The Role of Public Enterprises in India

The public sector is just as much a part of the society it is supposed to serve as the private sector. In India, the public sector not only profoundly influences the economy and society, but it is also the outcome of social and political processes that are outside the control of a single group or a single planning authority

An empirical study of the robustness of Inter-component Communication in Android

Abstract—Over the last three years, Android has established itself as the largest-selling operating system for smartphones. It boasts of a Linux-based robust kernel, a modular framework with multiple components in each application, and a security-conscious design where each application is isolated in its own virtual machine. However, all of these desirable properties would be rendered ineffectual if an application were to deliver erroneous messages to targeted applications and thus cause the target to behave incorrectly. In this paper, we present an empir-ical evaluation of the robustness of Inter-component Commu-nication (ICC) in Android through fuzz testing methodology, whereby, parameters of the inter-component communication are changed to various incorrect values. We show that not only exception handling is a rarity in Android applications, but also it is possible to crash the Android runtime from unprivileged user processes. Based on our observations, we highlight some of the critical design issues in Android ICC and suggest solutions to alleviate these problems. Keywords-android, fuzz, security, smartphone, robustness, exceptio

Industry, labour and the state: emerging relations in the Indian state of West Bengal

Despite the pursuit of similar industrial policies during the post-1990s, Indian states have revealed divergent outcomes in industrial growth. Such divergence suggests different levels of policy implementation which itself is a result of the interplay of formal and informal institutions, historically shaped. We try to ex-plain this divergence in the context of the evolution of state-business relations in West Bengal, a coastal state in Eastern India, and unique among Indian states not only by virtue of being ruled by a Leftist regime for an uninterrupted 34 years (1977-May, 2011), but also by having witnessed a turnaround of sorts in the outlook of the former government towards private capital within this period. Our findings suggest that it is the peculiarity of institutional behaviour that determines the policy outcomes in the state. The rigidities in political as well as economic institutions in the state are prompting us to look at West Bengal as a classic case of 'institutional stickiness' leading to 'path dependency'