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All-Male Groups in Asian Elephants: A Novel, Adaptive Social Strategy in Increasingly Anthropogenic Landscapes of Southern India
Get PDFMale Asian elephants are known to adopt a high-risk high-gain foraging strategy by venturing into agricultural areas and feeding on nutritious crops in order to improve their reproductive fitness. We hypothesised that the high risks to survival posed by increasingly urbanising and often unpredictable production landscapes may necessitate the emergence of behavioural strategies that allow male elephants to persist in such landscapes. Using 1445 photographic records of 248 uniquely identified male Asian elephants over a 23-month period, we show that male Asian elephants display striking emergent behaviour, particularly the formation of stable, long-term all-male groups, typically in non-forested or human-modified and highly fragmented areas. They remained solitary or associated in mixed-sex groups, however, within forested habitats. These novel, large all-male associations, may constitute a unique life history strategy for male elephants in the high-risk but resource-rich production landscapes of southern India. This may be especially true for the adolescent males, which seemed to effectively improve their body condition by increasingly exploiting anthropogenic resources when in all-male groups. This observation further supports our hypothesis that such emergent behaviours are likely to constitute an adaptive strategy for male Asian elephants that may be forced to increasingly confront anthropogenically intrusive environments
Workshop on Academic Integrity
Get PDFWorkshop on Academic Integrity was held at the NIAS on 24 September 201
Regional variation in rural transition in India
No full textThe dramatic decline in the share of agriculture in India’s gross
domestic product from 52 percent in 1950–1951 to less than 17
percent in 2017–2018 necessarily implies a decline in the amount
of labor this sector can employ. However, agriculture continues to
be the largest employer in the country. Even when workers move
out of the agricultural sector, they do not always leave rural areas.
The movement from an agrarian economy to a non-agrarian one
in India has not been matched by the expected shift from rural
areas to urban areas. The macro scenario facing the country is
that of low agricultural productivity, slow urbanization rates, and
huge surplus labor in rural areas. But within this overall national
picture, are there variations in terms of movement of labor away
from agriculture? Are there more than one rural transition
patterns being observed in the country? Are there contiguous
areas in the country with a specific transition pattern which is
common for a region? To answer these questions, this paper first
takes a closer look at different types of transitions observed in the
country. It then goes on to map the regions where workers have
moved into agriculture, moved out of agriculture but remain in
rural areas, and left the rural areas altogether respectively, in
addition to regions with a prominent place for marginal workers
Implementation of clean coal technologies to comply with "New Emission Norms" for thermal power plants - way forward for the Southern region. Summary Report of NITI Aayog-DST-NIAS Workshop, 17th September 2019 (NIAS/NSE/EEP/U/WR/13/2019)
Get PDFCoal based Thermal Power Plants (TPP) are the backbone of the power generation utilities in the country. Coal based TPPs constitute to around 56.1% of the total installed capacity and generates around 74.2% of the electricity generated in India. Considering the high pollution and resource impacts, of TPPs the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) notified the Environment Protection (Amendment) Rules (EPAR) on December 5, 2015 with a two-year window for TPPs to meet these standards. When implemented, these norms are expected to have positive environmental and health benefits by leading to lower pollution levels from TPPs. However, compliance with the new emission norms would require retrofitting existing thermal power plants with various Pollution Control Technologies (PCT) in the form of auxiliary systems to control SO2, NOX and PM emissions. In order to ensure 24x7 supply of electricity, CPCB (in consultation with CEA) finalized the revised timelines for all TPPs to comply with the new emission norms by December 2022.
The team at Energy and Environment Programme (EEP) in NIAS, Bangalore interacted with various Power Plant Generation companies (GENCOs) in Southern Region to understand their challenges and way forward with respect to the huge capital investment and schedules for implementation. This team developed and a “Concept Paper” for a workshop with the theme, “Strategies and Action Plans needed for transition to an environment friendly and sustainable Electricity Source mix for the Southern Region”. This Workshop was held at NIAS on 17th September 2019 to enable key stakeholders - Power Plant Owners (Central & Southern States), Pollution Control Equipment Suppliers, Regulators and Policymakers to share their experience and deliberate on the challenges to develop a road map for implementation. This report presents the gist of each talk by the invited participants, and also consolidates the key findings and recommendations of the Workshop. This summary report will form the basis for further research as well as for policy advocacy with GOI through NITI Aayog. A.V. Krishnan, Shyam Sundar R, Shilpa Srivastava and R. Srikant
Capturing Diversity: A Comprehensive Report on Women in Science and Engineering in India (NIAS/SSC/EDU/U/RR/07/2019)
No full textEvolution of Smart Weapons (NIAS/CSS/ISSSP/U/RP/69/2019)
Get PDFThe concept of aerial bombing has evolved and undergone significant improvements in terms of technologies, systems and deployment. While the bombs dropped from balloons in the second half of nineteenth century had a Circular Error Probability (CEP) of a few kilometres, the most recent smart glide weapons can achieve sub-metre CEP. The revolutionary developments in the field of Electronics, Sensors, Software and Mechanisms in the recent years, and their impact on improved performance of the systems are highlighted. This report gives an overview of evolution of aerial bombing systems and technologies over the decades, and also the future of smart weapons
Complex dynamics in simple mechanical systems: Similarities to neuronal bursting.
Get PDFWe present an overview of our studies on some simple mechanical systems including the ‘simple’
nonlinear pendulum and its variants. We show that these systems exhibit numerous types of regular bursting oscillations which are seen in biological neurons. In particular, we discuss bow-tie shaped bursts which we found
in a driven pendulum with linear velocity damping, under constant torque and dynamic feedback. Similar bursts
of identical bow-tie shape have been reported by us previously in a system of two resistively coupled Josephson
junctions in a certain parameter regime under certain conditions. We discuss the bifurcation mechanism producing
some of these burst
The Corporeal Costs of Doing What You Love
No full textWhen I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the high-technology world of startup capitalism in Bangalore, India, the air was full of possibility. This is India’s “Start Up City,” a vision for the future that is promised by state governments, driven by entrepreneurs and funders, and crafted by local media. In full page advertisements and dedicated supplements, media discourses about a new generation of workers who “do what they love” proliferate. These mediatized expressions of work and affect as interconnected align with global media proclamations about the rise of passionate entrepreneurs (Walter Isaacson 2011Isaacson, Walter. 2011. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. [Google Scholar]). Yet these mediatized affective realms obscure the material conditions under which such “loving innovations” are produced transnationally. Far from the homes of Silicon Valley multimillionaires are the proliferating spaces (manufacturing factories, startups, offshore offices) and actors (jobbers, workers, entrepreneurs) in the Global South who transform Do What You Love discourses into concrete products and services
The Potential for Concentrator Photovoltaics: A Feasibility Study in India
No full textIndia has aggressive plans for scaling up photovoltaic installations in the coming decades. Currently fixed tilt, flat plate crystalline silicon (c‐Si) technology sets the standard for cost and performance and is both robust and relatively easy to deploy. Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) systems have a different cost structure; using solar cells with the highest efficiencies, system efficiencies greater than 30% are possible, but the system is also more sensitive to meteorological conditions. India has a complex and varied atmosphere that prevents a straightforward comparison of technologies, and hence, in this paper, we use a computer model to simulate the power output from CPV systems located in locations in India where the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations are based and additionally, in Bangalore where we have a CPV test station. We quantify the increased intermittency suffered by CPV systems that arises from the larger dynamic range in direct beam irradiance over global irradiance. Nevertheless, by calculating the target system costs required to attain a competitive levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), we find that CPV systems in some, but not all locations have the opportunity to compete against dual‐axis tracked and inclined c‐Si based PV in India