From the Aura of Sun to the Devil’s Door: A Brief History of Corona

The spikes of sun give us a beautiful aura during solar eclipse. The spikes of a virus are the humanity is threatening. The new virus COVID19 is a sub group of coronaviruses. Such viruses are spike and cause few like diseases (SARS, MERS, and COVID19 etc.).Such viruses existed in wild animals long-ago. Long ago in 1798 Malthus wrote his famous book An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted that an over shooting of population over food grains production will create a pressure. This will lead to a Nature’s wrath. In the listing of wrath, Malthus mentioned some natural disasters. We thought Malthus was proved wrong by technological revolution (Lucas; 2004). However, probably he is now laughing in his grave. The push for food in Chinese Checker and the foray into the realm of wild fauna has probably ticked this virus. Now we are confronting a Malthusian wrath in a new form that pandemic of COVID19. Numerous socio-economic factors become important in the transmission, spread and mortality caused by COVID19. This short note tries to bring out the important of these factors in assessing the impact of COVID19. Whatever it may be COVID19 is teaching a lesson- a lesson to live in harmony with Nature. Are we prepared to learn this lesson? Or else our fate would be like dinosaurs in the remote past. It is this haunting reality that COVID19 forces us to learn

From the Aura of Sun to the Devil’s Door: A Brief History of Corona

The spikes of sun give us a beautiful aura during solar eclipse. The spikes of a virus are the humanity is threatening. The new virus COVID19 is a sub group of coronaviruses. Such viruses are spike and cause few like diseases (SARS, MERS, and COVID19 etc.).Such viruses existed in wild animals long-ago. Long ago in 1798 Malthus wrote his famous book An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted that an over shooting of population over food grains production will create a pressure. This will lead to a Nature’s wrath. In the listing of wrath, Malthus mentioned some natural disasters. We thought Malthus was proved wrong by technological revolution (Lucas; 2004). However, probably he is now laughing in his grave. The push for food in Chinese Checker and the foray into the realm of wild fauna has probably ticked this virus. Now we are confronting a Malthusian wrath in a new form that pandemic of COVID19. Numerous socio-economic factors become important in the transmission, spread and mortality caused by COVID19. This short note tries to bring out the important of these factors in assessing the impact of COVID19. Whatever it may be COVID19 is teaching a lesson- a lesson to live in harmony with Nature. Are we prepared to learn this lesson? Or else our fate would be like dinosaurs in the remote past. It is this haunting reality that COVID19 forces us to learn

Bees Out of the Pandora’s Box: Economic Consequences of National Register in Assam

In India, at present, there is a lot of hue and cry for and against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. All the arguments are however based on false perception of migration and its ill or well effects on the economy. We have used the Census 2001 data to understand the nature and trend of migration in Assam. Our analysis suggests that the recent uproar over illegal migrants from neighboring country in Assam is more of a myth than reality and does not hold much economic justification. Firstly, official data suggests that the flow of internal migration in various districts of Assam is miniscule. Moreover it is showing a declining trend over the last few decades. The historical international migration that took place in Assam was due to mainly ‘push’ factor and no such ‘push’ factors have been in sight in the last few decades. Secondly and more importantly, migration of any form (though waning in Assam) adds to the prosperity and well-being of the state

Bees Out of the Pandora’s Box: Economic Consequences of National Register in Assam

In India, at present, there is a lot of hue and cry for and against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. All the arguments are however based on false perception of migration and its ill or well effects on the economy. We have used the Census 2001 data to understand the nature and trend of migration in Assam. Our analysis suggests that the recent uproar over illegal migrants from neighboring country in Assam is more of a myth than reality and does not hold much economic justification. Firstly, official data suggests that the flow of internal migration in various districts of Assam is miniscule. Moreover it is showing a declining trend over the last few decades. The historical international migration that took place in Assam was due to mainly ‘push’ factor and no such ‘push’ factors have been in sight in the last few decades. Secondly and more importantly, migration of any form (though waning in Assam) adds to the prosperity and well-being of the state

A Chayanovian approach to vulnerability: Re-evaluation of Vulnerability using Indian Data

Vulnerability is regarded as the ability of withstand income shocks. This is true of the functioning –entitlement approach, the social constructivist approach, or the qualitative approach (Addison, Hulme and Kanbur 2009). In the standard economic theory, a somewhat distinction is made between production and income. While the battery of production analysis uses terms such as efficiency, technological diffusion, and scale economies and so on, the earning side are related to poverty, inequality, subsistence and host of such issues. In the present paper, we used the approach pursued by A. V. Chayanov. In the approach of Chayanov (1966, 1989), for the life of poor, production and earnings are so strongly correlated that it would be impossible to dichotomise them. In fact, it would be wrong and probably unjust to do so. Keeping this idea in view, we have constructed the vulnerability indices for Indian states based on production data. Our data reveals that the vulnerability in India is more widespread than is commonly thought. We have also examined various factors that are responsible for this scenario. In short, our exercise puts forth a completely different picture of vulnerability in India than is commonly thought

Trust & Informality in the Indian Credit Market: A Snapshot from Recent Data

Credit is very important in the lives of the poor people. The benefits of credit are manifold. Even after more than six and a half decade since independence, the extent and important of informal credit have not diminished to a great degree in India. This paper aims at to understand the significance of personalized relations in the working of the informal credit market with the help of the All Indian Debt and Investment survey data. .Our analysis shows that there is distinct compartmentalization of the Indian credit market with respect to the disbursement of loan from various credit agencies. Each of these category of credit agencies has some definite target group to cater to. Apart from this clear division of loaning pattern, the importance of trust, personalized knowledge and mutual co-operation in the informal credit market has also been observed

Theoretical framework for Measuring Social Deprivation

This paper tries to look at deprivation from an entirely different standpoint. The approach framed by us is somewhat different from the existing deliberations on deprivation. In the literature, deprivation relates to non-attainments of some desirable attributes. In our view this approach is one-sided. Deprivation, as we understand, is not only the result of non-attainment but accumulation of non-desirable traits that have been a result of such non-attainment. A proper measure of deprivation thus should measure not only the non-attainment factor but also the result of the accumulated, unwanted outcomes. The second perspective in which we differ from the standard analysis is the emphasis on the efficacy of the use of resources in combating the deprivation or ill consequences. The approach should emphasize not only on the availability of welfare improving inputs but to the extent to which these inputs have been transformed into the welfare-improving outcomes

Secure Cloud Storage Scheme Based On Hybrid Cryptosystem

This paper presents a secure cloud storage scheme based on hybrid cryptosystem, which consists of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and one-way hash function. Here, the data owner exports large volume of encrypted data to a cloud storage provider. The exported encrypted data is over-encrypted by the cloud storage provider, and the data is sent to the requesting user. An existing hybrid cryptosystem based dynamic key management scheme with hierarchical access control has been incorporated in our scheme. The key management scheme groups users in various security classes, and helps to derive efficiently, as well as directly the secret keys of the lower order security classes. The incorporated key management scheme in our proposed scheme incurs low computational, communication, and storage overheads for key generation, and derivation purposes. The security analysis, and the simulation results run on the AVISPA tool (formal security verification tool) show that the proposed scheme is protected from the adversaries. This scheme is useful in `owner-write-users-read\u27 application areas, and the end users may use resource-constrained wireless mobile devices securely in this proposed scheme

Formal Informal Interactions: A Simple Chayanov Model

Needless to say, the topic of formal-informal interaction is well traversed. Several dual economy models have been in operation to understand the dynamics of formalization-or in its popular acronym-development. Development discourse is essentially a way in which the economy becomes increasingly formalised or its operations become visible to the panoptic vision of law and legal institutions. The story is essentially the same. Formalisation raises efficiency and productivity thereby yielding benefit to all concerned. Also it adds to the society’s overall capacity to reproduce and produce itself giving way to future growth and prosperity. The story told and retold many a times fails to capture the reason for continuous existence or even (re)creation of informality even in a world where formality is the sure way to succeed. In an interesting paper Porta and Shleifer (2014) deals with this issue and comes out with an interesting conclusion. The informal sector does not merely exist for taking advantage of legal loopholes. Even if these loopholes are somehow stitched, the informal sector will not become formal. The clue perhaps lies in an old view expressed by Chayanov (though not included in the standard Chayanovian models) that in certain circumstances an informal sector can outperform a modern capitalist sector. This paper is a modest attempt to include this clue in a formal model of the simplest possible type that tries to unravel the relation between formal and informal sector as also the consequences of policies that leads to forced formalisation