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The paper examines how Hindu nationalist social service organizations, specifically the Deseeya Seva Bharathi (DSB), reconfigured the religious conception of 'Seva' to advance the project of constructing a Hindu social identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state of Kerala. The southern Indian state of Kerala has remained an exception in the story of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in contemporary India, which has repeatedly failed to make any considerable political inroads in the state. However, the disastrous economic consequences and livelihood challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, which was heavily dependent on foreign remittance and service industries, have opened up new spaces of engagement for Hindu nationalists. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted in central Kerala during the pandemic, this paper will elaborate on how the DSB used the crisis moment of the pandemic to reach out to economically and socially disadvantaged communities using the language of 'Seva' to build a Hindu social identity, which imbues the influence of majoritarian Hindu nationalist politics. The paper argues that the DSB's articulation of 'Seva' as a distinct and superior form of social service that is 'self-less', 'non-instrumental' and 'non-reciprocal' is significant in understanding the growing appeal of Hindu nationalist social service in the contested political sphere of Kerala, which is marked by competing social provisions by the state as well as other secular and religious groups. The paper notes that the reconfiguration of 'Seva' as a continuous religious concept enables Hindu nationalists to attain greater acceptance and legitimacy that even the secular state welfare could not achieve, while also concealing the inherent instrumental nature of its social service towards the construction of a Hindu social identity in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering is traditionally considered a male domain with lower female participation despite various affirmative actions taken in recent decades. There is evidence of greater gender equality as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and precautionary lockdown measures. With this in mind, this paper investigates whether women engineers in India were more adversely affected than their male counterparts by the COVID-19 pandemic. Such an impact may be explained by 'intersectional stigma', expanded upon in the literature on discrimination. The impact of such stigma varies in different countries based on socio-cultural factors. Through the use of ethnographic and statistical research methods on secondary and primary data from a sample of 384 engineers, this paper shows that the impact of COVID-19 is not significantly different between genders in engineering education and employment. This may be due to the high demand for digital engineering skills, and strong family support in Indian society. Engineering branch may play a relatively more important role than gender in terms of impact. This finding has repercussions for continuing engineering education (CEE) programs and regulatory bodies in India in terms of enhancing course content and the results may be used in developing affirmative programs in other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates India's first officially approved self-administered rapid antigen test kit against COVID-19, a device called CoviSelf. The context is rural India. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) are currently popular in situations where vaccination rates are low, where sections of the community remain unvaccinated, where the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow and where easy or timely access to RTPCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) testing is not an option. Given that rural residents make up 66% of the Indian population, our evaluation focuses on the question of whether this self-administered RAT could help protect villagers and contain the Indian pandemic. CoviSelf has two components: the test and IT (information technology) parts. Using discourse analysis, a qualitative methodology, we evaluate the practicality of the kit on the basis of data in its instructional leaflet, reports about India's 'digital divide' and our published research on the constraints of daily life in Indian villages. This paper does not provide a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of CoviSelf in detecting infection. As social scientists, our contribution sits within the field of qualitative studies of medical and health problems. Self-administered RATs are cheap, quick and reasonably reliable. Hence, point-of-care testing at the doorsteps of villagers has much potential, but realising the benefits of innovative, diagnostic medical technologies requires a realistic understanding of the conditions in Indian villages and designing devices that work in rural situations. This paper forms part of a larger project regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in rural India. A follow-up study based on fieldwork is planned for 2022–2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To monitor the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), India, during the last week of March 2020, imposed national restrictions on the movement of its citizens (lockdown). Although India's economy was shut down due to restrictions, the nation observed a sharp decline in particulate matter (PM) concentrations. In recent years, Delhi has experienced rapid economic growth, leading to pollution, especially in urban and industrial areas. In this paper, we explored the linkages between air quality and the nationwide lockdown of the city of Delhi using a geographic information system (GIS)-based approach. Data from 37 stations were monitored from 12 March, 2020 to 2 April, 2020 and it was found that the Air Quality Index for the city was almost reduced by 37% and 46% concerning PM2.5 and PM10, respectively. The study highlights that, in regular conditions, the atmosphere's natural healing rate against anthropogenic activities is lower, as indicated by a higher AQI. However, during the lockdown, this sudden cessation of anthropogenic activities leads to a period in which the natural healing rate is greater than the induced disturbances, resulting in a lower AQI, and thus proving that this pandemic has given a small window for the environment to breathe and helped the districts of Delhi to recover from serious issues related to bad air quality. If such healing windows are incorporated into policy and decision-making, these can prove to be effective measures for controlling air pollution in heavily polluted regions of the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the mathematical modeling of the second wave of COVID-19 and verifies the current Omicron variant pandemic data in India. We also we discussed such as uniformly bounded of the system, Equilibrium analysis and basic reproduction number R 0 . We calculated the analytic solutions by HPM (homotopy perturbation method) and used Mathematica 12 software for numerical analysis up to 8th order approximation. It checked the error values of the approximation while the system has residual error, absolute error and h curve initial derivation of square error at up to 8th order approximation. The basic reproduction number ranges between 0.8454 and 2.0317 to form numerical simulation, it helps to identify the whole system fluctuations. Finally, our proposed model validated (from real life data) the highly affected five states of COVID-19 and the Omicron variant. The algorithm guidelines are used for international arrivals, with Omicron variant cases updated by the Union Health Ministry in January 2022. Right now, the third wave is underway in India, and we conclude that it may peak by the end of May 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic has hit the agriculture sector hard around the world. A study was conducted to assess the impact of the pandemic on cropping patterns, crop management, usage of chemical inputs and their organic alternatives, harvesting, and marketing avenues through a survey approach in the two states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India. A total of 250 farmers participated in the study, the data was analyzed by Chi-square test and Kruskal–Wallis test. The assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on some aspects was undertaken by dividing the study period into three phases. Though a smaller number of people were infected with COVID-19 in the initial phase of the pandemic compared to the later phases, farm operations and the procurement of inputs were significantly affected at this phase as there was a sudden disruption in transportation due to COVID-19-induced movement restrictions. During the entire study period, commodities such as rice, bananas, vegetables, coconuts, and flowers suffered maximum crop loss compared to pulses, groundnuts, cotton, and rubber. Among fertilizers, the maximum shortage was observed for chemical fertilizers (46%) and biofertilizers (30%) compared to cow dung (18%) and poultry manure (6%), indicating that farmers tended to use more local materials that could be easily procured and accessed compared to shop-based inputs. A rise in the cost of cultivation, scarcity of farm workforce, and difficulty in hiring farm machinery all have contributed to the loss of profit during the pandemic period. As a response to COVID-19, growers initiated post-harvest processing of commodities, and cropping systems remained the same during the period. The paper also discusses some remedial measures to be adopted by households in the future, to minimize the impacts of such pandemics in the agrarian sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore how India's complex regime of control and management of religious institutions and communities—ironically, particularly Hindu institutions—influences the capacity of these institutions to promote various dimensions of human flourishing and socio-economic uplift among the most marginalized. In addition, I provide an overview of India's highly varied landscape when it comes to the freedom of religious institutions from state control, and in particular discuss how some minority religious institutions experience fewer government constraints on some aspects of their freedom to self-identify and self-govern, especially when compared to some majority institutions, such as Hindu temples. Although some minority institutions still face constraints on certain aspects of their operations, the freedom they have to manage their internal affairs can, at times, translate into greater agility and the ability to innovate and flourish in the context of 21st-century India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]