Author:

• Vijayshree Jayaraman

The last few years have seen an upheaval in practices of data collection and survey methods. Even before the pandemic, several data collection endeavors had begun the transition to digital, computer-assisted, and tablet-based surveys. India’s labor force surveys themselves had moved away from traditional paper- based surveys to computer-assisted PI techniques. The Covid-19 pandemic imposed a massive shock to these practices. Across several countries, ongoing surveys had to be prematurely terminated or put on hold in the interest of the safety of enumerators and interviewers.

Authors:

• Rosa Abraham
• Mridhula Mohan

“We stay in an apartment, and there is very little space around. What trees can we plant?”

“I live in an independent house, and we would like to have trees. But we are worried the roots will damage our walls and underground sump.”

These are questions we have often been asked by residents of Bengaluru. What it tells us is that while there is an interest in planting trees, there are also concerns about what kind of trees are most suited owing to constraints of space and potential damage to infrastructure. 

This guide is aimed at addressing some of these concerns. We have included 26 species of trees that can be grown in independent houses or apartment complexes in Bengaluru. We have included a basic description of each of the species, how to plant and care for the trees, the different kinds of uses and a fun fact or information nugget. The guide also contains information on installing root barriers to protect infrastructure from being damaged by tree roots. We have also included how diseased or damaged trees can be treated.

In developing countries, a precise approach to measuring women’s employment remains elu- sive. Emerging evidence underscores the pivotal role of survey methodology, encompassing respondent selection and question framing, in shaping the assessment of women’s employ- ment. Drawing from two labor market experiments in rural India, this study offers insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of women’s employment. The first ex- periment contrasts self-reported women’s and men’s employment figures with proxy-reported data from spouses. Women’s self-reported workforce participation surpasses proxy-reported estimates by six percentage points, while men’s estimates exhibit negligible differences. There are significant differences in the type of employment activities reported by self and proxy for both women and men. These divergences emanate from asymmetric measurement errors, stemming from gender-based norm disparities between spouses, and divergent interpretations of employment. Additionally, information asymmetry between spouses concerning women’s marginal activities and disparities in spousal characteristics contribute to these self-proxy differences. The second experiment investigates if framing of questions and recall period has an impact on reporting of labor market outcomes. We find that employing multiple ques- tions to capture weekly employment status yields a 10-percentage-point increase in reported women’s workforce participation, but men’s participation rate decreases by six percentage points. Furthermore, when a distinct employment query is directed at each day of the pre- ceding week as opposed to a single query for the entire week, reported women’s workforce participation increases by seven percentage points, and men’s by four percentage points.

Authors:

• Rosa Abraham
• Nishat Anjum
• Rahul Lahoti
• Hema Swaminathan

The Indian story of economic growth and structural transformation has been one of significant achievements as well as continuing challenges. On the one hand, the economy has grown rapidly since the 1980s, drawing millions of workers out of agriculture. And the proportion of salaried or regular wage workers has risen while that of casual workers has fallen. On the other hand, manufacturing has failed to expand its share of GDP or employment significantly. Instead, construction and informal services have been the main job creators. Further, the connection between growth and good jobs continues to be weak.

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Press Release (English | Hindi | Kannada)

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गणना करना सीखना और संक्रियाएँ सीखना ही गणित सीखना नहीं है। गणित सीखने में बहुत कुछ है। इसके लिए गणित की भाषा सीखना और स्वयं गणित करना अहम है। ऐसा गणित, जो आपके दिमाग की क्षमता को खींचे व कर पाने की खुशी भी दे । इस अंक में गणित के लेख इन बातों को बखूबी दिखा रहे हैं। बच्चों को लिखना सिखाने पर भी इस अंक के लेखों में विस्तृत बात हुई है। संवाद व अन्य लेख लिखने के आयामों यथा लिखना और पुस्तकें पढ़ना-लिखना और मौखिक अभिव्यक्ति आदि को उभारते हैं। सीखने में अर्थ की भूमिका अहम है। जो भी सीखा जाना है, सीखने वाला अपने लिए उसका अर्थ खुद गढ़ता है और जब वह यह अर्थ गढ़ पाता है, तभी सीख पाता है। बच्चों को कविता का अर्थ खुद गढ़ने देने की बात करता एक लेख, कविता ही नहीं बल्कि कुछ भी सीखने में अर्थ की भूमिका क्या हो सकती है, रेखांकित करता है। शामिल पुस्तक चर्चा भी बच्चों के सीखने के बारे में बहुत से महत्त्वपूर्ण बिन्दु रखती है।

This is a monthly newsletter published by Azim Premji University, as a part of Forests of Life, a climate awareness festival celebrating forests — a quest and yatra of young people from across different parts to engage with the youth of this country. In this edition, we celebrate National Forest Martyrs Day which is commemorated on September 11 each year to pay tribute to those who sacrificed their lives to protect forests and wildlife. The day is aimed at creating awareness about protecting forests and the environment at large.

Authors:

• Zico Dasgupta
• Amit Basole

Alongside rapid economic growth, India also saw steady de-agrarianisation of its economy in terms of contribution to GDP. In terms of employment, however, the movement out of agriculture was slower, and when they did exit, it was often a withdrawal from the workforce entirely. In general, more of the workforce are in salaried employment, however, these have filtered differently by gender, caste and religion. While cross-sectional data gives us a sense of how these structural changes affect workers at any given point in time, it cannot tell us how these play out for workers over their lifetime as well as how different generations or cohorts of workers have been affected. Here, we use seven rounds of nationally representative official data to construct cohorts who are tracked over these periods to observe employment participation and the patterns over time. We find that younger generations of women systematically less likely to be in paid employment whereas for men, after a certain age, generations look similar in terms of employment rate. Similarly, when examined from the perspective of cohorts, we find that access to salaried employment has changed by gender and caste, and increase in earnings over time over their lifecycle has slowed for certain groups.

Author:

• Rosa Abraham

The Constitution of India has been amended over a hundred times in the last seven decades. Yet, its basic principles remain supreme. For young students of India’s growth and progress, a deeper understanding of its Articles is essential. The maturing of our democracy and the deeper social consciousness pervading our people, owes much to the manner in which we have been guided by its timeless precepts. A reading of ​‘Reviewing the Republic’ will help any reader appreciate how our Constitution came into being and its powerful impact on the daily life of our citizens. 

This is a monthly newsletter published by Azim Premji University, as a part of Forests of Life, a climate awareness festival celebrating forests — a quest and yatra of young people from across different parts to engage with the youth of this country. In this edition, we celebrate International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, aiming to raise awareness and protect the rights of the world’s indigenous population. We intend to pay respect to all the Indigenous people who have made significant contribution towards the preservation and transmission of traditional knowledge.

We all know the pure pleasure of listening to stories as children and we have, in this issue, articles that demonstrate how storytelling can be used to great success in subjects as diverse as maths, physics, social studies and inclusion in schools everywhere – urban or rural. There are descriptions of how discussions emerging from a single story can be skillfully used to arrive at some really important understanding. All this adds up to creating a channel of exchange that cuts across age groups and backgrounds and finds common ground in the magical world of stories.

Research on democracy has shed much light on two kinds of democratic politics: patterns of voting and patterns of associational or movement politics. But there is growing recognition that in order to better understand the quality or depth of democracy, we need to move beyond this dualistic focus to better understand the everyday practices through which citizens can effectively wield their rights; these practices often diverge from the formal equality enshrined in laws and constitutions. The researchers study this question through a large, unique sample survey carried out in a South Indian city. We find that effective citizenship is refracted through the institutional specificities of urban India and that, as a result, the poor access the state through political participation and the rich through particularistic connections to persons of influence. But unlike the conventional celebration of participation as a citizenship-deepening activity, we also find that a substantial part of participation is associated with forms of brokerage that compromise democratic citizenship.

If one asks a teacher in preschool learning spaces in India, about the most usual story that is narrated to children, what is the most common answer? Will there be unanimity in the fact that the story of Thirsty Crow works just as well in many Indian languages, as it does in Indian Sign Language? Those who engage with early childhood care and learning would often stress upon the need to have a visually rich environment in these learning spaces, full of picture books and enthusiastic teachers who never give up a chance to bring out yet another story. Bringing Indian Sign Language to early childhood learning spaces, creating an immersive experience for children before they enter school years by making available in these spaces Indian Sign Language resources (and then taking such initiatives to schools, colleges, and community spaces) would allow us to slowly move toward the dream cherished by deaf adults.

Urbanisation is one of the most transformative drivers of global environmental change today, with India representing one of the fastest urbanising countries. The researchers map the urban expansion of India’s ten largest cities from 2001 to 2016, through a regression tree classification of Landsat data in Google Earth Engine. Indian cities are growing through sprawl, and simultaneously densifying through in-filling. In Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, urban growth is multinucleated, aggregating to form a larger urban region. However, the dominant pattern in most cities is mono-nucleated growth via edge-expansion. The colonial signature is visible in many cities such as Bengaluru, where due to the British colonial practice of planting trees in the cantonment, the city interior has lower urban density at the core as compared to the periphery. Much of the urban growth between 2001 – 2016 is at the expense of agriculture and fallow areas. Across all cities, urban patches have expanded and coalesced into larger units. At the same time, there is an overall loss of surface water cover within cities. Urban growth has led to fragmentation of tree cover, agriculture/​fallow and water bodies. This paper demonstrates that India’s urbanisation is leading to severe impacts on water security (because of the loss of surface water), biodiversity (because of the fragmentation of tree cover and the conversion of agriculture and fallow lands to built-up urban cover), factors which if left unaddressed will severely impact the sustainability of Indian urbanisation.

This chapter provides the emergence and practice of Dalit Studies within academia through a critical engagement with curriculum structures that exist within pedagogic discourses. It explores different kinds of academic writings that have prevailed within Dalit discourse by looking into their composition, engagement with the curriculum, and pedagogic practices. The Dalit community has created spaces for the emergence of public debates and conferences, study groups, and seminars that enable discursive engagement with Dalit Studies. One of the major milestones in Dalit discourse was taken up by Sukhadeo Thorat, who, under his chairmanship of University Grants Commission, granted the institutional setup of the Center for the Study of Social Discrimination and Exclusion for a systematic engagement with Dalit discourse. Dalit feminist scholars have highlighted ​“contradictions in schooling in that curricula and school cultures reproduce Brahmanical values”.

This is a monthly newsletter published by Azim Premji University, as a part of Forests of Life, a climate awareness festival celebrating forests — a quest and yatra of young people from across different parts to engage with the youth of this country. In this edition, we celebrate International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem, aiming to raise awareness of the importance of mangrove ecosystems.

Truth and Math: The July 2023 issue is as good as its cover!

Globalisation has resulted in ever increasing linguistic diversities and a worldwide recognition of the need to support linguistic pluralism through education (UNESCO, 2003). Keeping abreast with the global trend, India’s education policy has provided for the cultivation of multilingualism by including at least three languages in the curriculum. However, in reality, India’s education system is guided by monolingual ideologies that disregard multilingual realities and promote a form of ​“monolingual multilingualism” (Neumann, 2015). This translates into separatist pedagogy and practices that keep languages strictly compartmentalised at schools. Different time slots are allotted to teaching learning of disparate languages. Proficiency in a language is interpreted as the ability to use it without ​“resorting” to any other language. In effect, monolingual ideologies function to reject translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), or natural language practices of multilinguals, that enter into classrooms. Strategies such as code-switching and translating are invalidated when they occur in spoken or written conversations in classrooms. This article aims to study the monolingual ideologies that permeate the education system to understand their implications for the process of teaching and learning in Indian classrooms.

Small manufacturing firms are considered to be engines of growth and job creation. While most research on small firms focuses on formal sector units, in India informal sector units far outnumber the formal. This is true even for manufacturing units employing 5 to 49 workers, which constitute only 5% of all unorganised units, but in absolute numbers are nine times more numerous than organised units in the same size class. Such firms have the potential to contribute to structural transformation but their capacities vis-a-vis formal firms are not well understood. To address this, the researchers create a unit-level dataset combining Annual Survey of Industries data for organised (formal) units with the National Sample Survey data on unorganised (informal) units. They also discuss problems involved in this exercise and some ways to deal with them. They find that matching organised and unorganised units on observable characteristics reduces the labour productivity differences between them to around 25 percent. The researchers discuss some policy implications of their results.

Authors:

• Amit Basole
• Dimple Chopde
• Paaritosh Nath

This is a monthly newsletter published by Azim Premji University, as a part of Forests of Life, a climate awareness festival celebrating forests — a quest and yatra of young people from across different parts to engage with the youth of this country. The editions of this newsletter cover diverse aspects of forests — ecology, biodiversity, and climate change impacts; informative and unique titbits about forests, their resources, communities, and conservationists; national parks, wildlife sanctuaries; puzzles, quizzes, activity corners for children, and much more!

How do we introduce students to astronomy without the expensive instruments modern astronomers use and when regular school hours are nearly always during the day?

How can engaging with justice issues empower science learning, especially for learners who come from communities that have been traditionally excluded from science learning and careers?

Who are the pollinators in our neighbourhood and can we identify them by traits that plants may evolved to attract them?

Can simple practical demonstrations, like pushing a chair or dropping objects from a height, help students understand the relationship between force and motion more accurately?

Join us in exploring these and many other such questions in our commemorative issue.

पाठशाला भीतर और बाहर के सोलहवें अंक में शिक्षा के कुछ बुनियादी मसलों यथा शिक्षा में समावेशन, शुरुआती भाषा शिक्षण के पहलुओं, सामाजिक विज्ञान शिक्षण व नैतिक समझ के विकास आदि पर कक्षा के अनुभवों से उभरे व उन अनुभवों के विश्लेषण को समेटे हुए लेख हैं। चूँकि यह लेख कक्षा से अनुभवों से उभरे हैं, अतः यह उनके यथार्थ, संभावनाओं व चुनौतियों को सामने रखते हैं।

Postcolonial democratic deepening brings new challenges to religion as a social imaginary in India. Increasing cultural differentiation and pluralisation are countered by fundamentalisation, but also challenge existing minority/​multicultural imaginations. Religion, as the overarching identity category, has come under scrutiny given the politicization of caste among Muslims, who form the country’s most significant religious minority. Through social-justice and anti-caste politics in the 1990s, lowered-caste Muslims started to enact a new identity named Pasmanda, which means ​“those who have been left behind”. The Pasmanda discourse emphasises internal heterogeneities and hegemonies and pluralises the ​“Muslim”. It thus ruptures the imaginary of Muslims as a homogeneous minority in a culturally diverse country and problematises the majority – minority framework. An important site of contestation is the reservation (quota) policy in public employment, education, and the legislature. While privileged-caste Muslims generally prefer a quota based on religion, the lowered-caste Pasmanda Muslims increasingly mobilise for a caste-based quota, thus challenging systems of recognition and redistribution.

The canvas of science education needs to be viewed in its totality to prevent the confounding of some basic issues and to enable us to evaluate the fads and fashions in educational practice. Policies and processes in education are tacitly shaped by theories in the humanities and social sciences. Inadequate understanding of these theories, or the lack of attention to uncalled-for implications of their practical import, takes education in undesirable directions. To be a good science teacher has never been easy. The teacher is a master of knowledge in science. But that is not all. She is equally committed to the principles governing the practice and communication of science.

Cities are characterised by social and cultural diversity. The management of urban wildlife requires developing a better understanding of cultural beliefs associated with wildlife in diverse urban settings. We document a range of cultural beliefs associated with the slender loris (Loris lydekkerianus), an endemic, nocturnal primate, in the Indian megacity of Bengaluru. Many residents associate the loris with practices such as black magic, and they believe that the animal’s call is a bad omen that brings death and misfortune. Others consider it a harbinger of good luck that offers protection to young children. These superstitious beliefs may motivate illegal wildlife trafficking of the loris. Urbanisation has led to changes in these perceptions, and many respondents now report that they consider these beliefs to be old-fashioned superstitions that hold no place in a modern city. This study contributes to knowledge on changing urban attitudes to wildlife, which is vital to developing conservation strategies that involve local residents.

Utilising data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey, the researchers estimate quarterly changes in urban labour market flow over the period 2018 to 2022 and the impact on unemployment rates for men and women. Their analysis provides non-intuitive explanations for established findings as well as points out important questions for further study. Both men’s and women’s unemployment rates have reduced in 2022 compared to 2018, showing rapid reductions following the high levels reached during the lockdown. Women’s unemployment rates have consistently been higher than men’s throughout this period. The gap between men’s and women’s unemployment rates reduced during the lockdown, but has shown signs of increasing since 2021, even as unemployment rates have fallen. For women, flows from the labour force to non-participation play a larger role in explaining changes in unemployment rates as compared to men. Flows from the labour force to non-participation, however, have reduced since the pandemic, providing an explanation as to why labour force participation rates have increased, namely, women staying for longer in the labour force rather than more women entering it. Despite rising labour force participation rates, the gender gap in unemployment rates has risen, in contrast to developed economies.

Authors:

• Paaritosh Nath
• Rahul Menon

Due to the heavy-quark symmetry of Non-Relativistic Quantum Chromodynamics (NRQCD), the cross-section for the production of η_c can be predicted. This NRQCD prediction when confronted with data from the LHCb is seen to fail miserably. We address this LHCb η_c anomaly in this paper using a new approach called modified NRQCD, an approach that has been shown to work extremely well for studying J/​ψ, ψ′ and χ_c production at the LHC. We show, in the present paper, that the predictions for η_c production agrees very well with LHCb measurements at the three different values of energy that the experiment has presented data for. Modified NRQCD also explains the intriguing agreement of the LHCb η_c data with the colour-singlet prediction. The remarkable agreement of the theoretical predictions with the LHCb data suggests that modified NRQCD is closer to apprehending the true dynamics of quarkonium production.