SOUTH INDIA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
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Social Media and Students: Exploring the Link between Usage, Academic Performance and Mental Health
Get PDFSocial media has become an integral part of modern life, deeply influencing various societal sectors, including education. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are not only avenues for communication and social interaction but also provide students with opportunities for information sharing and learning. With the increasing prominence of these platforms, the impact of social media on academic performance has garnered significant attention. While it offers potential benefits, such as facilitating collaborative learning and easy access to educational content, it also presents challenges, including distractions, procrastination, and a potential decline in academic engagement (Junco, 2012). This paper investigates several questions related to linkage between Social Media Usage, Academic Performance and Mental Health. The research work has been carried out to study the impact of Social Media on the Academic Performance and Mental Health of the students in Bhiwani District of Haryana, India. A sample size of 60 was taken for the study from Postgraduate Students studying at University Teaching Departments of Chaudhary Bansi Lal University (CBLU). The main findings of the study show that Social media is beneficial for connecting with friends and family, finding information and resources, and networking for career opportunities. Social media can lead to academic distractions, feelings of inadequacy, cyber bullying, and mental health concerns. It also contributes to sleep disturbances and the pressure to maintain a positive online image. The need to take breaks from social media to maintain mental health is widely recognized among students
Age-Wise Analysis of Financial Capability Among Cashew Workers in Kerala: A Socioeconomic Perspective
Get PDFFinancial capability is a combination of the financial understanding, abilities, mindsets, and conduct that leads to favorable financial behaviors and appropriate money management decisions. The relationship between age and financial capability is complex and multifaceted, influenced by life stages, income and varying financial responsibilities. This article explores how financial capability evolves over the financial life of cashew worker, focusing on age-specific trends, behavioral patterns, and external factors shaping financial decision-making powers of cashew workers. By synthesizing existing research and analyzing demographic data, we aim to illuminate the influences of financial capability across age groups of cashew workers. The study is an Empirical research based on survey method confined to Kollam district of Kerala state .They may have lower incomes, higher debt and limited financial experience. Income generally peaks as individuals advance in their careers. Financial obligations, such as mortgages, child-rearing, and saving for retirement, are significant for them. The studies conclude that financial capabilities of cashew workers are different in different age group
Hurdles Handled by Women Entrepreneurs and Its Impact for the Growth of Business Development – An Empirical Analysis
Get PDFEntrepreneurship is an essential element for the growth of the global market. In India, Women face lot of hurdles to start-up their business. The researcher has analysed women entrepreneurs how to overcome their hurdles and its impact for their business development. The proportionate stratified random sampling technique is used to select 165 registered entrepreneurs as the sample size. The researcher has framed a null hypothesis for impact of business development is not dependent on hurdles handled by women entrepreneurs. For analytical purposes, linear regression analysis is employed. Hurdles handled by women entrepreneurs and Impact for business development is 0.897 and 0.886 and it indicates high-level reliability. The researcher identifies the lack of hurdles handled and found medium level of business development. Concluded that impact of self-confident, decision-making ability, to face more competition, to export their products, profit increase, creativity and more employment opportunities are important predictors for business development in order to increase sales as well as income aspect
Reimagining Development, Toward Sustainability and Inclusion
Get PDFThe 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) declared by the UNO have strengthened the need for academic reflection. Along with sustainability, the ideal of inclusion in a diversified society like India makes the objectives of development very focused. We have 17 research papers written on the above theme. As we navigate the complexities of 21 Century development, two imperatives have emerged as inseparable: environmental sustainability and social inclusion. This special edition covers diverse aspects examining how these twin goals manifest across India’s economic landscape. What strikes me most powerfully in reviewing these contributions is not merely the empirical evidence they provide, but the fundamental questions they raise about our development model itself.
THE SUSTAINABILITY IMPERATIVE: RHETORIC VERSUS REALITY
The ESG Paradox
Much has been proclaimed about Environmental, Social, and Governance principles transforming corporate India. Yet the evidence presented here compels uncomfortable honesty: we remain trapped between aspiration and achievement. Whether examining petroleum giants pursuing net-zero commitments, banks claiming sustainable finance credentials, or agricultural enterprises adopting green practices, a consistent pattern emerges, ESG integration remains superficial, driven more by regulatory compliance and international market pressures than genuine transformation.
What particularly concerns me is the disconnect between ESG scores and actual outcomes. When major corporations achieve only moderate sustainability ratings that correlate minimally with financial performance, we must ask whether we are measuring what matters or merely what is convenient to measure. The banking sector analysis reveals an even more troubling reality: sustainability efforts sometimes inversely correlate with market valuation, suggesting that investors remain unconvinced or that implementation costs outweigh perceived benefits. This is not sustainability, it is performative compliance.
The agricultural research offers a more nuanced perspective. Farm size determines who can afford sustainability, creating a two-tiered system where large producers comply while small farmers struggle. This observation crystallizes a broader truth: without deliberate inclusion strategies, sustainability mandates risk becoming another mechanism of marginalization, rewarding those already privileged while penalizing those operating at subsistence margins.
Climate Change: No Longer a Future
Threat The climate research presented here moves beyond apocalyptic projections to document present-day impacts. Agricultural productivity already responds measurably to climate variability, with nearly half of rice yield fluctuations attributable to temperature and rainfall patterns. For a nation where agriculture sustains hundreds of millions, this is not an environmental issue it is an existential livelihood crisis unfolding in slow motion.
What demands our attention is not whether climate change will affect India, but how unequally distribute its impacts. The political economy analysis of water scarcity forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality: environmental crises are not natural disasters but socially constructed outcomes reflecting power asymmetries. When 163 million Indians lack clean drinking water in a country with abundant water resources, the crisis stems not from absolute scarcity but from governance failures, privatization dynamics, and systematic exclusion of marginalized communities from decision-making processes.
Alternative Pathways: Permaculture and Systemic Redesign
The permaculture contribution offers conceptual relief an articulation of agriculture as ecosystem design rather than extractive industry. What appeals to me about this framework is its refusal to accept industrial agriculture’s assumptions. Rather than optimizing existing systems, permaculture proposes fundamentally different relationships between humans and natural systems, emphasizing regeneration over extraction, diversity over monoculture, and long-term resilience over short-term yield maximization.
However, as an editor, I must note the challenge: such alternative frameworks remain marginal in policy discourse and investment priorities. Mainstreaming permaculture requires not just governmental recognition but transformation of agricultural extension systems, credit mechanisms, and market structures currently designed for industrial agriculture. The gap between conceptual elegance and implementation reality remains vast.
INCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT: BEYOND WELFARISM
Employment Guarantees: Promise and Fragility
The MGNREGA analysis offers both hope and caution. When effectively implemented, employment guarantees demonstrably reach marginalized communities, with women and tribal populations securing dignified work at critical moments. This is inclusion in its most tangible form guaranteed livelihood access regardless of caste, gender, or market position.
Yet what troubles me deeply is the program’s vulnerability to administrative disruption. Participation collapses following bureaucratic reorganizations; completion rates plummet when political will wanes. This fragility exposes the limitation of welfare-based inclusion: benefits remain contingent on state capacity and political commitment rather than being structurally embedded in economic systems. Marginalized communities cycle between temporary relief and renewed vulnerability, never achieving the economic security that would constitute genuine inclusion.
Livelihood Diversification: Adaptation or Dispossession?
The tribal livelihood research reveals communities adapting to constrained circumstances diversifying income sources as traditional practices become untenable under conservation policies and climate pressures. Development discourse often celebrates such diversification as resilience. Yet we must ask are we witnessing adaptive innovation or gradual dispossession? When forest-dependent communities abandon traditional practices due to policy restrictions rather than choice, calling this “livelihood diversification” obscures coercion beneath neutral terminology.
Education emerges as the critical variable enabling successful diversification. This finding underscores that inclusion requires capability investments schools, skills training, information access not merely income transfers. However, it also reveals how decades of educational neglect have constrained current adaptive capacity, leaving communities vulnerable precisely when adaptation becomes most critical.
The Financial Exclusion Trap
Multiple contributions examine financial systems banking access, credit availability, digital payment adoption. What becomes evident is that financial inclusion initiatives have expanded access without necessarily building capability. Women possess bank accounts but lack financial literacy to leverage them effectively; rural populations own smartphones but cannot access digital banking due to connectivity, interface complexity, and trust deficits.
The comparison between urban and rural women’s financial capability reveals disparities that cannot be addressed through account-opening campaigns alone. Meaningful financial inclusion requires infrastructure investment, culturally appropriate education, vernacular interfaces, and perhaps most fundamentally, transformation of attitudes viewing financial services as urban, educated domains rather than universal entitlements.
Workers in traditional industries coir, cashew processing exemplify the limits of current inclusion approaches. Predominantly women from marginalized backgrounds, they access employment but remain trapped in informal arrangements without contracts, social security, or occupational safety protections. Three-quarters carry debt burdens; over half suffer chronic health conditions directly attributable to working conditions. This is not inclusion it is exploitation with a paycheck.
Labor Markets: Informality as Structural Violence
Perhaps the most damning evidence concerns employment contracts or their absence. When nearly 70% of regular wage workers lack written contracts, vulnerability becomes normalized rather than exceptional. The research documenting wage differentials demonstrates that contract status determines not just income but access to social security, job stability, and basic dignity. Only 2-3% of India’s workforce enjoys genuinely secure employment. This is not a market failure requiring marginal adjustments but a structural feature of India’s economic model. Informality serves capital accumulation by externalizing social reproduction costs onto workers and their communities. Addressing this requires not skill development programs or entrepreneurship training though both have value but fundamental labor market reforms establishing universal contracts, minimum wage enforcement, and social security as rights rather than privileges.
SYNTHESIS: TOWARD INTEGRATED TRANSFORMATION
Reviewing these contributions, I am struck by the interconnectedness repeatedly emerging. Sustainability mandates that exclude small farmers or informal workers inevitably fail; inclusion initiatives ignoring environmental degradation undermine their own foundations. Marginalized communities bear disproportionate environmental burdens while possessing least adaptive capacity. Water privatization creates scarcity for the poor while enabling corporate profit. Climate change devastates rain-dependent agriculture even as conservation policies restrict traditional adaptive practices.
What emerges is not a call for better policy coordination but recognition that our dominant development model generates these contradictions systematically. We pursue GDP growth that degrades ecosystems, industrialization that informalizes labor, urbanization that displaces rural livelihoods, and liberalization that concentrates wealth. Sustainability and inclusion initiatives operate as correctives to a fundamentally extractive, unequal system rather than transforming its underlying logic.
The research assembled here provides rigorous evidence of these dynamics. It also, collectively, points toward alternatives: participatory governance over technocratic management, justice frameworks over efficiency calculations, capability building over welfarism, systemic redesign over incremental adjustment. Whether examining permaculture, employment guarantees, or water justice movements, the most compelling contributions envision development not as maximizing output but as enabling dignified, sustainable livelihoods within ecological limits.
As Guest Editor, I offer this collection not as definitive answers but as evidence demanding uncomfortable questions. Can ESG frameworks drive transformation or merely legitimize existing power structures? Do inclusion programs empower marginalized communities or manage their exclusion more efficiently? Can we achieve sustainability without confronting inequality, or inclusion without challenging unsustainable accumulation?
These articles suggest that meaningful progress requires moving beyond technical solutions toward fundamental transformations in resource distribution, decision-making authority, and institutional arrangements. The path forward demands not just better policies but different politics guided by principles of equity, participation, and ecological integrity that place human dignity and environmental health before abstract growth metrics
Evolving Justice: The Shifting Paradigms of Crime and Punishment Through The Lens of New Criminal Laws
Get PDFCriminal law is the branch of law that must evolve to be in tandem with the changes and development of the society. A static law cannot serve the required exigencies in the society. Recently, with the evolving societal values, the underpinnings of criminal law, rooted in a British legacy have been overhauled and transformed completely. The Indian legal framework has been modernized and Indianized to enhance its efficiency and to navigate towards a potent justice system with the inculcation of technology in law enforcement and other judicial processes along with transformative crime controlling mechanism. Moreover, a reformative approach of crime prevention through new criminal laws also reflects a paradigm shift in reshaping the Indian criminal justice system. This paper is an attempt to delve into comprehensive analysis of the new criminal laws (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita,2023, Bharataiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita,2023, Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam,2023) and its implications to foster a just society
A Dominant Caste and Political Violence: A Sociological Study on Factionalism in Rayalaseema
Get PDFThe Rayalaseema region, situated in Andhra Pradesh, India, has historically been marked by factional violence, and various political leaders have strategically utilised it to advance their political objectives. Factionalism is a phenomenon that is particularly pronounced in the districts of Kadapa, Kurnool, and Anantapur. In these locales, political leaders have actively engaged with and modified factional dynamics to secure political leverage, resulting in a vehement interrelationship between politics and factionalism within the region. Based on the fieldwork conducted in Sambaturu village from March to May 2018, the snowball sampling technique and secondary data, the present study investigates the dynamics of factionalism and its intersection with politics in a village within the Kadapa district of Rayalaseema. With the objective of exploring and analysing the sociological dimensions of factionalism and political interactions within this specific context, the study finds that factionalism is intricately associated with caste, class, and gender, and it metamorphoses into a new form of feudal setup with the nexus with State
Secluded Work Spaces of Film Industry: A Sociological Analysis of Precarity among Mid-level Crew Workers in Malayalam Film Industry
No full textThe present study analysed the socio-economic challenges of mid-level crew workers in the Malayalam film industry, with diligent focus on their work space, social identity and economic conditions. . The study adopted a descriptive quantitative quantitative research approach. The data for the study was collected from 52 mid-level crew members, who occupy the designations of assistant directors, camera operators, production managers, and art directors. Stratified random sampling method was used to give equal representation to respondents from each designation. The analysis of the collected data reveals that mid-level crew workers operate in precarious conditions. This is marked by under employment, lack of work benefits, long gap between acquiring works reinforcing their classification as precariat in the evolving gig economic landscape of Malayalam film industry. Most respondents, despite having formal education and training in their field are receiving limited opportunities for their career growth. The professional identity of these mid level crew workers become more demeaned when they are excluded from movie credits and workplace protection schemes. Utilising a Socio-economic lens, the study advocates for equitable practices and policies for improving the conditions of these workers, where Malayalam film industry act as a creative gig economy, creating and maintaining various challenges for the mid-level crew workers
Inclusive Technological Driven Land Governance and SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages and Mapping with Advanced Technology in Rural Areas) Scheme: A Geographical Study of Haryana
Get PDFThe SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages and Mapping with Advanced Technology in Rural Areas) Scheme, launched by the Government of India, is a transformational and remarkable land governance scheme designed to modernize land records and improve property rights in rural areas. In the context of Haryana, this initiative has played a key role in revolutionizing land administration and governance, resolving long-standing problems related to land ownership and management in the state’s predominantly agricultural economy. The fundamental question studied in the research paper is how, with accurate land records, the administration can better plan and implement infrastructure development, agricultural support, and social welfare initiatives. This study encourages a dynamic academic exploration. The study reveals that SVAMITVA has significantly improved land governance in Haryana. Drone mapping has clarified property boundaries, reduced land disputes and enhanced transparency. Property owners have easier access to land records, increasing the security of tenure and facilitating credit access. However, the study also identifies challenges in implementation, including delays in technology adoption and a lack of digital literacy among villagers. The scheme has positively impacted rural land governance by promoting formal land ownership, reducing conflicts, and improving access to financial services. However, a greater focus on capacity building and technological infrastructure is necessary to ensure long-term sustainability and inclusivity
Woven Legacies: The Shawl and Carpet Industry of Kashmir in Transition, Pre-and Post-Partition
Get PDFThis paper offers a comprehensive exploration of the illustrious shawl and carpet industry in the Kashmir region, with a particular emphasis on its transformation from the pre-partition to the post-partition era. Kashmir, celebrated for its opulent cultural heritage and artistic traditions, is renowned globally for its textile craftsmanship, especially in the domains of shawls and carpets. These creations are not merely utilitarian but stand as embodiments of the region's artisanal excellence, reflecting the creative sensibilities of its skilled craftsmen. The shawl and carpet industry, historically pivotal to the economic and cultural identity of Kashmir, underwent profound transformations during these transitional periods.
By scrutinizing the pre- and post-partition eras (up to 1990), this study aspires to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Kashmiri shawl and carpet industry, shedding light on its historical significance and its enduring relevance in an ever-evolving world of markets and traditions. The research seeks to capture the essence of these timeless textiles and the narratives they encapsulate regarding Kashmir's enduring legacy of craftsmanship
Religion As a Catalyst for Mobilization: Defining and Redefining Religion in The Bodo Movement
No full textReligion has often been used with evil intentions, becoming a key factor in spreading hatred in many parts of the world today. However, it can also serve as a powerful tool for mobilizing and organizing people for positive causes. Though it is generally viewed religion as a private matter but close observation reveals its significant role in various social interactions also. Religion has become a powerful mobilising force globally. Regarding Bodos, the largest plain tribe of Assam, it has been observed that a portion of them has embraced various sects of Hinduism through a long process of assimilation, while a fraction has converted to Christianity. In the early 20th century, the Bodo people witnessed the rise of the 'Brahma Movement,' aimed at reducing conversions and unifying the community. While the movement was somewhat successful, some individuals, having been initiated by different Hindu Gurus, retained their new identity as 'Saraniya,' a separate identity from the Bodos. Then with a revivalist ambition Nikhil Bathow Mahasabha was established in 1990s and since its establishment the Nikhil Bathow Mahasabha has been working tirelessly to revive religious traditions and promote the unification of the Bodo people. This revivalism plays a key role in their movement for a separate socio-cultural and political identity