Publications & Resources
Our faculty, students and researchers work together everyday to contribute to a better world by grappling with urgent problems we are facing in India. We conduct rigorous work to produce high quality learning resources and publications to contribute to public discourse and social change. Here, we feature a sample from our work for everyone to access. You can explore featured resources, policies, and the latest publications from the University.
To explore all the work of our University, please visit our publications repository.
Report
21 Days and Counting : COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India
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- Authors
Abstract
On the 25th of March 2020, the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, announced a nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19. The decision, while imminent, was unplanned and unilaterally made without any consultation with the state governments. This has consequently caught millions of migrant workers and the bureaucracy off-guard, leaving them no time to plan for such an emergency. While millions of migrants successfully reached their home states, only to be quarantined in camps, many remain stranded far from home, with no money or food. We are therefore confronting a lethal combination of crises: health, hunger, sanitation, and trauma, both physical and psychological.
University Working Paper Series
The ordinary city and the extraordinary city : the challenges of planning for the everyday
in Azim Premji University
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- Authors
Abstract
Recent work on informal urbanism argues that ‘informality’ is a strong force in determining and shaping how cities in the global south grow, and hence needs to be a part of emergent urban theory. This paper uses this argument as a starting point, drawing upon the work of scholars who suggest that urban informality may have an organizing logic, a system of norms that emerge from the economic conditions and the social needs of people. Specifically, this paper examines informality in the urban space as an outcome of spatial and economic changes in a market precinct in Bangalore. It finds that activities in the street are temporal in nature. In this paper, the ordinary city encapsulates how people use urban spaces on an everyday basis and the extraordinary city reflects how urban spaces are transformed during a periodic, religious and cultural festival. The paper makes two key contributions, one, to show through an in-depth spatial ethnographic study how the ‘ordinary – extraordinary’ might help us understand informal urbanism and two, to propose that it may be useful to have intermediate levels of planning that incorporate the conditions of the ‘ordinary’ city as well as the ‘extraordinary’ city, thereby contributing to both theory and practice.
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- Authors
Abstract
Children are, first and foremost, individuals and so it follows that their developmental patterns are influenced by environmental conditions. With even twins differing in their abilities and milestones, it is near impossible to predict at what rate a child will learn. Thus children enter school with a wide range of abilities — and therefore possibilities.
However, the assumption that all children can learn the basic curriculum at the same pace, in the same way and to the same extent and level- is unsupported either by research or by personal experience. If we agree that children have varied strengths (multiple intelligences) the it surely follows that teaching methods have also got to vary correspondingly and that there have got to be multiple teaching styles.
This issue addresses many of these concerns and to do that we have a wide range of articles from writers across the country which establish resoundingly that every child can indeed learn — only it requires empathy and compassion from the teacher to make it happen.
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