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.

The present study analyses civic and community-based initiatives in conserving urban ecological commons in India, which have been increasingly polluted, encroached upon and degraded because of rapid land-use transformations. Bangalore, a city in south India, has one of the largest networks of manmade lakes, some of which are restored and managed by citizen groups, civil society, environmental activists and voluntary private bodies. The restoration process interfaces with urban policy making, shaping predominant management agendas in association with the State. Community initiatives in conserving the lakes are not only well-organised, but also play a crucial role in making city commons vibrant and integral nodes of cultural and social identification. However, the contemporary management system involving citizen groups in lake conservation is largely at odds with the tradition of community-managed lake systems previously existing in the city, which have eroded as the city became industrialised and increased in size and population, resulting in rapid landscape transformations. Against this background, the present study aims to illustrate that a seemingly representative community management of city ecologies is often embedded in an overwhelming political context. It also discusses the need for an urgent deconstruction to better understand how overtly flexible and dynamic restoration actions interact with inequality, power and conflicts. The results of the present study emphasise that the current participatory and community-driven initiatives of ecological restoration in Indian cities unfortunately accord limited significance to the overarching questions of social justice and relations of power.

This issue is about a term that is very much in the minds of educators today: Socio-emotional Learning (SEL), and which has become an integral part of learning and school life. Schools have ​‘Happiness Curriculums’ to develop self-awareness, enable effective communication, and work collaboratively towards collective goals instead of individual ones to bring equity to the learning process by becoming inclusive and empathetic. Teachers are looking at children as citizens who need to take their place in the larger social setting and learn to contribute to society while themselves leading meaningful and mindful lives.

Construction of a Tunnel through a Mountain- a broad theme for the power of mathematics to help you solve daily life problems.

Batesian mimicry imposes several challenges to mimics and evokes adaptations in multiple sensory modalities. Myrmecomorphy, morphological and behavioral resemblance to ants, is seen in over 2000 arthropod species. Ant-like resemblance is observed in at least 13 spider families despite spiders having a distinct body plan compared to ants. Quantifying the extent to which spiders’ shape, size, and behavior resemble model ants will allow us to comprehend the evolutionary pressures that have facilitated myrmecomorphy. Myrmaplata plataleoides are thought to closely resemble weaver ants, Oecophylla smaragdina. In this study, we quantify the speed of movement of model, mimic, and non-mimetic jumping spiders. We use traditional and geometric morphometrics to quantify traits such as foreleg size and hindleg size, body shape between the model ant, mimic, and non-mimics. Our results suggest that while the mimics closely resemble the model ants in speed of movement, they occupy an intermediate morphological space compared to the model ants and non-mimics. Ant-mimicking spiders are better at mimicking ants’ locomotory movement than morphology and overall body shape. Some traits may compensate others, suggesting differential selection on these mimetic traits. Our study provides a framework to understand the multimodal nature of mimicry and helps discern the relative contributions of such traits that drive mimetic accuracy in ant-mimicking spiders.

In a homogenised imagination of human aspirations, development interventions replicate popular models, including intensive farming in Adivasi landscapes. In the process, they try to sedentarise and individualise Adivasi communities living in the forest peripheries. Even as modernisation remains an elusive target in most of the tribal belts, ethnic socio-ecological institutions become redundant, leaving the community deskilled — ecologically, socially, and economically. Adivasi’s concerns about this conventional development process entailing detribalisation are seldom deliberated in literature and among the community. 

This issue of the Learning Curve tries to answer some hard questions about the present environmental crisis : who can we turn to make the changes required? How can we attempt to restore some of the lost balance? How can we make sure that this planet does not become extinct by the next millennium? Schools across the country are doing their bit, beginning with primary school, to create a well-informed, environmentally-aware generation. 

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!

Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper, I analyse India’s performance from a cross-country comparative perspective, estimating the growth semi-elasticity of structural change. Using a cross-country panel regression, I estimate the effectiveness of growth in moving workers away from agricultural and informal activities as compared to other developing countries at similar levels of per capita income. I show that the performance in pulling workers out of agriculture is as expected given its level and growth of GDP per capita, but the same is not true for pulling workers out of the informal sector. I also propose the following five indicators that need to be kept track of when evaluating the growth process: the growth elasticity of employment, the growth semi-elasticity of structural change, the growth of labour productivity in the subsistence sector, the share of the organised sector in total employment and the workforce participation rate. Comparing these indicators across periods, states, regions or countries, allow us to understand which sets of policies have worked better than others to effective improvements in employment conditions. When taken together the indicators allow us to set structural change targets as well as to say whether the current pattern of growth is going to be sufficient to meet those targets.

Multilingual education is an urgent and pressing concern in the Indian educational scenario. While the National Education Policy (2020) acknowledges multilingualism as a resource in educational contexts and reiterates earlier policies calling for mother tongue-based education in elementary classrooms, it does not provide guidance in terms of how to productively accommodate multiple languages in the classroom. Multilingual education will be much stronger if it is based on a strong understanding of multilinguality — the idea that the human mind is fundamentally multilingual in nature. A new, but substantial paradigm of scholarship addressing multilinguality is that of ​‘translanguaging’, which views named languages as socio-political constructs and argues that multilinguals have a unified linguistic repertoire that they flexibly, creatively and adaptively draw upon. Accepting the grounding assumptions of translanguaging would has important implications for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment in educational spaces. In this article, we describe and critique the translanguaging perspective, even while acknowledging its positive contributions. We point out, especially its failure to provide guidance in terms of how to productively accommodate translanguaging in classrooms.

Increasing community and parental connection with schools is a widely advocated means of improving levels of student learning and the quality and accountability of education systems across South Asia. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of accountability relations in education in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Bihar. It explores two questions: what formal platforms exist to enhance connections between socially disadvantaged families and the schools serving them; and (how) do they influence engagement with student learning? It finds that various platforms have proliferated across public, low-cost private and non-government schools. But, while they promote enrolment attendance and monitoring, a substantive focus on student learning is empirically demonstrated to be missing everywhere. The paper argues that an apparently surprising similarity of (dis)connection is located in system features that are common across school types, locations and social structures. It proposes that this is a ​‘field’ in which connection, facilitated by various platforms, is performed according to bureaucratised norms of accountability that even pervade family and community responses. Seeing this as a socially constituted ​‘field’ that constrains meaningful discussion of learning across schooling provision for disadvantaged families contribute new insight for accountability-focused reforms in education.

This chapter discusses collective and multiactor interventions by local communities in Bengaluru, in conserving urban ecological commons — specifically, urban lakes — which provides a range of services to residents, as well as protecting the overall resilience of the city. Bengaluru, which once had an agrarian ecological landscape nourished by a large network of interconnected rainwater harvesting structures — tanks or lakes, has now grown to a megacity. Rapid urbanization has been accompanied by conversion of many of these lakes into other forms of land use, with a decline in the functioning of lakes and their surrounding reliant socio-ecological systems. With the import of piped water to the city since the early 20^th century, lakes lost much of their perceived relevance for policymakers. Waste discharge and sewage eventually polluted most of the lakes and choked the overflow channels that connected lakes along a topographic gradient, reducing the flow of water. In recent years, spurred by a resurgent awareness of the importance of lakes, a growing number of civic and community efforts have resulted in lake restoration, in collaboration with the Government.

What role do ​‘chemical experiences’ play in helping children grasp the particulate nature of matter and use this idea to explain observed phenomena?

How do we use the art and aesthetics of lithography to introduce children to chemical reactions? What skills would children learn from this multisensorial and fun approach to science? 

Why is it important for teachers to trace the history of evolving definitions of elements and atoms, and communicate the conditional nature of their validity? 

Can we use poetry to teach chemistry? How would it change the ways in which students engage with science? 

Join us in exploring these questions in three sections of our latest issue – Our Chemical World, I am a Scientist, and Snippets. 

Drawing on results from a panel of 2778 workers interviewed during and after the 68-day hard lockdown imposed in India, the following study examines the livelihood impact of the pandemic and the extent of subsequent recovery or lack thereof. Focussing specifically on workers located in the informal economy, the study is a useful addition to the burgeoning body of work on the economic impacts of Covid-19 by providing an insight into the employment and earnings recovery of those located at the margins. These findings are spliced across socio-economic groups to showcase the differential impact of the pandemic on different demographics within the informal sector.

India’s 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealised social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children’s access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematises the idealisation of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ​‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ​‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognise and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway toward addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education.

This case study is of ​“India’s First Fully Solar Powered Village”2 — Dharnai. It is a case of the promises of and challenges facing the realisation of ​“energy democracy” — the idea that distributed renewable energy systems have the potential to democratise the economy and society.

In the list of new teaching methods that teachers quickly thought of for online classes during the pandemic, the worksheet emerged as a learning aid that is creative, and participative, making children want to use their minds more independently. This issue features articles that showcase tried and tested methods of creating and using worksheets.

Constitutional measures to ensure fair compensation and livelihood security to the land losing refugees of development processes, overlook the complexity of ​‘public purpose’ — the dominant rationale behind operationalizing ​‘eminent domain’ of the state. Popular perception of public purpose as urbanization muffles the de facto social citizenship around plural values of agricultural landscapes. Ignoring the enduring public purposes served by agrarian landscapes aids in underestimating the longterm welfare impacts on displaced farmers.

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.

Enjoy the magical mystery tour of Mathematics with an in-depth read of the March 2022 issue of At Right Angles. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for high-frequency employment and income data to gauge the nature and extent of shock and recovery from month to month. Lack of such high frequency household-level data from official sources has forced researchers to rely almost entirely on the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS) conducted by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). Recently, the CPHS has been criticised for missing poor and vulnerable households in its sample. In this context, it becomes important to develop a detailed understanding of how comparable CPHS estimates are to other more familiar sources. We examine the comparability of monthly labour income estimates for the pre-pandemic year (2018−19) for CPHS and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). Across different methods and assumptions, as well as rural/​urban locations, CPHS mean monthly labour earnings are anywhere between 5 percent to 50 percent higher than corresponding PLFS estimates. In addition to the sampling concerns raised in the literature, we point to differences in the way employment and income are captured in the two surveys as possible causes of these differences.
While CPHS estimates are always higher, it should also be emphasized that the two surveys agree on some stylised facts regarding the Indian workforce. An individual earning INR 50,000 per month lies in the top 5 percent of the income distribution in India as per both surveys. Second, both PLFS and CPHS show that half the Indian workforce earns below the recommended National Minimum Wage.

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.

Why do party balloons rise in air? How high can they go? When do they drift to the ground?

How much water do plants lose? Do they lose it only as water vapour? Can they regulate water-loss? 

Which chemical bonds are stronger — covalent or ionic? How can we tell? 

Can we grow a dense forest of native species in congested urban spaces or degraded land? How long would this take?

Who were the first people to measure the size of the earth? How did they do it? 

Join us in exploring these questions in our new section — Ask a Question. 

Cities are often seen as incubators for enterprise and innovation. However, in this urbanisation era, we seem to suffer from a lack of imagination on how to handle the many environmental problems associated with expanding cities. This is especially true in the case of the peri-urban interface (PUI), a geographical and conceptual landscape with which the city core often has a contentious relationship. In this chapter, we look at the complex linkages between water and waste in the PUIs of two metropolitan cities: Bengaluru and Kolkata. We look at two water systems: Kannuru lake in Bengaluru and Kolkata’s wetlands. Kannuru is a freshwater lake that supported traditional livelihoods and subsistence use by local communities, while Kolkata’s peri-urban wetlands not only served as the city’s natural sewage treatment plant but also enabled agriculture and aquaculture. Urbanization has adversely impacted both these water systems. Kannuru lake is threatened by a landfill on its periphery, while sewage-based farming and fisheries in Kolkata’s wetlands have been impacted by changes in land use and composition of sewage. We unravel the complexity in the waste-water relationship, where waste is seen as a pollutant in one and as a nutrient in the other. We attempt to understand how we can re-envision waste and water linkages in the PUIs of expanding cities if India needs to move towards a sustainable future.