Plastic Waste in India: overview, impact, and measures to mitigate: Review

India is one of the world’s large and fastest-growing economies. With the expanding development, the usage of plastic for anthropogenic activities has expanded many folds and India alone generated around 3.3 million metric tonnes of plastic in the financial year 2019. 79 percent of the plastic generated worldwide enters our land, water, and environment as waste; part of it also enters our bodies through the food chain. The industry in India states that 60 percent of what is generated is recycled and we had assumed that we had solved the problem of plastic waste by recycling, or burying it in landfills. But we were incorrect. Plastic garbage is omnipresent today. It is filling up our oceans and harming marine life and affecting all organisms in the food chain. With the development of economic growth of the country per capita consumption of plastic will only increase in the coming years and we will end up generating more plastic waste The review paper aimed to examine the major impact of plastic waste in India and how to reduce plastic consumption, considering measures such as phasing out or banning multilayered plastics that cannot be recycled, contemplating renewable raw materials, promoting the use of bioplastics, incentivizing the recycling business, and making the rules and guidelines for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) simple and enforceable

Assessing the Migration of BPA and Phthalic Acid from Take-out Food Containers: Implications for Health and Environmental Sustainability in India

The research investigates the escalating consumption of take-out food in India and the associated health risks stemming from the extensive use of plastic packaging. Through a comprehensive nationwide online survey, the study delved into dietary preferences, frequency of take-out food consumption, delivery service timing, and the types of packaging commonly encountered by Indian consumers. To address these concerns, the research team developed an analytical method to detect Bisphenol A (BPA) and Phthalic acid migration from food-contact materials (FCMs) into various food simulants. The investigation revealed that prolonged exposure to elevated temperatures led to increased migration of BPA and Phthalic acid, particularly in polyethylene pouches using 3% acetic acid as a food simulant, with the highest concentrations observed after 45 minutes of exposure. Additionally, a microbial bioassay demonstrated the mutagenic potential of migrated plasticizers, showcasing significant effects in mammalian systems, particularly under metabolic activation. The study underscores the substantial health risks associated with plastic packaging in take-out food, emphasizing potential implications for consumer health and calling for more extensive research and considerations regarding food packaging materials

"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work

A note on non-splitting Z-bent functions

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2017.01.001In this note, we find constructions of non-splitting Z-bent functions, thus solving an open problem of Dobbertin and Leander (2008) [4]. Under some technical conditions, we also construct Z-bent functions of level r+1 that are not splitting into Z-bent functions of level r≥0.Office of Naval Research GlobalVSP award no. N62909-13-1-V10