According to the Government of India, linking Aadhaar with the delivery of welfare schemes has saved nearly INR 2,73,093 crore till March 2022 due to, apparently, the removal of duplicate/​fake beneficiaries and plugging of leakages, etc. What is the overall impact of Aadhaar on welfare delivery? We try to understand this through a case study of MGNREGA in Jharkhand. Surveying nearly 3,000 workers in eight villages in Jharkhand to assess both the costs and benefits of linking MGNREGA with Aadhaar, the paper focuses on its impact on errors of inclusion and exclusion.

The article explores the emergent tension between the minority imagination and anticaste politics among India’s most significant religious minority, the Muslims. Since the late 1990s, the mobilisation of lowered-caste Muslims in the form of the Pasmanda movement has increasingly challenged the hegemony of the so-called high-caste Ashraf Muslims. The nascent Pasmanda counterdiscourse has contested the critical elements of the entrenched Muslim-minority discourse: identity and the religio-cultural, security and interreligious (communal) violence, and equity and affirmative action. The monolithic image of the Muslim community has been dispelled, and the Muslim-minority discourse has been characterized as a machination for preserving and reproducing the Muslim elite interests. The article maps the Pasmanda discourse and locates it as an instance within the evolving literature on the analytical limitations of the concept of minority to address the justice claims of emergent political subjectivities. The Pasmanda contestations present a sharp anomaly to the existing Muslim-minority discourse and indicate a paradigmatic shift.

Temporality is recognised as critical to the understanding of childhoods by contemporary scholars of childhood. This paper explores the varying temporalities through which marginal childhoods (and their educational inclusion), particularly those situated in contexts of temporary internal migration, are constructed in the Indian context. Drawing on ethnographic data from the city of Bengaluru, this paper problematises how dominant ideals around migration, childhood, and schooling frame migrant children’s lives through linear temporalities. Furthermore, the paper argues that policy interventions that ostensibly include migrant childhoods do not engage critically with the politics of linear temporality which, in turn, is central to the exclusionary dynamics of migrant children’s schooling. linear temporality; marginal childhoods; educational inclusion; temporality of schooling; migrant childhoods and temporality.

The present article examines the efforts of the Hindu conservatives at securing support for a law to ban cow-slaughter during the intervening years of India’s Independence. It also critically examines the debate on this question in the Constituent Assembly of India. Through this examination the article notes how the Hindu conservatives prepared the ground for a law against cow-slaughter even prior to the question being debated in the Constituent Assembly. Further, it argues that by an exclusive consideration of the views of the practitioners of conservative Hindu religion, whose ideology is based on a monolithic conception of Hinduism, over cow and conversely disregarding the others’ views, particularly of Islam on the same, the makers of the Constitution of India sought to impose a Hindu religious practice upon the non-believers of Hindu religion. The article also highlights the role of Ambedkar in the making of Article 48. The article is divided into three sections, wherein the first section looks at the Hindu conservatives’ attempts at securing support for a law against cow slaughter, the second and third sections analyze the debate over the question of cow-slaughter in the Constituent Assembly of India.

Classroom assessment is the process of documenting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs of learners. It provides essential feedback to both instructors and students to improve their teaching methods for guiding and motivating students to be actively involved in their learning. Assessment drives learning. Formative assessments enable the instructor to guide the students to learn well. Summative assessments enable the measurement of levels of attainment of course outcomes and act as feedback to course design and curriculum improvement. This article presents the underlying principles of assessment through a discussion of assessment approaches and their purposes, types of assessment items, quality of assessment and summative assessment plans. Quality assessment instruments can be developed through an understanding of the quality attributes of assessment items, the process of designing assessment instruments, designing a variety of assessment items, and devising plans to evaluate them through rubrics. An approach is presented for creating a summative assessment plan that can also lead to the attainment of outcomes as per the requirements of programme accreditation.

The social – ecological systems (SES) framework (Ostrom 2009, Science. 325(5939):419 – 22) typologically decomposes SES characteristics into nested, tiered constituent variables. Yet, aligning the framework’s concepts of resource system (RS) and resource unit (RU) with realities of individual case studies poses challenges if the underlying SES is not a single RS, but a mid to large-scale nested RS (NRS). Using a diagnostic approach, we describe NRSs — and the activities and networks of adjacent action situations (NAAS) containing them. An NRS includes the larger RS and multiple interlinked semi-autonomous subsidiary RSs, each of which support simultaneous, differently managed appropriation of individual RUs. We further identify NAASs operating within NRSs in two diverse empirical cases — networks of lake systems in Bengaluru, India and German wheat breeding systems — representing a lever towards understanding transformation of SESs into sustainable futures. This paper contributes towards unpacking and diagnosing complexities within mid to large-scale RSs and their governance. It provides a generalizable, rigorous approach to SES case study analyses, thereby advancing methods for synthesis in sustainability science.

Cite this article: Unnikrishnan, H., Katharina Gerullis, M., Cox, M. et al. Unpacking dynamics of diverse nested resource systems through a diagnostic approach. Sustain Sci (2023). https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​0​7​/​s​1​1​6​2​5-022 – 01268‑y

People in rural India routinely experience a vast difference between what is promised by the state and what is realised on the ground. Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) enable a broad spectrum of actors to be involved in planning the activities of the local state and holding the bureaucracy accountable for their actions at this level. While literature shows that clientelism is pervasive and affects the performance of PRIs adversely, there are pockets of evidence where programmatic transactions regularly occur. I use programmatic and clientelistic transactions as ideal types of outcomes and exploring how these transactions are engendered through a comparative study of two Gram Panchayats with similar institutional settings using ethnographic materials. Together with institutional design and economic factors, differences in local political dynamics affect development outcomes. Individualistic and loyalty-driven leadership prompts symbiotic relationships with bureaucrats, whereas cadre-based leadership prefers control and scrutiny. The expectations of villagers from their panchayat are also shaped by these political traits. In the first scenario, bureaucracy uses procedural compliance to hide clientelist decisions from scrutiny, whereas in the second, it is used to demonstrate neutrality in decision making.

Since the last few decades of the twentieth century, we have been witnessing a major push towards universalization of school education in the countries of the Global South, both from policy advocates and from the grassroots. This verve in societal aspirations and policy action is definitely encouraging. However, this dynamism should also inspire us to rethink and reimagine the aims and practices of education in a rapidly changing context. Education as an organized human enterprise is intimately linked to the broader aims of human wellbeing, good life and justice. The policies and practices of Education for all, therefore, aim to realize these ideals. This special issue of the Journal of Human Values explores the significance of the prevailing conceptualizations of wellbeing, a good life and justice on education theories, policies and practices in the Global South.

During our frequent visits to the countryside of Solapur city, we observed an unusual behaviour in a pair of Indian Robins Copsychus fulicatus. It was a hot summer day in May 2021 and we noticed the pair collecting nest material such as grassroots, twigs, and hair. The nest was situated on a 1.5 m high mound of soil. To avoid disturbing them, we observed them from a distance of c. 9 m, with the help of 10x binoculars and 65x camera. The location of the nest was clearly visible — in a westward-facing hole, 1.4 m above the ground.