Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India

Automatic Image Annotation using 2D MHMM

Automated Image Annotation is an important and challenging task in the field of computer vision and CBIR(Content-Based Image Retrieval). It has extensive use in research as well as personal fields. In this project, the same has been achieved with the help of a statistical method, namely a 2-dimensional multi-resolution hidden Markov model. Prior to classifying images by the system, it is trained using a set of images which are previously annotated using labels. Then the image to be annotated is compared against each trained model produced as a result of the previous step. This produces a parameter called likelihood. The label having the highest likelihood is assigned to the image

Disaster Relief and the Indian State: Lessons for Just Citizenship

What does the giving and receiving of disaster relief say about a democratic state’s engagement with justice and its responsibilities towards its citizens? This is the question that motivates the following paper, where an attempt is made to characterise the “relief state” through the example of the Indian state’s response to the super-cyclone in 1999 in Odisha on the eastern coast of India, and more recently, the devastating floods of 2008. The paper interrogates the norms that guide the state in its relief role, as well as the strategies deployed by disaster victims to access such relief. It argues that the ‘relief relationship’ between states and victims, who are also citizens, complicates the idea of the nation-state as a provider of just citizenship. Guided by contemporaneous debates about justice, rights and citizenship in India, the paper observes that the moral stance adopted by citizens is as important to the realisation of citizenship and its benefits as the formal enshrinement of rights. Through an intensive discussion of the norms and practices of disaster relief, it concludes that victimhood is the moral content of how citizens engage with the state after a disaster

The political prioritisation of welfare in India:comparing the Public Distribution System in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand

The idea of state responsibility for ensuring food security has gained ground, with strong popular mobilisations for the Right to Food around the world; but important variations prevail, both in the articulation of demands around food security interventions and in political responses to these. This paper takes a close look at India’s Public Distribution System, a programme with a long history and clear national-level, legislative backing, but considerable differences in prioritisation at the subnational level. Through an empirically rich and innovative comparison of Chhattisgarh with Jharkhand – both created at the same time, in 2000 – it asks why the opportunities afforded by statehood allowed Chhattisgarh to politically prioritise the PDS, but not Jharkhand. The paper finds that the explanation lies in the interrelated dimensions of political competition, the nature of pressures exerted by electorally significant societal groups, and political enablement of bureaucratic capacity. Finally, the analytical framework at the heart of the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political conditions that allow the deployment of state capacity for the promotion of welfar

Formation of Morphable 3D­model of Large Scale Natural Sites by Using Image Based Modeling and Rendering Techniques

No global 3D model of the environment needs to be assembled, a process which can be extremely cumbersome and error prone for large scale scenes e.g. the global registration of multiple local models can accumulate a great amount of error, while it also presumes a very accurate extraction of the underlying geometry. On the contrary, neither any such accurate geometric reconstruction of the individual local 3D models nor a very precise registration between them is required by our framework in order that it can produce satisfactory results. This paper presents an application of LP based MRF optimization techniques and also we have turned our attention to a different re­ search topic: the proposal of novel image based modeling and rendering methods, which are capable of automatically reproducing faithful (i.e. photorealistic) digital copies of complex 3D virtual environments, while also allowing the virtual exploration of these environments at interactive frame rates

Radiative Acceleration and Emission from Relativistic Outflows

Outflowing streams of matter or jets are a common phenomenon in the observeduniverse. The most extreme and powerful jets are relativistic, i.e., they travel at speedscomparable to the of speed light. Gamma Ray-Bursts (GRBs) and Active Galactic Nuclei(AGNs) are two sources of these relativistic jets. In this work I will explore the role playedby advected radiation the radiation internal to the jet itself in modifying the jetdynamics and creating the observed radiation spectrum. First, I present a Monte Carlocode designed to simulate the spectrum formed in a scattering dominated photon-leptonplasma. I demonstrate that non-thermal features in the emitted spectrum can arisefrom the interaction of thermal populations of photons and leptons, initially at differenttemperatures. I find the existence of a correlation between the spectral parametersthat suggests the presence of this mechanism in cosmic sources, for example, in promptspectra of GRBs. These simulations, however, do not account for the dynamical couplingbetween the radiation and matter within the jet, which is expected for outflows from bothGRBs and AGNs. In the second part of this dissertation, I show how radiation regulatesthe dynamical properties (such as structure, acceleration) of jets. I use a custom-madedynamic Monte Carlo code to study radiation (Compton scattering) driven expansionand acceleration in unexplored evolutionary stages of GRB jets. My results uncover newregimes of jet evolution and allow me to obtain analytical estimates to better parameterizethe jet dynamics in analytical and semi-analytical studies. In addition, I explore radiativeacceleration and deceleration as mechanisms to produce two-component structured AGNjets. I find that this radiation-driven regulatory mechanism plays a crucial role inexplaining the puzzling observation of high-energy emission from misaligned AGN jets.Keywords: Outflows, Relativistic, AGNs, Jets, Radiation, GRB