(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

Integrated Management of Acute Malnutrition or POSHAN Phase 2.0 was implemented in 20 districts of Rajasthan in 2018. After 12 weeks of outpatient therapeutic care of children with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), 70.4% children were cured, 12.2% defaulted and 17.4% were non-recovered and referred to Malnutrition Treatment Centres for facility treatment. The research study attempts to (a) study the sociocultural factors at the family level responsible for varying numbers of cured, defaulted and non-recovered SAM children at different localities; (b) explore the probability of the SAM children staying healthy post successful treatment at community settings without any external intervention; and (c) explore the possible approaches beyond the emergency medical response to develop a long-term strategy to address malnutrition in children. The insights and cues gained from the phenomenology of individual experiences help us understand the structural elements that undergird a healthy living. It was observed that irrespective of socio-demographic characteristics and food basket of a family, all the SAM children had a troubled medical history and/or low birth weight. The research findings also point out that a rise in income alone does not automatically lead to increased nutritional food intake. It is also important to see the issue of malnutrition in the larger context of the agrarian crisis that has cast its shadow over the rural landscape. For sustainable and lasting solutions, it is essential to shift to and promote farming practices that facilitate indigenous, locally produced and culturally acceptable nutrition from supplementary foods. © 2021 SAGE Publications.

World University root node

Journal of Health Management

A Sociocultural Perspective on Malnutrition in Children: Evidence from POSHAN Programme, Rajasthan

The environment is often invoked in the context of growing municipal waste, a result of rapid growth and burgeoning consumption in urban India, in a manner that would appear to be class and caste neutral, as well as accommodating of the interests of labor. In actuality, waste policy and practice have been contoured in distinctly opposite directions to that dictated by a genuine concern for the environment. The article draws on primary qualitative research in a medium hill town, primarily key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and official documents, to substantiate its arguments. Key findings suggest that the benign platform of the environment disguises ever greater informalization of the formal, in newer and structurally more damaging ways, to both labor and the environment. Indeed, as hypothesized by Roy (2009), the waste sphere shows the idiom of India’s urbanization and planning itself to be one of informality, characterized by deregulation, ambivalence, opacity, and exemption. © 2021 SAGE Publications.

International Relations and Governance Studies

Journal of Developing Societies

The Environment as Disingenuous Trope: Tracing Waste Policy and Practice in a Medium Hill Town of the Himalayas, India

In this paper, we study the role of a tax-funded public security system in superior technology adoption by strategic agents and consequent welfare implications of improvement in property security in an environment where rights to private property are completely insecure. We show that if property insecurity leads to technological backwardness (through strategic non-adoption of costlessly available superior technologies), a tax-funded public security that thwarts appropriation (much like a security-guard) can successfully support superior technology adoption by strategic agents in a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium. The superior technology equilibrium might even be welfare improving over the technological backwardness equilibrium if the available technology spectrum is sufficiently wide. We then study—within the confines of superior technology adoption—whether more secure property is always welfare improving for everyone. We find that better property security—although growth-enhancing—might not be welfare improving for all. Indeed, it is possible that the poor are made worse-off as a consequence of reallocation of resources in response to enhanced property security and not because public authorities are corruptible. In such a situation, we design a budget-balanced tax-linked-transfer scheme where the poor is given a tax-relief at the expense of an additional tax burden on the rich agent. We show that for a below thirtypercent tax relief to the poor, a Pareto-improving movement towards property security can be achieved. © 2021, Editorial Office, Indian Economic Review.

Economics

Indian Economic Review

Public security, technology adoption and welfare implications in an insecure property rights environment

Climate change is expected to adversely impact crop productivity and forest stocks of the planet, which will pose food security challenges and complicate carbon mitigation goals. This paper asks in what ways warming temperatures may affect the ability of REDD+ programs to sequester carbon and support rural livelihoods. An example from the forest-rich central Himalayan region of India is used for modeling the implications of crop productivity decline on land use change decisions. Local communities derive their livelihoods through multiple avenues including forestry and farming. When faced with warming-led declining crop productivity, communities may find it attractive to enroll farmland into REDD+ programs. However, a reduced biomass growth rate due to increasing temperatures and declining precipitation would also lower the benefits from REDD+ participation, thereby delaying the timing of irreversible land use decisions. Results suggest that while higher carbon prices and declining crop incomes incentivize early farmland conversion into forests, a lower biomass growth rate discourages REDD+ enrolment. If communities are allowed fuelwood harvesting from forests, it could make land enrollment into REDD+ more attractive, leading to early conversion. However, the value of fuelwood to the communities plays a crucial role in determining the timing of REDD+ participation. When fuelwood is less scarce, warming will delay enrollment into REDD+ schemes. Whereas, when fuelwood is valuable to the community, early afforestation becomes an attractive option. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Land Use Policy

Land use decisions under REDD+ incentives when warming temperatures affect crop productivity and forest biomass growth rates

The elementary unit of letter construction is the basic anatomical features of letterforms. The letter identification is a process of decoding and encoding of the anatomical information of the letters. They are the fundamental components of letter identification. This paper explains the process of Bengali letter identification and reveals the crucial anatomical features for design purposes. Here, an eye-tracking study has been conducted to identify the involvement of letter features in reading. In order to reveal the letter features, we exposed the letters under low contrast conditions to establish the consequence of anatomical features. The objective of the experiment is to identify the important letters features during the reading process that aids the letter identification task. A total number of six participants had performed the task under low contrast condition, and data was captured using an eye-tracking device. The aim of the paper is to understand the role of anatomical features in the letter identification process, so that such information can be useful for the Type designers. Type designers are designers who design typefaces and develop fonts for everyday use. The saccades, fixation, and heat-signature data from eye-tracking study have provided two major sets of information—(1) a list of letter features (individually) involved in the letter identification process, (2) a list of common and unique letter features across all Bengali letters. The result indicates that there is an active involvement of letter-parts and features in the letter identification process, and the list of common and distinctive letter features has been prepared to guide the type designers. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Design

Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies

The Role of Letter Anatomy in Type Design: An Eye-Tracking Study of Bengali Letters

Imperialism, international law, and war are not strange bedfellows but as the historical record suggests can be natural allies. While Anthony F. Lang, Jr in his chapter sheds light on the European discourse of just war, Siddharth Mallavarapu engages with various critical perspectives on the relationship between ‘empire’, ‘law’, and ‘war’: Mediated through questions of race, colonial difference, and ‘standards of civilization’, his contribution seeks to reverse the ‘gaze’ and view this compact not from the victor’s perspective often presented as neutral and disinterested but from the consciously partisan perspective of those who have been recipients of the violence inherent in the imperial way of law-making. It goes on to examine truncations or abridgements of classical sovereignty and shadow invocations of ‘responsibility’ with regard to ‘human shields’, drones and politico-legal responses to assassinations. Ultimately, it poses the question of what might help rehabilitate international law and avoid the logjams of bureaucratic rationality when it comes to dealing with conflict within and between states. © the many contributors 2021.

The Justification of War and International Order: From Past to Present

Imperialism, international law, and war: Enduring legacies and curious entanglements

This paper develops an integrated framework for modeling payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms that deliver multiple environmental services. Specifically, under a community-led PES, forest conservation is promoted to deliver carbon and stream water benefits. The upstream community is paid for avoided fuelwood harvesting through a United Nations programme on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) program, whereas additional income is generated from water sales to the downstream communities. A bio-economic model derives optimal level of fuelwood harvesting, which in conjunction with the changing species composition of forests, streamflow hydrology and fire risks, impacts on the carbon and water generation potential of the PES project. Results indicate that forest conservation outcomes are better when water and carbon services are combined, however overall cost to the program is lower under a carbon-based PES. Changing species composition of forests creates tradeoffs between water and carbon benefits. Forest fires further challenge the viability of PES schemes through reducing streamflow and carbon sequestration potential. Recommendations for Resource Managers: Linking two or more environmental services under a single payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme could improve forest conservation through making it more attractive to the participating communities. PES programs that combine multiple environmental services become economically attractive to participating communities through increasing their incomes. For instance, water and carbon driven services complement each other due to the overlapping benefits from improving forest biomass. However, fire risks can lower the benefits from PES and dissuade community participation. Similarly, the ecological and hydrological dimensions of PES projects that offer carbon and water benefits need to be understood and incorporated within PES framework design to enhance their durability. Conservation of mixed forests is more responsive to water-based PES payments, in comparison to monoculture oak forests, however, mixed forests are also more vulnerable to degradation in absence of cooking fuel subsidies. © 2021 The Authors. Natural Resource Modeling published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Fulltext

Natural Resource Modeling

Can combining two environmental services under a single PES program result in better environmental outcomes and lower costs?

The Covid pandemic has resulted in an economic shock. However, not all sectors are affected uniformly. We study two channels on the supply side through which the shock is amplified differentially across industries. First, we look at the dependence on global value chain (GVC), measured as share of imports in total inputs, which measures an industry’s integration with the GVC. A disruption in GVC will amplify the shock more for a higher value of the import share in inputs. Second, we construct a network of industries based on inputs used and calculated a dependency score for each industry. Higher the dependency score, greater is the chance for disruption. We find that both these factors are correlated with output share of the industries, implying amplification and a significant impact. Using IIP data for the months post the onset of pandemic, we find that disruption is higher in industries with higher import share and higher dependency score. Finally, we create a vulnerability index using these two variables. Industries with higher VI score are likely to face greater challenges in the recovery process. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Rajib Bhattacharyya, Ananya Ghosh Dastidar and Soumyen Sikdar; individual chapters, the contributors.

The Covid-19 Pandemic, India and the World: Economic and Social Policy Perspectives

IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES IN INDIA: Networks and trade dependence

In 1995, a multimillion-dollar experiment – the Indian Ocean Experiment – discovered a dark mass of polluting air hovering above the Indian subcontinent. This mass of air was termed a cloud and found to be composed of a high amount of black carbon that was judged to be the second biggest threat to climate change after carbon-dioxide. In this article, an attempt is made to trace the life of black carbon by documenting its changing forms since the experiment. It emerges that the changing forms allow for the movement of air – smoke from traditional cookstoves and vehicular diesel emissions in India lead to the formation of the cloud – and reveal how an ethnography of air can be undertaken. © The Author(s) 2021.