Migration, Representations and Social Relations: Experiences of Jharkhand Labour to Western Uttar Pradesh

Studying a stream of migration from Jharkhand to western Uttar Pradesh (UP), this article focuses on the work and life experiences of migrant labour from tribal India. Based on an in-depth study of a Jharkhand village, alongside a briefer stint at the destination village in UP, it examines the micro-level nuances and complexity of migrant labour movements and their often unexpected and unrecognised social consequences, particularly, the renegotiation of class and gender relations at home and the destination. Apart from pointing to the deep interconnections between the relations of production and reproduction, it demonstrates how the use of distinct representations of work and life due to spatial distanciation contribute to renegotiating both labour relations and social identities

PROJECT UNIVERSE - ESOURCING STRATEGY

Triton is a small esourcing company located in Southern England. Triton operates in the e-procurement space whereby it enables clients to create their own e-auction interfaces. The reverse auction model is in significantly widespread use in the e-procurement sector. Triton has key competencies within this space. As a recently established start up company, Triton faces a couple of key challenges. First it is unclear which market it should operate in. Should it for instance, service all sorts of customers in the procurement market or address the needs of a specialist segment. Second, Triton also hasn´t been able to figure out whether it should direct its efforts to locate public sector projects or create customised solutions for smaller companies that are coming into the market. Being a small company it needs to build reputation by creating uniquly reliable customer service yet such a strategy tends to impact on its cash flow in the short term. By placing oneself as a consultant to Triton, the student will be expected to develop a strategic plan for its growth. The strategic plan in essence is expected to address the immediate past, present and future existence and growth of Triton´s business

On the log correction to the black hole area law

Various approaches to black hole entropy yield the area law with logarithmic corrections, many involving a coefficient 1/2, and some involving 3/2. It is pointed out here that the standard quantum geometry formalism is not consistent with 3/2 and favours 1/2.Comment: 4 pages; added new result

Gender, Water, and Nutrition in India: An Intersectional Perspective

Despite the global recognition of women’s central role in the provision, management, and utilisation of water for production and domestic use, and despite the close links between production choices, the security of water for consumption, and gendered social relations, the implications of these interlinkages for health and nutrition are under-explored. This paper seeks to fill this gap. It unpacks the gendered pathways mediating the links between water security in all its dimensions and nutritional outcomes, based on research in 12 villages across two Indian states. The findings point to the importance of the dynamic links between natural (land and water) systems and gendered human activities, across the domains of production and reproduction, and across seasons. These links have implications for women’s work and time burdens. They impact equally on physical and emotional experiences of well-being, especially in contexts constrained by the availability, access, quality, and stability of water

Spatio-temporal Patterns of Indian Monsoon Rainfall

The primary objective of this paper is to analyze a set of canonical spatial patterns that approximate the daily rainfall across the Indian region, as identified in the companion paper where we developed a discrete representation of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall using state variables with spatio-temporal coherence maintained using a Markov Random Field prior. In particular, we use these spatio-temporal patterns to study the variation of rainfall during the monsoon season. Firstly, the ten patterns are divided into three families of patterns distinguished by their total rainfall amount and geographic spread. These families are then used to establish `active' and `break' spells of the Indian monsoon at the all-India level. Subsequently, we characterize the behavior of these patterns in time by estimating probabilities of transition from one pattern to another across days in a season. Patterns tend to be `sticky': the self-transition is the most common. We also identify most commonly occurring sequences of patterns. This leads to a simple seasonal evolution model for the summer monsoon rainfall. The discrete representation introduced in the companion paper also identifies typical temporal rainfall patterns for individual locations. This enables us to determine wet and dry spells at local and regional scales. Lastly, we specify sets of locations that tend to have such spells simultaneously, and thus come up with a new regionalization of the landmass