The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, 2016: A Critical Analysis

On 11 August 2016, amending the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, the new bill, The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, 2016 was introduced and passed in the Rajya Sabha (or Council of States), the upper house of the Parliament of India. Central aim of this article is to critically review the amendments to the bill regarding geographies of maternity leave and its associated facilities

Self-Proclaimed God Convicted, POCSO Amended

In the wake of the strings of horrific child rape, on 21 April 2018, the Union Cabinet cleared the ordinance on POCSO or The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences, whereby any individual convicted of raping a child of 12 years or under will be awarded death penalty. This article is an attempt to critically analyse the ordinance, while trying to answer whether the death penalty would reduce rapes in children.&nbsp

Are We Empowered? Stories of Young Indian Working Women

Rituparna Bhattacharyya. 2013. Germany: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 336 pages, ISBN-13: 978-3659205804, ISBN-10: 365920580X, Price $98.80

Women, Environment and Sustainable Development: A Case Study of Khul Gad Micro Watershed of Kumoun Himalaya

Women in the marginal areas of Uttarakhand have always played and continue to play a significant role in managing and operating most of the household and agricultural activities. They are the main subsistence provider in the hills and considered the backbone of hill agriculture. Their lives are intrinsically related to land, water, forest, which are the main components and integral parts of an eco-system. An adverse effect on any one of these components disturbs the other components due to strong linkages and interrelationship with each other and creates havoc on the life of people, especially women in the region. However, in recent years, environmental degradation, poor resource management and increased migration of men to the plains have deteriorated the livelihood options and added more workload to women of the region. The sufferings of the communities in these hilly areas are gradually increasing and their standard of living is declining because they have been neglected at both policy and practice levels by the government. The nexus between women, environment degradation and poverty are poorly understood and rarely treated in an integrated way. Therefore, the key objective of the present paper is to analyse the work participation of women operating at different sub-systems, impact of environmental degradation and role of women in sustaining the traditional agro-ecosystem in Khul Gad micro-watershed of Kumoun Himalaya

Impact of leader on cluster synchronization

5 pages, 5 figuresNon peer reviewedPostprin

Confusion and Making Sense of Menstruation: A Micro-level Study of Village Khagawal, Chandauli District, Uttar Pradesh

Menstruation is a natural process which has significant and irrevocable changes on a woman’s life. Navigating the entire process is no small feat, and the added confusion in the age of information overload often complicates the situation rather than simplifying it. In India, discourses surrounding menstruation are still restricted to sanitary napkins while overlooking menstrual disorders, understanding and examining the agencies responsible for it. Many a time, ancient pearls of wisdom are being dismissed as taboos without apprehending its deeper sciences which helped women in traversing the entire process since time immemorial. This research is an attempt to view menstruation holistically by giving importance to a woman’s personal experiences and to find out how menstruation is integrated into the local culture. To accomplish the research, we conducted a questionnaire survey amongst 40 females aged 13-49 years and three focus group discussions to explore the coping mechanisms, the grass-root problems the rural girls and women face during menstruation in village Khagawal located in Chandauli district of Uttar Pradesh. The findings revealed that rudimentary information concerning menstruation was present amongst the respondents— the respondents are aware of the traditional knowledge and ways but completely ignorant regarding the scientific roots of the practices. Some facets of hygiene need to be addressed

A Null-model Exhibiting Synchronized Dynamics in Uncoupled Oscillators

The phenomenon of phase synchronization of oscillatory systems arising out of feedback coupling is ubiquitous across physics and biology. In noisy, complex systems, one generally observes transient epochs of synchronization followed by non-synchronous dynamics. How does one guarantee that the observed transient epochs of synchronization are arising from an underlying feedback mechanism and not from some peculiar statistical properties of the system? This question is particularly important for complex biological systems where the search for a non-existent feedback mechanism may turn out be an enormous waste of resources. In this article, we propose a null model for synchronization motivated by expectations on the dynamical behaviour of biological systems to provide a quantitative measure of the confidence with which one can infer the existence of a feedback mechanism based on observation of transient synchronized behaviour. We demonstrate the application of our null model to the phenomenon of gait synchronization in free-swimming nematodes, C. elegans

Transfer Matrix Analysis

Vibration analysis of arbitrary shaped structures has been of interest to structural designers for several decades. Dynamic behavior of these structures is strongly dependent on boundary conditions, geometrical shapes, material properties, different theories, and various complicating effects. Closed-form solutions are possible only for a limited set of simple boundary conditions and geometries. For analysis of arbitrary shaped structures, several numerical methods, such as finite element method, finite difference method, boundary element method, and so on, are usually applied. In this paper, we have tried to put some light on the methods of calculation of methods to find out the vibration in structural members by taking advantages Transfer Matrix Methods in calculating the vibration in Multi-Storied Buildings, the various beam actions in a given beam with some given loading criteria and also used to compute the natural frequency of a shaft under torsional vibration. Computer-Aided Analysis has also been provided to calculate the vibration in a multi-storied building