by the individuals in the population, is defined to be stable (neutrally stable) if the population continues to be comprised only of the incumbent behavioural rules (all incumbent behavioural rules continue to exist) even in the face of an appearance of a mutant behavioural rule. I formalise this in terms of two conditions. Firstly, internal stability requires the incumbent behavioural rules in the population to be equally fit. Secondly, external stability (neutral external stability) requires incumbent behavioural rules to be fitter (to not be less fit) than any mutant behavioural rule. I show that: (i) a necessary condition for stability of a state is that the state must be such that each individual responds by claiming a time-invariant share of the pie, and (ii) the state where all individuals demand half of the pie is the only state that is both internally stable and neutrally externally stable. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Economics

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Evolutionary stability of behavioural rules in bargaining

Bat-borne pathogens such as Nipah virus, SARS-CoV2, and Ebola have been causing significant losses to the global economy and human lives. In this paper, the role of afforestation and agroforestry in mitigating risk of bat-borne disease transmission to humans is explored using an epidemiological-agroforestry model of land use decision on private farms. Farmers owning land in fragmented forest areas are financially incentivized to grow Gmelina arborea-based forests or intermix them with agricultural crops. This reduces forest fragmentation through creating connectivity between forest patches. While agroforestry may increase the chances of contact between bats and humans, a reduction in forest fragmentation improves the carrying capacity of bats and reduces their risk of migration and roosting near human dwellings. Results indicate that afforestation on private lands or promoting agroforestry can help reduce the risk of virus transmission to humans. A small sum paid under a payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme would be sufficient to incentivize farmers to convert their farmlands into Gmelina arborea-based agroforestry or forests. In absence of substantial PES incentives, private landowners may delay land conversion when financial benefits generated through agroforestry timber sales carry higher weight in their optimization decisions. Whereas the socially optimal land use option would be to immediately convert farmland in affected areas to agroforestry or forests. Therefore, from a policy perspective, promoting PES-based forestry and agroforestry in fragmented bat habitats can help prevent spread of deadly viruses in the future. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Cleaner Production

Mitigating vector-borne pathogen spread risks through promoting Gmelina arborea-based afforestation and agroforestry on private farms

This paper develops a potential Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) based agroforestry mechanism for removing nitrate contaminants from a groundwater plume. Under a PES arrangement, farmers are incentivized to grow nitrate removing poplar trees which yield timber revenues along with PES incomes for cleaning a contaminated aquifer. Optimal land use allocation decisions between a traditional agricultural crop and poplar based agroforestry are derived using a dynamic bio-economic model of groundwater nitrate assimilation in trees, where rate of biomass accumulation is influenced by the length of rotation, PES payments and revenues from poplar and wheat. Results, derived through an application of the model to Uttar Pradesh, India, suggest that the rate of nitrate removal from contaminated plumes can get constrained by the total land area dedicated to poplar farming as well as by the rotation length of poplar plantation. Revenues generated through poplar biomass sale play a crucial role in land use decisions in favor of poplar afforestation. In absence of biomass income, afforestation decisions become sensitive to PES price. Findings also indicate that nitrate remediation of highly contaminated aquifers would require large-scale conversion of farmlands and a long-term time frame, for which it is important to make PES-based agroforestry financially attractive to the farmers. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Payments for ecosystems services-based agroforestry and groundwater nitrate remediation: The case of Poplar deltoides in Uttar Pradesh, India

In the year 1975, the Indian government initiated the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), the largest national programme in the world targeting long-term nutrition and holistic development of children, to be implemented through the Anganwadi Centres (AWC). Combining differences across villages in the year of AWC construction with birth-year of children, we capture the variation in ‘exposure’ to the programme, to estimate the impact of the ICDS exposure through access to AWCs on later life health outcomes of children. Our findings suggest that a 10–13 year old cohort fully exposed to the scheme during first three years of life has higher height (by 2.3 cm) and weight (by 1 kg) as compared to the same cohort, not exposed to the services in initial three years. The Z score of height-for-age (ZHFA) and Z score of weight-for-age ZWFA, although not statistically significant, seem to increase as well. The average impacts seem to be as high as 0.74 cm and 0.33 kg for an extra year of exposure, for measures of height and weight, respectively. Our findings are robust to changing age cohorts and several specifications. The effects seem to be larger among girls and in poor households. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.

Journal of Development Studies

Lasting Impact of Early Life Interventions: Evidence from India’s Integrated Child Development Services

Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imaginations of India’s identity has been refashioned to legitimize its foreign policy. These three cases point to Nehru’s decision to join the Commonwealth, Vajpayee’s strides for nuclearization and Modi’s approach toward the diaspora. We argue that foreign policy makers in India have either refrained from engaging with ‘public history’ due to their uncritical positioning in structural realism or erected versions of the past that happily rationalize their contemporary practices. The deployment of public histories has taken place to invoke India rightful place in the international order and as instruments in shaping public consensus which advances the interests of the elites in validating their foreign policy choices. This elite-driven exercise is shot through the dominant Western imaginations and cognitive categories although these elites self- consciously took charge of the destiny of a nation that had to be refashioned as ‘post- colonial.’. © 2021 Taylor & Francis.

India Review

Indian foreign policy as public history: globalist, pragmatist and Hindutva imaginations

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

How to decentre Aberystwyth and tell a critical, multilocational IR story

The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review (Dasgupta 2021), henceforth the Review, tells us that we are embedded in Nature and our economies are bounded within Nature. It helps us estimate the value of natural capital and include it in estimations of economic output. The Review’s key messages concern (i) keeping our demands well within Nature’s supply, (ii) moving away from gross domestic product (GDP) towards inclusive wealth as a measure of economic success, and (iii) acknowledging the institutional failure in addressing global environmental problems and resolving them through institutional reforms in the financial and education systems. However, this commentary suggests that the Review is about conserving economics for biodiversity. It offers little opportunity for transformative change in our thinking and acting, to change our relationship with Nature so that we can conserve its diversity and dynamism. This commentary suggests possible ways forward, drawing upon lessons on non-linear behaviour, emergent properties, and complexity in Nature. These include looking to niche communities that live within the limits set by Nature, learning from various environmental social sciences on how to maintain and promote the aggregate stocks and funds of Nature; and finding ways to include economic activity and output in value frameworks of sustainability, justice, and diversity. © Raina 2021.