Fifty years ago this week, Gaura Devi, an ordinary woman from a nondescript village in India, hugged a tree, using her body as a shield to stop the tree from being cut down. Little did she know that this simple act of defiance would be a seminal moment in the history of India and the world. Or that Reni village, where she lived, would come to be recognised as the fountainhead of the Chipko environmental movement. What the foot soldiers of Chipko wanted was an acknowledgement of their Indigenous rights to access forest resources that were crucial for their survival. What they got instead was a national law and a ministry populated by a new breed of power brokers — who, in the years to come, would decide at times that habitat preservation is possible only by keeping local communities out.

Background: Care provision received renewed attention during the COVID-19 pandemic as several healthcare providers vied for the coveted title of ​“frontline warrior” while they struggled to provide care efficiently under varying health system constraints. While several studies on the health workforce during the pandemic highlighted their difficulties, there is little reflection on what ​“care” or ​“caring” itself meant specifically for community health workers (CHWs) as they navigated different community and health systems settings. The study aimed to examine CHWs’ caregiving experiences during the pandemic.

Methods: Twenty narrative interviews with CHWs including ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) and ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse Midwives) were conducted in different states between July and December 2020.

Results: Our findings highlight the moral, affectual, and relational dimensions of care in the CHWs’ engagement with their routine and Covid-19 related services, as well as the ​“technical” aspects of it. In this article, we argue that these two aspects are, in fact, enmeshed in complex ways. CHWs extend this moral understanding not just to their work, but also to their relationship with the health system and the government, as they express a deep sense of neglect and the lack of ​“being cared for” by the health system.

Conclusion: CHWs’ experiences demand a more nuanced understanding of the ethics of care or caring that challenges the binaries between the ​“technical” and moral aspects of care.

The mental health discourse in India has been primarily viewed through a biomedical lens that often overlooks the cultural context and social inequalities. To ensure equitable access to preventive, promotive, curative, and rehabilitative mental healthcare, India needs practitioners who combine a social perspective with an empathetic approach. To address this need, we designed a course titled ​“Critical Perspectives on Mental Health” that aims to introduce the relevant perspectives and community-based approaches to mental health. In this article, we share our reflections on designing this course and facilitating it in the form of a post-graduation programme.

Azim Premji University, in collaboration with 9 Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), conducted a survey of 3,000 households in 92 low-income settlements across 39 wards of Bengaluru. The survey was done to estimate the continuing impact of COVID-19 induced lockdowns and economic disruptions on employment and livelihoods. The survey also captured information on access to government support as well as coping mechanisms to deal with such a crisis. Workers in a wide range of occupations such as drivers (cab, auto, and others), daily wage workers (construction and others), domestic workers, and factory workers (garment and others) were surveyed. The survey was conducted in the month of November 2021 with the help of Action Aid, Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA), The Center for Advocacy and Research (CFAR), Hasiru Dala, Gubbachi, Reaching Hand, Sangama, Swabhimaan Trust, and Thamate.

• Download the full report here
• Press release: English | Kannada
• Key Findings: Short | Detailed
• YouTube video of the virtual event held on 4 April, 2022.
• Recording of the in-person event held on 29 March, 2022 in Bengaluru is available here.

Media coverage

– Print

• Bangalore Mirror: Inheritance of Covid losses (30 Mar 22 | Page 1, 8)
• Rajasthan Patrika: तीन फीसदी परिवारों को ही मिला नकद हस्तांतरण योजनाओं का कुछ लाभ : अध्ययन (30 Mar 22 | Page 1)
• The Hindu: Survey finds that Covid-19 impact on livelihoods continues (30 Mar 22 | Page 4)
• The New Indian Express: Urban poor still coping with job, income loss- Report (30 Mar 22 | Page 2)
• Udayavani: Kannada (30 Mar 22 | Page 8)

– Online

• ETV Bharat: ರಾಜಧಾನಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಕೋವಿಡ್ನಿಂದಾದ ದುಷ್ಪರಿಣಾಮ : ಸಮೀಕ್ಷೆಯ ವರದಿ ಬಿಚ್ಚಿಟ್ಟ ಅಜೀಂ ಪ್ರೇಮ್ಜಿ ವಿವಿ
• Hindustan Times: 3% benefitted from Karnataka govt’s cash scheme
• News9: Bengaluru COVID impact survey- Job, income losses hamper ability of households to recover
• Rajasthan Patrika: कोरोना महामारी : 40 फीसदी ने कम भोजन से किया गुजारा
• The Indian Express: Job and income losses persisted among low-income settlements well past 2020 lockdown- Study
• The News Minute: Job, income losses due to lockdowns continue to impact Bengaluru urban poor

The globally invasive Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) possesses a venom lethal to some amphibian species in the invaded range. To test the novel weapons hypothesis (NWH), the effects of the toxin on the cohabiting amphibian species in the ant’s native range need to be investigated. The invader should benefit from the novel chemical in the invaded range, because the species are not adapted, but the venom should not be effective in the native range. The researchers explore the venom effects on juveniles of three amphibian species with different degrees of myrmecophagy inhabiting the ant’s native range: Rhinella arenarum, Odontophrynus americanus, and Boana pulchella. They exposed the amphibians to the ant venom, determined the toxic dose, and evaluated the short-(10 min to 24 h) and medium-term (14 days) effects. All amphibian species were affected by the venom independently of myrmecophagy. In addition to amphibian sensitivity, the researchers discuss how the differential Argentine ant abundance and density in the two ranges could be the key to the susceptibility of amphibians to the venom, resulting in the possibility of NWH. Their results confirm the potential magnitude of the impact of the Argentine ant in successfully invaded areas for the conservation of already threatened amphibians.

Mathematical Loops: The March 2023 issue of AtRiA takes on a (S)trip with a Twist! Enjoy the journey!

In India, as in many countries around the world, most government jobs are allocated through a system of merit-based exams. Over the past few decades, these exams have become incredibly competitive, at times receiving over 1,000 applications for each vacancy.

Against a backdrop of rising educational attainment, high aspirations, disappointment with private sector opportunities, and a deep unmet need for income security, it is understandable why the demand for public sector employment opportunities is so high.

Yet despite the large footprint that public sector recruitments have in our social, economic and political life, many basic questions about them remain shrouded in mystery. Who applies? Why do they apply? Are these intense levels of competition socially productive, or do they make people worse off? Why are people willing to invest so much in exam preparation? Why are people willing to gamble on such low odds of getting selected?

Our lack of understanding limits our ability to formulate sound labour market policy. As we will see, a large share of college graduates participate in public sector recruitment exams, and candidates for these exams make up a disproportionate share of the overall unemployed population. How can we improve employment outcomes if we do not understand who the unemployed are and how they invest their time?

The main reason for the holes in our understanding is a lack of data. To date, neither private nor public household surveys include questions on whether individuals are preparing for competitive exams; and recruitment agencies have historically been cloistered institutions, understandably concerned about protecting the integrity of the recruitment process. As a result, the crores of candidates preparing for competitive exams around the country remain largely invisible in data, and by extension in policy.

This report attempts to shine a light on this dark corner of the labour market. To do so, the researcher uses several new sources of data. First, he draws on administrative data from a recruitment agency. This data allows us to observe the whole recruitment process for the entire universe of applicants — the first time such data has been made available in the Indian context. 

Second, the researcher uses data from a large-scale survey of over 3,000 candidates, which provides information about their investments in exam preparation, their access to resources, their constraints, and their beliefs. 

Third, the research collaborators and the researcher conducted interviews and focus groups with candidates to better understand them in their own words. These rich data sources provide new insights into the economic and social life of candidates preparing for competitive exams.

The goal of this report is to demonstrate how both labour market and recruitment policy can be informed by a better understanding of candidate application behaviour. This understanding can, in turn, help us tackle some of the key challenges in the modern Indian labour market — high levels of educated unemployment, a lack of skill development, low levels of female labour force participation, and more.

Download the report here

Summary Articles:

VoxDev: The costs of extreme competition for government jobs: Evidence from India

Ideas for India: The costs of extreme competition for government jobs

Further Reading:

Mangal, Kunal (2022a), ​“How much are government jobs in developing countries worth?.” Download here.
Mangal, Kunal (2022b), ​“The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs.” Download here.

FAQs:

Are the statistics in the report official?

Although the report uses official data, the statistics in the report were not computed by TNPSC. Therefore, none of these statistics are official, and any errors in processing the data are entirely my own.

Is the report written in affiliation with any coaching center?

No. We are academic researchers. No one who was involved in either collecting and analyzing the data had any affiliation with a coaching center.

Will the report be available in Tamil?

We hope to be able to provide a Tamil summary of the report in the near future.

This report examines the changes in the producer company landscape in the last two years by analysing data on producer companies registered in the country from April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2021. The report examines changes in geographical spread and capitalization of producer companies in the last two years, in order to determine the extent to which the gaps in the previous promotion efforts have been addressed. It also analyses recent policies to understand their impact on the producer company ecosystem. The report identifies five focus areas to enable the sector to reach its full potential in enhancing the incomes and reducing the vulnerabilities of small producers.

Eight essays in this compendium, written by experts with long years of experience in administration and academic research take a critical view of governance responses during the three waves of Covid-19 pandemic in India and recommend measures to address governance challenges that India is likely to face after the pandemic. The essays survey the institutional, procedural, legal, and socio-political implications of the Union and the State Governments’ responses to the pandemic-induced crisis in a range of areas such as public health, education, environmental regulation, urban planning, management of vital statistics and reliance on technology-based solutions. A series of policy recommendations have been made in each of these domains to address the problems that the pandemic has left behind, and to make the governance system and processes better equipped for any such future catastrophe.

The compendium has been brought out jointly by the School of Policy and Governance (SPG) at Azim Premji University, and the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), which is a is a group of retired officers of the All-India Services and Central Services.

The Lens of Computational Thinking teaches us to look at the same things with fresh eyes, the July 2022 issue invites you to do just that!

This working paper develops an understanding of how learning outcomes are derived from aims of school education and their characteristics, and proposes an approach to designing an effective lesson plan. 

Isn’t mathematics simply divine? Not an unexpected line from the At Right Angles team but one that we will back up with our Features article from the March 2021 issue: Geometric Constructions from the Sulvasutras. It’s an incisive dive from there to the Utilitarian Math World but your disillusionment will be healed with delightful articles on understanding some of the whys of procedures and rules in mathematics such as the divisibility rules, the square root algorithm, the formula for the median and the folk method to find the height of a tree.

We bring you a new first with this issue: for the first time, AtRiA goes beyond its covers with three additional articles available only in the online mode. A big shout out to the numerous submissions which enable us to take this leap.

Do revert with your feedback on AtRiA.​editor@​apu.​edu.​in

Eighty-seven percent of agricultural households in India are small and marginal producers, cultivating small plots which generate low returns. Their average monthly income is Rs 6426, making farming on small plots economically unviable (NSSO 2014). Therefore, policy makers and practitioners are turning to producer collectives as a means for improving the economic situation of small producers.

Vision 2020 – As we move into the 9^th year of AtRiA’s existence, we refocus for clarity. The March 2020 issue talks about Breaking Down Barriers: A Mathematical Approach. Launch right into the how and what with B. Sury’s article on Tiresome Paths, Water Gates and Euler’s Formula. But there’s more than networks and circuits here, starting with this issue, we will be focusing sharply on the challenges and difficulties of the average mathematics teacher and hoping to share and discuss strategies to help those who struggle with the nature and pedagogy of mathematics.

We have some wonderful material to draw you in- Conversations on the Greatest Common Divisor, Trials with Triangles, Impossible Triangles on Dot Sheets and some great Search Problems for the Middle School to mention a few. We start a new section called ViewPoint and continue with our photo series Captured Mathematics. TechSpace features the free dynamic geometry software Robocompass and our PullOut is on Angles. Our review this time is on the Mathematics of India.

The March 2019 issue is packed with articles for students, teachers and teacher educators of all classes. Striking results are not just reported, they are also explained and justified with proofs. And our sources vary from students to observations from colleagues in mathematics classrooms and mathematical tricks from websites- these are explored and explained.

Volume 7 Issue 1: This issue of AtRiA welcomes you to the Math Village. Where house numbers, rangoli patterns, piles of fruit and even a child’s amusement device speaks to the instictive mathematician in each of us.

Read about these in Triangular Numbers in Features and the House Number Problem in ClassRoom. Appropriately, many of these problems were prompted by Ramanujan in his village. The Review is of a book which was used to teach a pre-course at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University and it syncs perfectly with the theme of finding mathematics in the most unexpected places.

Hone up on how to create a Conjecturing ClassRoom or generate Elementary Cellular Automata! Misconceptions in Fractions and an analysis of common errors in Algebra give an insight into students’ struggles with mathematics and the PullOut, too, focuses on Algebra and how to make a seamless move from Arithmetic to Algebra.

It is different for each one of us which is why when people reminisce about their school, opinions can differ about the same subject or teacher. The teacher, for her part, also has unique relationships with the class she goes to. It is a dynamic, organic process. The same concern, involvement and thoughtfulness that was evident in the experiences recounted in the first part are present in the narratives of this Issue too.

There has been substantial recent interest in the decline of labour shares across countries. For the most part, attention has been focused on developed countries. We examine the evolution of India’s labour share in its formal industrial sector from 1983- 2016. Using two datasets corresponding to sectoral aggregate data and plant-level data respectively, we document a secular decline in the labour share across all sectors from 1983, with a stabilisation at very low levels (around 8 to 10 percent) starting around 2005. We then use the plant-level data to identify correlates that illuminate reasons for the overall decline in the labour share. We find strong evidence to support multiple causes: increased capital intensity, greater informalisation, greater privatisation, and productivity increases in larger firms. As such, we suggest that the declines in labour share experienced are due to a composite set of factors. Conversely, other potential explanations (e.g. regional variation in the labour share) have less explanatory power.

Authors:

• Arjun Jayadev
• Amay Narayan

The challenge of employment in the Indian economy, especially after it growth acceleration since the mid-1980s, relates to its quality rather than its quantity. While employment growth has kept pace with the labour force over the long run, what has grown is informal employment. The coexistence of rapid capital accumulation, robust output growth and lack of growth of formal employment can be understood using the well-known Harris-Todaro model of a dual economy. This framework highlights the key role of the wage gap between the modern and traditional sectors as a determinant of urban informal employment. Hence, one of the most effective and egalitarian ways to address the employment problem is to adopt policies to increase agricultural productivity and income, which can reduce the wage gap. Since crop yields in India are far lower than many other countries in the world, including China, Brazil, and Bangladesh, there is ample scope for land-augmenting and labour-absorbing technological change in Indian agriculture. Efforts to ramp up industrialization should be taken up in earnest only after the wage gap has been narrowed significantly.

Author:

• Deepankar Basu

India’s overall economic performance over the last fifteen years has been outstanding, with the economy growing at an average of over 7% p.a. Growth has been service-led with the services sector accounting for over 60% of GDP growth over the period. Importantly, India’s structural transformation has been marked by a shift straight from agriculture to services led growth, leapfrogging manufacturing. The problem with this pattern of growth has been that it has generated relatively fewer opportunities of employment generation. The role of the manufacturing sector, ordinarily considered to be an important engine of growth and job creation for low and middle income countries, has been rather limited. Its share in total GDP and employment has continued to hover around 15% and 12% respectively for the last three decades.

Author:

• Radhicka Kapoor

Understanding the nature of work performed by women in India requires rest of all that we broaden our understanding of what is work, and recognize the different kinds of socially necessary as well as other work. The nature of work and how to capture it in empirical data have indeed been among the most complicated and debated issues in social sciences. This is particularly so in societies where much work occurs in informal, often even very private, settings that can be very hard to identify, let alone measure. The fact that international de nations of work and of economic activity have themselves been changing over time only adds to the complexity.

Authors:

• Bidisha Mondal
• Jayati Ghosh
• Shiney Chakraborty
• Sona Mitra

Volume 6 Issue 1: The Art of the Matter — can a picture be a powerful pedagogical tool? At Right Angles believes it can, and if you read the write up on the facing page, I’m sure you will agree with us. Going to the heart of the art is key to mathematics and there’s more of the same inside this issue. We begin with Ramya Ramalingam, a sixteen-year-old school girl, unravelling the mysteries of Knot Theory for us. And Haneet Gandhi picks up where her series on Tessellations stopped, with a fascinating article on tiling and the pictures we can create with different combinations and permutations of polygons.

In the Classroom section, Khushboo Awasthi opens up the Square Root Spiral with a series of investigative questions; Ujjwal Rane proves Fagnano’s Theorem in several innovative ways. CoMaC describes an unusual way to bisect an angle and also manages to pull yet another 3−4−5 triangle which has long connected math with art pops up in Kepler’s triangle — read more about it in Marcus Bizony’s article. And in How To Prove It, Shailesh Shirali uses Ptolemy’s theorem to reveal all kinds of fascinating relationships in cyclic quadrilaterals.

Tech Space features the first part of a two-part series on constructive definitions; Michael de Villiers shows you how to do so with a GeoGebra activity centered on the golden rhombus. Truely cutting edge math pedagogy!

Our review this time is by Kamala Mukunda who shares her views on Liping Ma’s classic Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. This is a must-have for every school library and a must-read for mathematics teachers of all classes.

Finally, it’s Time — this Pull Out by Padmapriya Shirali will give you several new ideas to introduce this all important concept and help students quantify something which impinges on their consciousness long before they come to school.

Volume 5 Issue 1:

The starting point of this Issue is Mahatma Gandhi’s Nai Talim which he envisaged over many years and made available in 1937. Children learn by making and doing, and it is by relating these two to the larger context that the understanding of the whole picture emerges. It is this larger picture that this issue has attempted to present. This issue also explores the relevance of Nai Talim in the India of today. The explorations are on the idea of Nai Talim and the overall visions of a ​‘good society’, rethinking Nai Talim in the light of the NCF of 2005, as well as in the present context.

Volume 4 Issue 1: The lead feature in the March 2015 issue of AtRiA is based on the theme Proof Without Words. In the Review section, Mark Kleiner discusses Edward Frenkel’s Love and Math — the Heart of Hidden Reality. Thomas Lingefjard, in his article Learning Math with a DGE system, addresses a pressing need of teachers using technology in the classroom. This issue features a new author Ali Hussen whose article weaves in algebra, geometry and arithmetic. It also introduces a new series on Low Floor High Ceiling activities.The pullout continues on the Teaching of Geometry (part ii).

Volume 3 Issue 1:

Volume 2 Issue 1:

This issue of Learning Curve centres attention on the subject of ​‘school leadership’. It defines the construct and scope of educational leadership, ruminates on whether a school leader ought to be an academician or an administrator, reflects on the challenges of school leadership and explores the forms of school leadership in India.