(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

The world at large when focused on China has tended to focus on its economic prowess, its large domestic market and of late, its rising international economic heft as expressed in such outreach projects as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, for the Communist Party of China (CPC) itself, the central focus has always been to use economic capacity to ensure domestic stability and the continuation in power of the Party. This chapter, therefore, looks at the Chinese leadership’s views of the Chinese economy, as gleaned from prominent reports and speeches and what these say of their views, including apprehensions, about the state of affairs of the Chinese economy and the implications for the position and legitimacy of the CPC. © The Author(s) 2020.

International Relations and Governance Studies

China’s Search for ‘National Rejuvenation’: Domestic and Foreign Policies under Xi Jinping

Political considerations in the Chinese leadership’s economic assessments

This paper argues that what we do to conserve biodiversity depends on how we know biodiversity. The former Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is concerned that national policymakers may not take the findings of this global assessment (GA) seriously because of ‘squabbling scientists.’ The paper explores the contentious issues in IPBES, about presenting knowledge to policymakers, and about the integration of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) into this global scientific knowledge creation. It asks why IPBES fights shy of addressing the dialectical relationship between how we know and how we act on the environment. Given that biodiversity is best understood and conserved by local communities, we present a case study of the protocols or policies of the Maldhari community in the Banni grasslands in India. The institutions or norms of the Maldhari ‘way of life’ govern and co-create their knowledge and policy decisions or protocols for biodiversity and livelihoods. The IPBES conceptual framework places these institutions that govern knowledge generation and policy-making outside and distinct from the direct drivers of nature and human well-being. If IPBES findings are to be taken up by nation states, we need astute policy makers who understand institutions and are capable of public engagement and co-creation of knowledge and policy. The paper makes a plea for building on the IPBES report with national and local public engagement, to enable knowledge-policy relationships of co-ownership and action for biodiversity conservation. © 2020, Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature.

World University root node

Sustainability Science

How we know biodiversity: institutions and knowledge-policy relationships

While quota-based and other affirmative actions remain on the policy radar of nations faced with social inequalities, there is limited evidence informing policy choices at the national level. This paper estimates the mid-term impact of quota-based affirmative action in higher education (HE) in India implemented from 2008, which mandates that 27 per cent of seats are to be reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in public funded institutions of HE. Exploiting the differences in participation across social groups, age cohort,s and geographies with varied histories of affirmative action, our triple difference method estimates the impact of the Act by the year 2011–2012. Our results indicate that southern and northcentral states that already had quotas in place for a fairly long period of time, do not contribute much in further expansion of enrolment of OBCs; instead, the eastern region, where such a policy did not exist for long has about 0.12 points improvement in enrolment. Our estimates are robust to different specifications and the impact seems to be non-existent amongst the richest. It suggests that future policy initiatives need to be more nuanced considering regional differences in policy histories, supply of institutions, and extant rates of HE participation of the disadvantaged sections. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Economics

Journal of Development Studies

Quota-Based Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Impact on Other Backward Classes in India

A road map for resuming limited economic activities with necessary precautions in certain industries that can lessen economic pain, given the prevailing situation, has been drawn up in this paper. It identifies industries and districts that can start functioning in a limited manner, informed by geographical, occupational, and other industry-specific data. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Economic and Political Weekly

Lives and livelihood: An exit strategy from lockdown

When the traditional (dance) and the modern (university) intersect within the Liberal Arts, the pedagogical dynamics produced opens possible pathways to approach decolonization as an ongoing praxical pedagogical process. This un-archival unruly lived experience of decolonization proposes a possibility of evoking Indian pasts against the misuses of the present. Arguing for an un-archival response which mediates the insertion of traditional oral mnemocultres into academia, enables knowledge production through heterogeneous modes of practice sustained by an embodied relation with generativity. Examining the relationship between the curriculum, the teacher and the student created in this context, this paper theorizes decolonization as an epistemological move towards understanding, living and moving beyond the colonial translation. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Art & Performing Art

Research in Dance Education

Choreographing decolonization: pedagogical confrontations at the intersection of traditional dance and liberal arts in higher education in India

The notion of the “migrant” in the current capitalist times and the world of migrants in it are explored. The source to destination streams of migrant labour is outlined, and it is then argued that reverse migration will perhaps usher in the greatest crisis in the rural landscape of India, for which we are not yet prepared. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Migration and reverse migration in the age of covid-19

We study optimal fiscal policy in a stock-flow model of the environment within an endogenous growth framework, where some pollutants have a lasting impact on environmental quality which is restored through abatement expenditure, while others dissipate and hence, have a short-term effect on the environment. All pollutants, however, affect the productivity of a public good negatively. Given that short-term pollution, although it dissipates, is irreversible in this sense, a government cannot ignore its negative effects since this type of pollution lowers the productivity of all inputs. We find that a larger negative effect of short-term pollutants as well as a higher congestion effect of private capital leads to corrective fiscal policies with higher optimal income tax and abatement expenditure rates, which have favorable growth consequences. Interestingly, we find that the rate of short-term pollution does not affect optimal fiscal policy while that of the long-term pollution does. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Journal of Public Economic Theory

Are short-term effects of pollution important for growth and optimal fiscal policy?

Induismo e cremazione. Altri addii (Other Goodbyes) Ana Cristina VargasINTERVISTARavi Nandan Singh

Sociology

SOCREM NEWS

Induismo e cremazione. Altri addii (Other Goodbyes)

Improved cookstoves (ICS) can deliver “triple wins” by improving household health, local environments, and global climate. Yet their potential is in doubt because of low and slow diffusion, likely because of constraints imposed by differences in culture, geography, institutions, and missing markets. We offer insights about this challenge based on a multiyear, multiphase study with nearly 1,000 households in the Indian Himalayas. In phase I, we combined desk reviews, simulations, and focus groups to diagnose barriers to ICS adoption. In phase II, we implemented a set of pilots to simulate a mature market and designed an intervention that upgraded the supply chain (combining marketing and home delivery), provided rebates and financing to lower income and liquidity constraints, and allowed households a choice among ICS. In phase III, we used findings from these pilots to implement a field experiment to rigorously test whether this combination of upgraded supply and demand promotion stimulates adoption. The experiment showed that, compared with zero purchase in control villages, over half of intervention households bought an ICS, although demand was highly price-sensitive. Demand was at least twice as high for electric stoves relative to biomass ICS. Even among households that received a negligible price discount, the upgraded supply chain alone induced a 28 percentage-point increase in ICS ownership. Although the bundled intervention is resource-intensive, the full costs are lower than the social benefits of ICS promotion. Our findings suggest that market analysis, robust supply chains, and price discounts are critical for ICS diffusion. © 2019 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Fulltext

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Experimental evidence on promotion of electric and improved biomass cookstoves

Marx’s theory of rent as presented in the Third Volume of Capital has been a well-researched area in the history of political economy but not many of these studies discuss the theory with respect to the exposition of the labour theory of value and primitive accumulation in the FirstVolume. In this backdrop, the chapter attempts to retrace the trajectory of the theory of rent in Marx’s exposition of capitalism by focusing on the status of land as a ‘commodity without value’ (not produced by labour) within this framework. By critically engaging with the writings of David Harvey and Enrique Dussel, the chapter also explores the methodological innovation in the deployment of ‘rent’ within a value-based interpretation of the capitalist mode of production and the productive ambiguity in positing the distinction between rent and interest in a capitalist society, especially in terms of competition and return on ‘fictitious capital’. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.