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Climate Change and Energy Options for a Sustainable Future
No full textThe signs of global warming can be seen everywhere — hotter summers, frequent heavy rains, prolonged droughts, more severe forest fires, fiercer storms (including snow storms) and cyclones, as well as melting polar ice caps. Our indiscriminate actions are raising the spectre of millions of climate refugees who are victims of battles for water, crops, fish, and so on. It is poignant that the poorer countries, that are the least equipped to face these calamities have contributed the least to global warming, but are the worst hit.
Only a concerted effort from the entire world by a rapid transition to renewable, clean and green energy sources, while checking wastage, deforestation and pollution, and a genuine adjustment in lifestyles towards moderation can avert the Earth, the only habitable planet we know, from turning into a hothouse
Causal discovery using compression-complexity measures
No full textCausal inference is one of the most fundamental problems across all domains of science. We address the problem
of inferring a causal direction from two observed discrete symbolic sequences X and Y. We present a framework
which relies on lossless compressors for inferring context-free grammars (CFGs) from sequence pairs and
quantifies the extent to which the grammar inferred from one sequence compresses the other sequence. We infer
X causes Y if the grammar inferred from X better compresses Y than in the other direction. To put this notion to
practice, we propose three models that use the Compression-Complexity Measures (CCMs) – Lempel–Ziv (LZ)
complexity and Effort-To-Compress (ETC) to infer CFGs and discover causal directions without demanding
temporal structures. We evaluate these models on synthetic and real-world benchmarks and empirically observe
performances competitive with current state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we present two unique applications of
the proposed models for causal inference directly from pairs of genome sequences belonging to the SARS-CoV-2
virus. Using numerous sequences, we show that our models capture causal information exchanged between
genome sequence pairs, presenting novel opportunities for addressing key issues in sequence analysis to investigate
the evolution of virulence and pathogenicity in future applications
Educating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India
No full textEducating Youth: Regulation through Psychosocial Skilling in India studies the rise in skill-based developmental interventions for young people that aim to harness youth potential. Tracing these changes to the neoliberalization of education and training globally, this book discusses how a range of training programs, from social and personality development skills to employability and vocational skills, seek to cultivate an ethic of self-responsibility through skilling, to overcome structural disadvantage among the marginalized youth.
Examining one such form of training in depth, Life Skills Education or LSE, that is advocated by international organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, and popularized in India by various actors---from the state departments of education to local non-governmental organisations and middle-class citizens—this book shows how these programmes get adapted and modified within the Indian context. It demonstrates how authoritarian adult–child relations, caste inequalities and rote culture inflect the messages for self-development that the programmes transmit. Discussing the impact of these psychosocial skilling programmes observed in the Indian context, the book reflects on the cultural disconnects and internal limitations of liberal, progressive and experiential pedagogies in achieving intended outcomes
The Rurban Elephant: Behavioural Ecology of Asian Elephants in Response to Large-Scale Land Use Change in a Human-Dominated Landscape in Peri-Urban Southern India
No full textAn impetus for growth and development in India, with the second largest human population in the world, has resulted in rapid changes in land use across the country, especially over the last two decades. While the land area under agriculture has only slightly increased, there have been significant changes in the shift from single-cropping to double- or multiple cropping every year and an overall increase in built-up areas. We assess the impacts of such transformations on the lives of India’s largest land mammal, the Asian elephant, at a time when about 400 people and 150 elephants succumb annually to human–elephant conflict across the country. Although elephants generally prefer forested habitats, the increased availability of nutritious crops and forest cover in the form of agroforestry plantations outside protected forests has led them to move extensively across peri-urban areas and successfully adapt to this novel anthropogenic ecological regime. We discuss these unique, inexorable processes of synurbisation, adaptation in a nonhuman species to human-induced change, with a particular focus on how the successful exploitation of rurban agricultural resources has allowed for the appearance of spatially and temporally flexible behavioural innovations that, in turn, impact the life-history strategies of a threatened elephant population in a peri-urban region of southern India
Understanding and Modeling Residential Electricity Demand in India
Get PDFResidential electricity demand arises from the need for households to meet various end-use energy services. This demand has seen consistent growth over the last decade currently accounting for close to a quarter of the total electricity consumption in the country. In developing economies like India this sector will also be a key contributor to future greenhouse emissions given that we are starting from a comparatively low base. But our understanding of this sector is still limited. To gain a better understanding of this space, we approach this problem in two parts. In the first part, we outline a methodology to design and conduct a representative survey by presenting the case study of a primary survey we conducted of Bengaluru. Using the survey, we model appliance ownership and usage patterns identifying key contributing end-use categories and variations in patterns of electricity consumption across households. Next, we develop a bottom-up, end-use model, disaggregated by regions, to project growth in end-use energy service categories. We identify growth in ownership of key appliances and changes in consumption driven by this growth. We model changes in consumption patterns at different regional disaggregation identifying key demand drivers. Based on model insights from the primary survey and national model, we identify key policy amendments and suggest some new policy directions to manage the growth of demand from the residential sector
Challenges to identify and mentor gifted children in developing countries: the Indian experience
Get PDFThe National Education Policy 2020 (NEP-2020) has recognized the need to identify and nurture
gifted and talented children beyond the school curriculum. Through systematic research, the
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru has developed multiple protocols for identifying
and multi-level, multi-stage mentoring of gifted children. This study argues that there is need for a
paradigm shift in the identification process that predominantly uses psychometric measurements in
the portfolio that captures the actual data points of gifted children. This is particularly relevant for
developing countries like India, which has a diverse population predominantly from disadvantaged
communities. Establishing norms for standardized psychometric tests developed for the
western populations will have inherent limitations to identifying the gifted children in multi-lingual
and multi-cultural contexts. Needless to state, India has far too few trained psychologists to accomplish this task
Seeing the Urban from the Agrarian: Emerging Forms of Agrarian Urbanization in India
Get PDFConventionally, the city has been the dominant conceptual basis for understanding urban processes. The rural, on the other hand, is assumed to be external to the city, which is supposedly subsumed by the global forces of capitalist urbanization. Such a conceptualization underestimates the complex ways in which the rural, with its distinct agrarian dynamics of land, labor and capital, is significant in understanding the processes of urbanization that are anchored in geographies beyond the city. Using the framework of “agrarian urbanism” (Gururani 2019), this paper focuses on a small town, Patran, located in the Patiala district of Punjab and argues that contemporary processes of urbanization are deeply entrenched in the rural and its agrarian dynamics of land and caste. By focusing on agrarian changes that were driven by colonial policies of land rights and ownership, and state-led agrarian development strategies in post-independent India, this paper argues that instead of assimilating the rural, urbanization in predominantly agricultural contexts both mirrors and differs from the old forms of agrarian relations and leads to the coproduction of the rural, albeit in new ways
Seeing the Elephant: Socioecology and Physiology of the Female Asian Elephant Elephas maximus in an Anthropogenic Landscape in Southern India
No full textBurgeoning global demand for natural resources has led to an extensive increase in fragmentation and degradation of forests, resulting in habitat islands, human-dominated landscapes, and disjunct wildlife populations. Many such modified spaces host a wide range of species, including long-ranging, large mammals such as the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. Perpetual exposure to anthropogenic disturbances in most such landscapes coerces such species populations to adapt to these novel ecologies in order to ensure their long-term survival and fitness. These adaptations are often in the form of behavioural and physiological responses, or demographic changes. One significant aspect in this context, however, is that the use of these human–dominated, modified landscapes by species, such as elephants, may not be limited to only serve as movement pathways or temporary refuges, but these areas could form an integral part of their home range. In today’s context of conservation outside protected areas, therefore, such landscapes are of functional importance, and understanding species behaviour and ecology in such areas more closely may become vital for the conservation and management of the affected populations.
This thesis thus attempts to explore the lives of Asian elephants in a human-dominated landscape, the Valparai plateau in the Anamalai hills of southern India, with a primary focus on their behavioural ecology and some aspects of their physiology. It first attempted to understand the factors determining the landscape-level distribution of this population of elephants and its seasonal variation, identifying slope and elevation to be their primary determinants. Through intense field tracking, it was observed that, of all the habitat types available on the plateau, riparian vegetation was preferred by the elephants, disproportionate to its availability. Our close observations of female elephant socioecology also indicated that the groups on the plateau formed fairly unique social units, with minimal fission-fusion processes and inter-group interactions. Furthermore, the thesis has explored certain aspects of reproductive and stress physiology in the study elephants, comparing the observed patterns with another group of female elephants, maintained under semi-wild conditions in a forest camp in the same landscape. Through eight detailed chapters, the thesis thus contributes to our sparse knowledge of elephant biology and ecology, behaviour and physiology in a rapidly changing environment while highlighting the importance of such understanding in devising conservation and management strategies for the beleaguered elephant populations of today
Women in leadership: Achieving sustainable future in a post-COVID-19 world
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic is one of the worst episodes ever faced by humankind during the last hundred years or so. Its impact on humans has threatened the existing social system, which in turn affects sustainable development of the society. India and the world today have been facing daunting challenges of managing natural hazards and climate change. As we are navigating ways to recover from this health disaster and build a resilient society, there is an opportunity to address issues of sustainable development. Foundations of building such a society must be based on bringing women to the forefront of decision- making and implementing new structural solutions. In what follows, we argue that the efforts to mitigate climate change and inequality have to consider women empowerment as the central agenda, failing which either aspect of sustainability cannot be achieved