Social inequality, reproductive health and child development : a Chhattisgarh village study

India’s gains in reproductive health and child development have been slower than anticipated, and significantly the country continues to bear a disproportionate share of the global undernutrition burden. Indian children do particularly poorly in the foundational foetal stage and in the first three years, and public programmes are especially ineffective in reaching this group. While it is recognised that reproductive health and child nutrition is determined complexly, having biomedical and social roots, positions from a policy perspective are oftentimes competing – on whether key barriers are primarily economic or essentially cultural. Additionally, an argument explaining the South Asian nutrition ‘enigma’ emphasises the mediating role of female power, often measured as female decision-making autonomy. I discuss based on research in a village in the rice-growing plains of Chhattisgarh the complex and interrelated cultural, economic and gender-based variables as they bear on reproductive health and nutrition for the different social groups in the village. I argue that this under-researched geography at the confluence of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian cultural streams has interesting insights to offer for social theory into the determinants of female power. Important elements of northern kinship based on exogamous principles, theoretically less favourable for female autonomy than ‘southern’ kinship systems, counter-intuitively go alongside relatively egalitarian gender relations, also evidenced by sex-ratios, and other telling indicators. Furthermore, not fitting with mainstream discourse on female autonomy’s positive demographic and health implications, relatively egalitarian gender relations and sex-ratios go alongside poor performance on other demographic, health and nutrition outcomes. For caste groups in the village, elements of northern kinship appear to bear on son-preference, and undermine a woman’s independence in fertility related decision-making. However, beyond an influence on fertility the influence of gender-inequality on reproductive and child development outcomes could not be read off from observations or expressions of decision making power. I argue that it may be useful to broaden the gender-lens beyond a narrow conceptual focus on decision-making autonomy to include structural dimensions such as rigidities in gender division of labour. Behaviours and practices relevant to reproduction and childrearing vary significantly from biomedical recommendations. These reveal both economic and cultural roots. Judged against biomedical norms, health and childcare behaviours shaped by ideational beliefs are at greater variance for the post-partum stage than during pregnancy. Cultural food proscriptions have little relevance during pregnancy, implying that concerns of ‘eating down’ in pregnancy for its influence on foetal growth are of little consequence for this geography. I argue that there are important economic barriers that place limits on diet quality in pregnancy, yet there is some scope for health-facilitating resource reprioritisation. Health and childcare behaviours in the post-partum stage diverge to a greater extent from recommended biomedical practice, and could be damaging to nutritional status of the mother and child. While these practices have a clear ‘ideational’ element, they are also rooted in fear of both ill health and economic distress, deriving perhaps from the historical experience of communities in a poor health environment. I discuss from the curious case of the nutritionally vulnerable Pardhi tribe, and their rejection of the public works NREGA programme that there are iterative cultural and nutritional factors that influence poverty for this community, notwithstanding oppressive social and political relations. Productive activity perceived to involve high energy expenditure, while seemingly economically attractive can be rejected in contexts where communities aim to preserve ‘body-capital’. Further conventional classifications of what is considered routine unskilled work under NREGA may be rejected because of cultural unfamiliarity and unfamiliar body techniques. The wider marginalisation of the community and oppressive social relations may further contribute to Pardhi rejection of public programmes. In addition, entrenched local political rivalries work against public interest to mediate the everyday welfare state and implementation of reproductive health and nutrition programmes such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS)

Would the People of Chhattisgarh Prefer Cash Transfers instead of Foodgrain?

The overwhelming and consistent preference for grain over cash is striking, especially since this preference was expressed by both men and women, irrespective of class, age, or community. It is useful to examine reasons for this sharp preference for grain over cash against the background of national debates about cash transfers

History from the Margins: Literary Culture and Manuscript Production in Western India in the Vernacular Millennium

Scholars of South Asia have long known of praśastis, eulogistic verses often composed in the transregional Sanskrit language on copperplates, stone slabs, and temple walls, from the early centuries of the Common Era. They have traditionally sieved these documents to recover dynastic histories and have supposed that as a genre, it faded away in the second millennium CE when Islamic polities were established across the subcontinent and new genres of history writing were popularized. In making this supposition they have overlooked the fact that praśastis continued to be frequently composed and written. Yet, their appearance was neither in public spaces nor in public documents, but frequently at the ends of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. In this paper, I carefully analyze a corpus of hitherto un-translated praśastis and other scribal remarks written at the end of oft illustrated sumptuous Jaina manuscripts prepared between c. 1000 –1600 in western India. This was a period during which manuscript culture and literary production burgeoned in the region. Through my close reading of these genealogical micro histories, I shed new light on the emergence of new power elites, literati associations, centers of manuscript production, the rise of professional authors and scribes, and formation of kinship. I also consider the aesthetics and poetics of patronage in the region and ask why patrons in the early centuries of the second millennium CE sought to legitimize their family histories using an archaic genre

Composition-contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings

Vector representations of natural language are ubiquitous in search applications. Recently, various methods based on contrastive learning have been proposed to learn textual representations from unlabelled data; by maximizing alignment between minimally-perturbed embeddings of the same text, and encouraging a uniform distribution of embeddings across a broader corpus. Differently, we propose maximizing alignment between texts and a composition of their phrasal constituents. We consider several realizations of this objective and elaborate the impact on representations in each case. Experimental results on semantic textual similarity tasks show improvements over baselines that are comparable with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, this work is the first to do so without incurring costs in auxiliary training objectives or additional network parameters.Comment: ACL 202

Temperature-Humidity-Bias Aging Technique to Identify Defective Surface Mount Capacitors

Ceramic chip capacitors can potentially crack due to thermal stresses in a surface mount assembly process. The electrical performance of the cracked capacitors will degrade with time, and they will prematurely short. In high reliability applications, the cracked capacitors must be identified and eliminated. We have developed and demonstrated the temperature-humidity-bias (THB) aging technique to identify cracked capacitors. The initial phase of the study involved setting up automated test equipment to monitor 100 surface mounted capacitors at 85% relative humidity, 85{degree}C with 50 volts dc bias. The capacitors subjected to severe thermal shock were aged along with control samples. Failure mode analysis was done on the failed capacitors. The capacitors with surface cracks short-out within the first 8 hours of aging, whereas the capacitors that failed after a longer aging time (8 to 1000 hours) had a shorting path in an internal void. Internal voids are typical defects introduced during manufacturing of multilayer ceramic (MLC) capacitors. In the second phase of the study, we used the THB aging technique to study the effect of surface mount processes on capacitor cracking and, thus the reliability. The surface mount processes studied were vapor phase, infra-red (IR) and convection belt reflow soldering. The results shoed that 6.3% of vapor phase soldered capacitors, and 1.25% of the IR and convection belt soldered capacitors had cracks. In all capacitors, regardless of the solder process used, an additional 3 to 4% of the capacitors failed due to a shorting path in the internal void. The results of this study confirm that this technique can be used to screen cracked capacitors and compare different solder and manufacturing processes

Modeling and Simulation - The Effects of Grain Coarsening on Local Stresses and Strains in Solder Microstructure

A critical issue in the long-term reliability of solder connections used in electronic packages is the joint failure during thermal cycling. Presently in most finite element analysis to predict the solder joint fatigue failures, solder is assumed as a homogeneous single-phase metal. However in the last decade, several metallurgical studies have shown that solder microstructure may have a role in early solder joint failures (ref 1). Investigators have observed (ref 1) that solder microstructure coarsens in local bands during aging and during thermal cycle fatigue. In a failed solder joint, the fatigue cracks are found in these bands of coarse grains. It is speculated that the grain coarsening increases the local strains within the microstructure, thereby increasing the likelihood for a crack to initiate. The objective of this study is to model and simulate the effect of grain coarsening on local stresses and strains. During solidification of eutectic Pb/Sn solder, two types of microstructure form, namely lamellar and equiaxed. In this study, I have developed a computer code to generate both types of microstructures of varying grain coarseness. This code is incorporated into the finite element (FE) code that analyzes the local stresses and strains within the computer-generated microstructure. The FE code, specifically developed for this study, uses an algorithm involving the sparse matrix and iterative solver. This code on a typical single-processor machine will allow the analyst to use over 1 million degrees of freedom. For higher number of degrees of freedom, we have also developed a code to run on a parallel machine using message passing interface. The data reported in this paper were obtained using the single-processor code. The solder microstructure, if assumed to be homogeneous single phase, has gradual variation in local stresses and strains. In 2-phase solder, von mises stresses and strains are heterogeneously distributed. In general, the maximum von mises stress in 2-phase solder case are higher than in 1-phase solder. In lamellar microstructure of 2-phase solder, the maximum von mises stress in the microstructure gradually increases with grain coarseness. In equiaxed microstructure of 2-phase solder, the maximum von mises stress does not follow a general trend, increasing or decreasing, with increasing grain coarseness

The ideal and the techno-economic city : a critical analysis of The City of Tomorrow by Le Corbusier

Department: Architecture

Elevated potential for intraspecific competition in territorial carnivores occupying fragmented landscapes

The distribution of mammals is determined by a suite of endogenous and exogenous factors. In territorial, polygynous species like tigers (Panthera tigris), males often center their space-use around female territories, repelling competitors from these areas. Competition among males for females leads to increased mortality of both sexes and infanticide of unrelated cubs, which can lead to population declines. We hypothesized that increased territorial overlap among adult male tigers and elevated levels of inter and intra-sex competition would be manifest in populations with male-biased adult sex ratios (ASR). We also assessed whether inter-sex variation in adult survival or degree of habitat connectivity resulted in skewed ASR. We evaluated these hypotheses using camera trap data from three tiger populations occupying habitat patches with varying levels of connectivity and ASRs. Data were analyzed using multi-state occupancy models, where states were defined as habitat use by one or more male tigers in sites with and without female use. As predicted, in populations with male-biased or even ASR we found evidence for increased spatial overlap between male tigers, particularly pronounced in areas adjacent to female territories. Given parity in adult survival, habitat fragmentation likely caused male-biased ASR. Our results suggest that the persistence of small tiger populations in habitat patches with male-biased ASR may be significantly compromised by behavior-mediated endogenous demographic processes that are often overlooked. In habitat fragments with pronounced male biased ASR, population recovery of territorial carnivores may require timely supplementation of individuals to compensate for population losses from intraspecific competition

‘If the gas runs out, we are not going to sleep hungry’: Exploring household energy choices in India’s critically polluted coal belt

Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Despite a range of initiatives to introduce cleaner fuels, a large proportion of poor people in India continue to rely on solid fuels for cooking and heating, with severe implications for personal and family health. This paper seeks to open up the various fuel-supply strategies that underpin domestic energy use in low-income settings to explain the unconventional solutions (jugaad) that households employ to bridge the gap between energy needs and supply of various fuels, including liquefied petroleum gas. We draw on long-term ethnographic engagements in four severely polluted low-income urban settlements in central India’s coal belt to investigate how communities, and primarily women, ensure domestic energy provision. As households struggle to secure a range of potential fuels with different benefits and drawbacks, we outline the socio-cultural and economic processes that shape household energy decision-making. These highly uncertain processes take place within an institutional structure that offers some possibilities, but is overall too rigid to fit the lived realties of low-income residents. Although households commonly understand that there are negative health effects from solid-fuel smoke, pollution and health are only marginal considerations for households facing daily struggles to reduce expenses. We argue that understanding the everyday jugaad of household energy provision is crucial for the possibilities to shift away from fuels damaging to both human health and the environment