327 research outputs found
The management of inter-state rivers as demands grow and supplies tighten: India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh
International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of the private economy, (ii) bringing third parties, other than governments, into the design and negotiation of cooperative projects, (iii) the principle of sharing costs and benefits, and (iv) taking steps toward multilateral discussion. However, political and implementation challenges have remained, and have been exacerbated by looming water shortages as economies grow and climate change occurs. This paper examines how recent innovations in diplomacy may be extended to address these challenges.international rivers, South Asia, multi-track diplomacy, cooperation
Politics and technology of sharing the Ganges
This thesis is a study of the international conflict over the sharing of
the waters of the River Ganges: its origins, conduct and consequences.
In Part I the proximate cause of the conflict - the Farakka Barrage
Project - is investigated; some uncertainties about the project's
technical rationale and misrepresentations about support for the project
are investigated. A history of the political dispute which accompanied
the construction and operation of the barrage is presented in Part II.
Periods when the conflict might have been resolved are identified and
examined and the governmental strategies underlying the events are
inferred. An assessment is made, in Part III, of the physical
consequences for Bangladesh of operation of the Farakka Barrage during
the dry seasons of 1976 and 1977« It is concluded that Bangladesh
suffered serious economic disruption as a result of the reduced flows
in the River Ganges. Part IV is an analysis of the major engineering
projects which India and Bangladesh have proposed as means of
increasing the dry season flow in the Ganges, and, therefore, removing
the conflict of interest at the centre of the dispute. The analysis
shows that the projects are not simply technical responses to the
water shortage but they embody wider political objectives of the two
nations. A comparison, in Part V, with water disputes elsewhere casts
an unfavourable light on India's conduct of this conflict
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Plain Tales from the Rice Trade: Indications of Vertical Integration in Foodgrain Markets in Bangladesh
Natural selection maximizes Fisher information
In biology, information flows from the environment to the genome by the
process of natural selection. But it has not been clear precisely what sort of
information metric properly describes natural selection. Here, I show that
Fisher information arises as the intrinsic metric of natural selection and
evolutionary dynamics. Maximizing the amount of Fisher information about the
environment captured by the population leads to Fisher's fundamental theorem of
natural selection, the most profound statement about how natural selection
influences evolutionary dynamics. I also show a relation between Fisher
information and Shannon information (entropy) that may help to unify the
correspondence between information and dynamics. Finally, I discuss possible
connections between the fundamental role of Fisher information in statistics,
biology, and other fields of science.Comment: Published version freely available at DOI listed her
The management of inter-state rivers as demands grow and supplies tighten: India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh
International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of the private economy, (ii) bringing third parties, other than governments, into the design and negotiation of cooperative projects, (iii) the principle of sharing costs and benefits, and (iv) taking steps toward multilateral discussion. However, political and implementation challenges have remained, and have been exacerbated by looming water shortages as economies grow and climate change occurs. This paper examines how recent innovations in diplomacy may be extended to address these challenges
Recommended from our members
Development of the Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra: the Difficulty of Negotiating a New Line
The management of inter-state rivers as demands grow and supplies tighten: India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh
International cooperation over the major rivers in South Asia took a new turn with the signing in 1996 and 1997 of five innovative water, power and economic cooperation agreements. The innovations include four elements: (i) the transfer of some previously diplomatic questions into the sphere of the private economy, (ii) bringing third parties, other than governments, into the design and negotiation of cooperative projects, (iii) the principle of sharing costs and benefits, and (iv) taking steps toward multilateral discussion. However, political and implementation challenges have remained, and have been exacerbated by looming water shortages as economies grow and climate change occurs. This paper examines how recent innovations in diplomacy may be extended to address these challenges
Recommended from our members
The Finance of Forced and Free Markets: Merchants' Capital in the Bangladesh Grain Trade
The propagation of a cultural or biological trait by neutral genetic drift in a subdivided population
We study fixation probabilities and times as a consequence of neutral genetic
drift in subdivided populations, motivated by a model of the cultural
evolutionary process of language change that is described by the same
mathematics as the biological process. We focus on the growth of fixation times
with the number of subpopulations, and variation of fixation probabilities and
times with initial distributions of mutants. A general formula for the fixation
probability for arbitrary initial condition is derived by extending a duality
relation between forwards- and backwards-time properties of the model from a
panmictic to a subdivided population. From this we obtain new formulae,
formally exact in the limit of extremely weak migration, for the mean fixation
time from an arbitrary initial condition for Wright's island model, presenting
two cases as examples. For more general models of population subdivision,
formulae are introduced for an arbitrary number of mutants that are randomly
located, and a single mutant whose position is known. These formulae contain
parameters that typically have to be obtained numerically, a procedure we
follow for two contrasting clustered models. These data suggest that variation
of fixation time with the initial condition is slight, but depends strongly on
the nature of subdivision. In particular, we demonstrate conditions under which
the fixation time remains finite even in the limit of an infinite number of
demes. In many cases - except this last where fixation in a finite time is seen
- the time to fixation is shown to be in precise agreement with predictions
from formulae for the asymptotic effective population size.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, requires elsart5p.cls; substantially revised and
improved version; accepted for publication in Theoretical Population Biolog
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