57 research outputs found
Installing Automobility
No full textAn examination of the process of prioritizing private motorized transportation in Bengaluru, a rapidly growing megacity of the Global South. Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In this book, Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population. Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses
Cohomological X-independence for Higgs bundles and Gopakumar–Vafa invariants
No full textThe aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we prove Toda’s X-independence conjecture for Gopakumar–Vafa invariants of arbitrary local curves. Secondly, following Davison’s work, we introduce the BPS cohomology for moduli spaces of Higgs bundles of rank r and Euler characteristic X which are not necessary coprime, and show that it does not depend on X. This result extends the Hausel–Thaddeus conjecture on the X-independence of E-polynomials proved by Mellit, Groechenig–Wyss–Ziegler and Yu in two ways: We obtain an isomorphism of mixed Hodge modules on the Hitchin base rather than an equality of E-polynomials, and we do not need the coprime assumption. The proof of these results is based on a description of the moduli stack of one-dimensional coherent sheaves on a local curve as a global critical locus which is obtained in the companion paper by the first author and Naruki Masuda
Learning approach among health sciences students in a medical college in Nepal: a cross-sectional study
No full textAji Gopakumar,1 Susirith Mendis,2 Jayakumary Muttappallymyalil,3 Jayadevan Sreedharan3 1Department of General Education, 2Continuing Medical Education, Continuing Professional Development and Center for Continuing Education and Community Outreach, 3Department of Community Medicine, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, United Arab Emirates Shah et al aimed to explore the learning approaches among medical, dental, and nursing students which were considered useful to transform the students to become better learners. While the generic objective of the study is appreciated, we have some concerns regarding the methodology and statistical analysis of the study. View the original paper by Author and colleagues. 
Transforming Water Supply Regimes in India: Do Public-Private Partnerships Have a Role to Play?
No full textPublic-private partnerships (PPP) are an important governance strategy that has recently emerged as a solution to enhance the access of marginalised residents to urban infrastructures. With the inception of neo-liberal economic reforms in India, in Indian cities too PPP has emerged as an innovative approach to expand coverage of water supply and sanitation infrastructures. However, there has been little study of the dynamics of partnership efforts in different urban contexts: What role do they play in transforming existing infrastructure regimes? Do reform strategies such as partnerships result in increased privatisation or do they make the governance of infrastructures more participative? Reviewing some of the recent literature on urban political analysis, this article develops the concept of water supply regime to describe the context of water provision in three metropolitan cities in India. To further our understanding of the role of PPP within regimes, this article sketches five cases of water supply and sanitation partnerships located within these three metropolitan cities. From these empirical studies, the article arrives at the conclusion that while PPP are always products of the regime-context they are inserted within, quite often strategic actors in the partnership use the PPP to further their interests by initiating a shift in the regime pathway. This leads us to conclude that PPPs do play a role in making water supply regimes more participative but that depends on the nature of the regime as well as the actions of partners
Vandana Asthana. 2009. <i>Water Policy Processes in India: Discourses of Power and Resistance</i>. New York: Routledge. 182 + xiv pp. $130. ISBN 13: 978-0-415-77831-2
No full textThe global embedding of automobility: Making a case for a hybrid STS framework of analysis
No full textPolicy transmission: the emerging policy dynamic of water supply infrastructure development in India
No full textThe focus of this paper will be to investigate the nature of policy reform in the water supply infrastructure sector in India. In the formal division of powers, much of the authority to implement policies in this sector rests with state governments and the role of the national government is largely restricted to recommending broad policy directions. Since the late 1990s, with the diffusion of the reform agenda into this sector, the national government has taken a number of measures that try to intervene more confidently in setting policy agendas in the states. However, this intervention has not proceeded along expected lines and more assertive policy articulations have been made by different states. A host of factors, such as the proliferation of regional parties and the diverse political logics behind reform implementation in each state are behind this. Using the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India as examples, this paper will develop a model of how water supply policy reforms are being transmitted.</jats:p
Experiments and Counter-Experiments in the Urban Laboratory of Water- Supply Partnerships in India
No full textPublic Leadership Framework: Studying Approaches to Diversify Engineering Education
No full textDespite the recent interest in diversifying engineering education there has been very little analysis regarding the nature of interventions needed to refashion engineering education. This article proposes a preliminary framework referred to here as the Public Leadership Framework (PLF) to examine efforts to diversify engineering education. By comparing three highly regarded programs, the PLF is used here to reveals not just their topical differences but also the differences in their orientations and the nature of engagement with society
Developing Durable Infrastructures: Politics, Social Skill, and Sanitation Partnerships in Urban India -super-1
No full textAccelerated national and international efforts to redress the acute lack of infrastructures in the developing world have focused on forging partnerships to spur infrastructure development. This article finds a sore lack in attempts to grasp how infrastructures implemented through multiactor partnerships within entrenched, often volatile, political environments, become durable. Durability is understood here through field analysis, an approach common within the "new institutional" literature. Two case studies of sanitation infrastructure-making from cities in India are presented as empirical evidence. Failure of the first case and the success of the second in acquisition of durability clearly illustrate the vital role political strategy plays in making infrastructures durable. Copyright 2009 by The Policy Studies Organization.
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