Quantifying transport, regulatory and other costs of India–Bangladesh trade

In the globalised world, international borders ought to be mere lines on the map. But recent studies have shown that informal trade barriers still exist, and inhibit trade, particularly so in the developing countries. This can arise due to a host of factors such as complex customs procedures, which sometimes change, and capacity constraints, given limited facilities and/or corruption at the border. However, non-tariff barriers of various sorts and structural impediments are less obvious and perhaps more interesting, but also much more difficult to measure directly. In this context, this paper attempts to quantify the relevant costs resulting from informal barriers that impinge upon trade between India and Bangladesh through the land customs stations (LCSs) at Petrapole (West Bengal) and Benapole (Bangladesh). The study is based on primary data collated through surveys conducted in West Bengal. Our estimates show that the aggregate delay pertaining to all the phases of exports turns out to be approximately four days for a single shipment. It also shows that the additional transaction costs in terms of delays and speed money incurred by the Indian exporters during trading with Bangladesh is about 10 per cent of shipment value. The present study has shown that informal barriers/para-tariff in India-Bangladesh trade are already high and further trade liberalisation without improving the infrastructure would be counterproductive. The paper ends with feasible policy recommendations to make trade between India and Bangladesh more vibrant.

Interface and Morphology Engineering in Solution-Processed Electronic and Optoelectronic Devices

The first part of this dissertation focuses on interface and morphology engineering in polymer- and small molecule-based organic solar cells. High-performance devices were fabricated, and the device performance was correlated with nanoscale structures using various electrical, spectroscopic and microscopic characterization techniques, providing guidelines for high-efficiency cell design. The second part focuses on perovskite solar cells (PSCs), an emerging photovoltaic technology with skyrocketing rise in power conversion efficiency (PCE) and currently showing comparable PCEs with those of existing thin film photovoltaic technologies such as CIGS and CdTe. Fabrication of large-area PSCs without compromising reproducibility and device PCE requires formation of dense, pinhole-free and highly uniform perovskite thin films over large area, which remains a big challenge as of today. In this work, a scalable process, called ultrasonic spray-coating (USC), was thoroughly optimized to deposit dense and uniform perovskite thin films for high-efficiency PSCs. In order to realize high-performance flexible PSCs, a unique photonic curing technique was demonstrated to achieve highly conductive TiO2 as electron transport layer on flexible substrates. Moreover, the effect of processing conditions on perovskite film growth was evaluated and taken into account to increase PCE to more than 15%. In addition, a series of high-performance organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) were fabricated en route to demonstrate the versatility of the USC process. Several different polymer binders were used to modulate the lateral and vertical phase morphologies in OFETs, significantly improving the device performance. In summary, this research provides guidelines for the design and fabrication of high-performance solution-processed solar cells and field-effect transistors based on organic materials and hybrid perovskites, while presenting a viable route for large-scale fabrication

Mitigating carbon emission through economic instruments: An Indian Perspective

EnergyEnergy ResourcesCarbon Emission

C(X) determines X -- an inherent theory

One of the fundamental problem in rings of continuous function is to extract those spaces for which C(X) determines X, that is to investigate X and Y such that C(X) isomorphic with C(Y ) implies X homeomorphic with Y . The development started back from Tychono? who first pointed out inevitability of Tychono? space in this category of problem. Later S.Banach and M. Stone proved independently with slight variance, that if X is compact Hausdor? space, C(X) also determine X. Their works were maximally extended by E. Hewitt by introducing realcompact spaces and later Melvin Henriksen and Biswajit Mitra solved the problem for locally compact and nearly realcompact spaces. In this paper we tried to develop an inherent theory of this problem to cover up all the works in the literature introducing a notion so called P-compact spaces

Role of Economic Development and Governance in Mitigating Insurgency: A Case Study of Tripura, India

The purpose of this paper is two folds: firstly, to analyze the short run and long run relationship between insurgency on the one hand and economic development and governance on the other and secondly, to determine the direction of causality between these three variables in Tripura, one of the conflict-ridden states in India during 1980-2005. With the application of auto-regressive distributed lag model (ARDL), an inverse relationship has been established which formalises the descriptive notions about the cointegration between insurgency on the one hand and economic development and governance on the other in the long run. No short run relationship was established between them. Going one step ahead, an endeavour has been made to capture both the economic development and governance as diagnostics for peace in our model. The study suggests that economic development brings down insurgency faster than that of governance. However, improvement in governance is more certain to scale down insurgency. Furthermore, the application of Granger Causality test suggests that there exists bidirectional causality between insurgency, economic development and governance taking 6 lag and onwards

Velocity Distribution of Driven Inelastic One-component Maxwell gas

The nature of the velocity distribution of a driven granular gas, though well studied, is unknown as to whether it is universal or not, and if universal what it is. We determine the tails of the steady state velocity distribution of a driven inelastic Maxwell gas, which is a simple model of a granular gas where the rate of collision between particles is independent of the separation as well as the relative velocity. We show that the steady state velocity distribution is non-universal and depends strongly on the nature of driving. The asymptotic behavior of the velocity distribution are shown to be identical to that of a non-interacting model where the collisions between particles are ignored. For diffusive driving, where collisions with the wall are modelled by an additive noise, the tails of the velocity distribution is universal only if the noise distribution decays faster than exponential.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure