One foot in the city, one in the village: India’s urban poor and their rural bonds

When many of India’s poor move from their rural homes to the country’s packed cities, they remain registered in their village. Here Ankush Agrawal (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) and Vikas Kumar (Azim Premji University, Bengaluru) explain the reasons why India’s urban poor keep a foot in villages and its policy consequences

Critical success factor and metrics for new product development success

The literature emphasizes the great importance of new product development (NPD) for the continuing success of a business. Its contribution to the growth of companies, its influence on profit performance, and its role as a key factor in business planning have been well documented. The competitive environment in which new products are marketed is undergoing fundamental changes. These changes are the key factors driving the NPD activities in service and manufacturing industries. New product development has been an important managerial issue for many firms as the number of new products marketed has grown and product life cycles have shortened. This thesis explores and analyzes the NPD process in detail. The focus is to develop a framework that identifies the critical success factors (CSF) of each phase in the NPD process, and proposes metrics to measure them. Furthermore, the tools and techniques that can be used to evaluate each metric forms an integral part of this framework. (Abstract shortened by UMI.

Notes on Nagaland’s area

Empirical research in economics and, to a lesser extent, in other social sciences is largely dependent upon government statistics. It is generally assumed that governments are committed to collecting and disseminating correct statistics. As a result, the mutually constitutive relationship between politics, economy, and statistics, and the possibility of systematic manipulation of statistics driven by the structural features of this relationship, has received insuf�icient attention within economics. This paper examines the implications of the absence of shared preferences over the quality of statistics within a government. It explores the multiplicity of con�licting maps of the State of Nagaland issued by different tiers and wings of the government to underscore the lack of attention paid to a statistic as crucial as area. The paper situates the cartographic-statistical confusion in its political and economic contexts, and suggeststhat political-geographic arguments are being used to advance political-economic interests along contested borders. It argues that the confusion is not amenable to a technical resolution as it islinked to the dispute over Nagaland’s place within the Union of India and the border disputes between Nagaland and its neighbouring states

NSSO surveys along India’s periphery : data quality and its implications

Sample surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) are the most widely used sources of household level information about consumption, employment, and other socio-economic indicators in India. The representativeness of samples, the wide range of topics surveyed, and the availability of a long-time series are some of the reasons for the appeal of NSSO data for research and policy. This paper assesses the quality of the NSSO data for Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir, which lie in India’s politically restive ethno-geographical periphery. It argues that the NSSO data for these states during 1973-2014 lack representativeness and inter-temporal comparability due to faulty sampling frames, frame and sample non-coverage, and biased samples. It quantifies the impact of data quality on statistics of interest to policy-makers. The paper shows that the estimates of monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) are sensitive to non-coverage and argues that the incidence of poverty is underestimated because NSSO surveys failed to capture the complete distribution of consumption expenditure due to non-coverage. In Nagaland, the degree of non-coverage was so high that in most years between 1993-94 and 2011-12 the state’s poverty headcount ratio was the lowest in the country despite the possible overestimation of its poverty line. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the use of non-representative survey data. Put together, the unreliability of government statistics in Jammu and Kashmir and Nagaland highlights systemic problems that have wider implications for our understanding of the relationship between state, statistics, and policy-makin

Nagaland's demographic somersault

After two decades of very high growth, Nagaland's population declined between 2001 and 2011 though there were no epidemical diseases, wars, famines, natural calamities, political disturbances, or any significant changes in the state's socio-economic characteristics. This decline is unprecedented in the history of independent India. It has been shown that the census estimates of the state's population for 1981-2001 are internally inconsistent. In the light of this, this paper uses information from the Sample Registration System and National Family Health Surveys to examine the reliability of the census figures in Nagaland between 1971 and 2011. It suggests that the census estimates are inconsistent with these sources of information

Infirmities in NSSO data for Nagaland

The samples of the National Sample Survey Office are unlikely to be representative of Nagaland. This is so not because of the size of the sample, but because of the arbitrary restriction to villages within 5 kms of bus routes, whereas the bulk of the rural and tribal population is located farther from the roads. Further, it is argued that the Census of India data, which is used as the sampling frame, is found to be unreliable for Nagaland

Analytical Modelling and Simulation of Highly Sensitive n- RADFET Dosimeter

In the present paper, we have developed a model of a n-RADFET dosimeter device. Moreover, the study has addressed the effects of ionizing radiation on the surface potential and threshold voltage characteristics of the device. In addition, a detailed simulation analysis of the device has been conducted to obtain some further results. The study indicated that high sensitivity can be obtained for RADFET using n-MOSFET device. The results are expected to benefit in establishing the effectiveness of n-RADFET device as a dosimeter