Can energy empower women? : A case study of the Solar Mamas' programme in rural Rajasthan, India

Feminist scholars who have analysed the gender, energy and development (GED) and women’s empowerment nexus, including Clancy et al. (2012), Batliwala, (2015), and Dutta et al. (2017), claim that access to energy is critical in the development process for social inclusion and gender equality. However, it is argued that because of societal rules and patriarchal norms that dictate gendered roles and responsibilities, women and children suffer the most from the lack of, and the unequal access to, energy services (Dutta, 2019). This is especially true in the context of rural Rajasthan where there is strong discrimination against women and gender inequality (Kaushik, 2015). There is a lack of empirical evidence on the extent to which and how, access to energy, and training in energy technology, can facilitate the achievement of rural women’s empowerment. This thesis addresses this important research gap through a case study of the Solar Mamas’ programme of the Barefoot College (BC) in rural Rajasthan. The NGO has been engaging illiterate and semi-literate women for over 20 years in training in small-scale solar energy technology solutions to address energy poverty. Drawing on feminist constructivist epistemology, I adopt mixed methods of qualitative data gathering and analysis to question the role of the BC in fostering rural Rajasthani women’s empowerment. The specific socio-cultural context of rural Rajasthan makes it especially difficult for those rural women who are marginalised to start their empowerment process alone. Therefore, I argue that the role of the College is critical to facilitating the empowerment of rural women. My analysis reveals that the NGO innovative eco-village cooperative living model offers spatial and temporal features that facilitate long-lasting changes in women’s lives, therefore encouraging ‘transformative’ empowerment. There emerge instances of intergenerational change affecting new generations, therefore emphasising empowerment as an ongoing process. The training and the engagement with the NGO also encourage women’s collective agency and entrepreneurship in the rural energy technology sector. This, in turn, challenges the gendered division of labour and knowledge domains, and contributes to greater gender equality. I suggest that an analysis of the social fabric of households and the community should supplement development interventions on energy provision and energy technology training. Such analysis can uncover social inequalities and differences in energy access, use, and the benefits deriving from services, and can facilitate challenging these constraints to encourage women’s ‘transformative’ empowerment through energy

A paradigmatic flow for small-scale magnetohydrodynamics: properties of the ideal case and the collision of current sheets

We propose two sets of initial conditions for magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in which both the velocity and the magnetic fields have spatial symmetries that are preserved by the dynamical equations as the system evolves. When implemented numerically they allow for substantial savings in CPU time and memory storage requirements for a given resolved scale separation. Basic properties of these Taylor-Green flows generalized to MHD are given, and the ideal non-dissipative case is studied up to the equivalent of 2048^3 grid points for one of these flows. The temporal evolution of the logarithmic decrements, delta, of the energy spectrum remains exponential at the highest spatial resolution considered, for which an acceleration is observed briefly before the grid resolution is reached. Up to the end of the exponential decay of delta, the behavior is consistent with a regular flow with no appearance of a singularity. The subsequent short acceleration in the formation of small magnetic scales can be associated with a near collision of two current sheets driven together by magnetic pressure. It leads to strong gradients with a fast rotation of the direction of the magnetic field, a feature also observed in the solar wind.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Evidence for Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling in rotating stratified turbulence using high-resolution direct numerical simulations

We report results on rotating stratified turbulence in the absence of forcing, with large-scale isotropic initial conditions, using direct numerical simulations computed on grids of up to 4096^3 points. The Reynolds and Froude numbers are respectively equal to Re=5.4 x 10^4 and Fr=0.0242. The ratio of the Brunt-V\"ais\"al\"a to the inertial wave frequency, N/f, is taken to be equal to 4.95, a choice appropriate to model the dynamics of the southern abyssal ocean at mid latitudes. This gives a global buoyancy Reynolds number R_B=ReFr^2=32, a value sufficient for some isotropy to be recovered in the small scales beyond the Ozmidov scale, but still moderate enough that the intermediate scales where waves are prevalent are well resolved. We concentrate on the large-scale dynamics, for which we find a spectrum compatible with the Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling, and confirm that the Froude number based on a typical vertical length scale is of order unity, with strong gradients in the vertical. Two characteristic scales emerge from this computation, and are identified from sharp variations in the spectral distribution of either total energy or helicity. A spectral break is also observed at a scale at which the partition of energy between the kinetic and potential modes changes abruptly, and beyond which a Kolmogorov-like spectrum recovers. Large slanted layers are ubiquitous in the flow in the velocity and temperature fields, with local overturning events indicated by small Richardson numbers, and a small large-scale enhancement of energy directly attributable to the effect of rotation is also observed.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures (including compound figures

On the inverse cascade of magnetic helicity

We study the inverse cascade of magnetic helicity in conducting fluids by investigating the detailed transfer of helicity between different spherical shells in Fourier space in direct numerical simulations of three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). Two different numerical simulations are used, one where the system is forced with an electromotive force in the induction equation, and one in which the system is forced mechanically with an ABC flow and the magnetic field is solely sustained by a dynamo action. The magnetic helicity cascade at the initial stages of both simulations is observed to be inverse and local (in scale space) in the large scales, and direct and local in the small scales. When saturation is approached most of the helicity is concentrated in the large scales and the cascade is non-local. Helicity is transfered directly from the forced scales to the largest scales. At the same time, a smaller in amplitude direct cascade is observed from the largest scale to small scales.Comment: Submitted to PR

Analytic approach to solve a degenerate parabolic PDE for the Heston Model

We present an analytic approach to solve a degenerate parabolic problem associated to the Heston model, which is widely used in mathematical finance to derive the price of an European option on an risky asset with stochastic volatility. We give a variational formulation, involving weighted Sobolev spaces, of the second order degenerate elliptic operator of the parabolic PDE. We use this approach to prove, under appropriate assumptions on some involved unknown parameters, the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions to the parabolic problem on unbounded subdomains of the half-plane