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India’s Internal Security: Threat Perception and Way Forward
Get PDFContrary to popular discourse, the threats emanating from the internal security issues pose serious security threats to the Indian state and its people. Faced with numerous internal security challenges, the Indian experience of dealing with them has been a mixed experience. Arguably, no other country has ever faced such multiple internal security threats, in various forms and intensity than the Indian state. While the threat perception emanating from the internal security challenges have de-escalated over the last few years, they refuse to die down. Considering the immediacy of the issue, this paper critically engages with the contemporary internal security challenges that the Indian state encounters. In doing so the paper reflects upon the very process through which each of these internal security threats operates and highlights the nature and the intensity of threat perception. Through providing a conceptual framework, the paper also evaluates the state responses to the internal security issues. The paper limits its scope to four major internal security issues in India: The Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), the violent conflicts in the Northeastern states, Separatism and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), and communal violence and religious radicalisation
Scaling-up Nature based solutions for mainstreaming urban resilience in Indian cities
No full textRapid growth of urban areas has attracted foremost global attention in the last few decades. By 2050, India is expected to be the center of urbanization with 68 Indian cities having population of around a million. Rapid urbanization has resulted in huge loss of urban blue-green infrastructure (BGI) resulting in loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. There is growing need of disaster proofing fast expanding Indian cities. It is fundamental to explore, customize and integrate Nature-based Solutions (NbS) based resilience planning by restoring existing BGI in Tier I Indian megacities to curb the growing risks within acceptable limits. There is huge scope for exploration and mainstreaming of NbS in Tier II and Tier III cities that have space to plan BGI as per the growing population requirements and anticipated future risks. Scientifically planned NbS can help towards building resilience by maintaining the socio-cultural, economic, and ecosystem sustainability. The present chapter provides an overview of BGI as an efficient NbS and mainstreaming of nature-based interventions to ensure sustainable habitat in Indian megacities and growing small cities. The chapter highlights the factors that determine the use of urban NbS and underlines the problems associated with the implementation of Nb
Identification of 3'-UTR single nucleotide variants and prediction of select protein imbalance in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients
Get PDFgenetic influence in epilepsy, characterized by unprovoked and recurrent seizures, is through variants in genes critical to brain development and function. We have carried out variant calling in Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (MTLE) patients by mapping the RNA-Seq data available at SRA, NCBI, USA onto human genome assembly hg-19. We have identified 1,75,641 SNVs in patient samples. These SNVs are distributed over 14700 genes of which 655 are already known to be associated with epilepsy. Large number of variants occur in the 3'-UTR, which is one of the regions involved in the regulation of protein translation through binding of miRNAs and RNA-binding proteins (RBP). We have focused on studying the structure-function relationship of the 3'-UTR SNVs that are common to at-least 10 of the 35 patient samples. For the first time we find SNVs exclusively in the 3'-UTR of FGF12, FAR1, NAPB, SLC1A3, SLC12A6, GRIN2A, CACNB4 and FBXO28 genes. Structural modelling reveals that the variant 3'-UTR segments possess altered secondary and tertiary structures which could affect mRNA stability and binding of RBPs to form proper ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes. Secondly, these SNVs have either created or destroyed miRNA-binding sites, and molecular modeling reveals that, where binding sites are created, the additional miRNAs bind strongly to 3'-UTR of only variant mRNAs. These two factors affect protein production thereby creating an imbalance in the amounts of select proteins in the cell. We suggest that in the absence of missense and nonsense variants, protein-activity imbalances associated with MTLE patients can be caused through 3'-UTR variants in relevant genes by the mechanisms mentioned above. 3'-UTR SNV has already been identified as causative variant in the neurological disorder, Tourette syndrome. Inhibition of these miRNA-mRNA bindings could be a novel way of treating drug-resistant MTLE patients. We also suggest that joint occurrence of these SNVs could serve as markers for MTLE. We find, in the present study, SNV-mediated destruction of miRNA binding site in the 3'-UTR of the gene encoding glutamate receptor subunit, and, interestingly, overexpression of one of this receptor subunit is also associated with Febrile Seizures
Policy-driven approach to demand management from space cooling and water heating appliances: insights from a primary survey of urban Bengaluru, India
Get PDFAppliances that provide thermal comfort services like
space cooling and water heating have high energy
demands and significant seasonal variation in usage.
Ownership and usage of these appliances increase
rapidly with income. Given the significant impact of
these appliances on electricity demand, it is key to
analyse their ownership and usage. A well-designed policy and standards framework can help transition households as well as manufacturers towards a higher efficiency ecosystem, and significantly lower electricity demand growth rates. In this study, we analyse ownership and usage patterns of these appliances using data from a primary survey of Bengaluru, India. We suggest some passive demand-side management
frameworks based on current policies implemented for these appliance categories
Patterns in Past Settlements: Geospatial Analysis of Imprints of Cultural Heritage on Landscapes
No full textThis book is an introduction to a new branch of archaeology that scrutinises landscapes to find evidence of past human activity. Such evidence can be hard to detect at ground-level, but may be visible in remote sensing (RS) imagery from aerial platforms and satellites. Drawing on examples from around the world as well as from her own research work on archaeological sites in India (including Nalanda, Agra, Srirangapatna, Talakadu, and Mahabalipuram), the author presents a systematic process for integrating this information with historical spatial records such as old maps, paintings, and field surveys using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to gain new insights into our past. Further, the book highlights several instances where these insights are actionable -- they have been used to identify, understand, conserve, and protect the fragile remnants of our past. This book will be of particular interest not only to researchers in archaeology, history, art history, and allied fields, but to governmental and non-governmental professionals working in cultural heritage protection and conservation
Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban Bengaluru
Get PDFBuilding on recent literature that explores how the social logics of older agrarian formations are
refracted in processes of urbanization, the paper foregrounds the significance of caste in rapidly
changing peri-urban spaces. Drawing on extended fieldwork in several villages on the outskirts
of Bengaluru, it shows how the twin scaffoldings of agrarian society—caste and land—are
reconfigured as the values of land change in this zone of transition. Caste identity not only
structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the transformation of agrarian land into
urban real estate—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways, especially through the politics
of land. This study demonstrates why caste should be understood as a social structure of
accumulation, whose specific modes of operation are defined by regionally rooted histories of
development and memories of oppression and struggle.
This paper draws on fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2020 as part of the project “Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital,” in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, funded by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-1636437]. We thank our colleagues Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Hemangini Gupta, Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner, and other members of the research team for many discussions and debates. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Third Annual Research Conference of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, January 10–12, 2019; in the panel on The Peri-urban Question: Renewing Concepts and Categories at RC21@Delhi, September 18–20, 2019; and at the French Institute of Pondicherry, February 13, 2020. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of those conferences for their valuable feedback, as well as to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments. All photos are by Pierre Hauser, who we sincerely thank for allowing us to use his work
Bridging Development and Heritage: Expert Gaze, Local Discourses, and Visual Aesthetic Crisis at Hampi World Heritage Site
No full textIn this article, I explore the complex trajectory of two bridges that were proposed for construction across the River Tungabhadra in the early 1990s at locations that now fall within the boundary of Hampi, a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site (WHS) in India. The proposed bridges were considered improper forms of infrastructure development in the visual context of a WHS, and the site was placed on the World Heritage in Danger List in the late 1990s. Popular media framed the controversy as a ‘classic clash’ between heritage and development where conservation goals and developmental needs opposed one another. Heritage experts, agencies, and activists read the crisis as one of ‘heritage or development’, normatively typecasting residents north of the river as ‘uneducated, ignorant locals’ wanting development at the cost of heritage. However, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival material covering nearly three decades, I demonstrate that residents wanted the bridges not as physical infrastructure towards some obscure development goals, but as the means to link their overlooked contributions to the founding of the Vijayanagara Empire, the capital region and its contemporary remaking as a WHS. In this instance, the binary opposition lay in the ‘expert gaze’, not in local discourses. It was experts, rather than ‘local people’, who saw conservation and development as inherently opposed to each other. I explicate how various views on what constitutes heritage and development intersect with each other, and suggest that dissonance need not be the inevitable result but may be built into the gaze of expertise
On the NIAS Logo (NIAS/U/SP/08/2021)
No full textThe NIAS logo is an artistic depiction of the geometrical structure of the vedic śyenaciti, one of the specified forms of the platform for vedic sacrifice, which is in the shape of a falcon. The specification of the form of the vedic sacrificial platforms in the śulvasūtras encapsulates the advanced knowledge of Number and Geometry in the vedic period. In particular, a precise rational approximation for as well as the Pythagorean theorem are clearly specified in the Baudhāyana śulvasūtra and these are the earliest documented statements on these topics anywhere in the world. The speech of Roddam Narasimha draws a connection between the ideas connoted by the NIAS logo and the programme of NIAS as envisioned by its founder, J.R.D. Tata
Inequality and autonomous adaptation to climate change (NIAS/SSc/IHD/U/WP/20/2021)
Get PDFThis note explores multidisciplinary framework to study inequality and autonomous adaptation to climate change. It argues that the knowledge on climate change in social sciences lacks the discourses from the ground. It raises the demand for investigating autonomous adaptation to climate change for bridging this disconnect