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This paper introduces the Government of India Initiative on linguistic data creation in Indian languages. The Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL) is a fully funded Government of India scheme established in 2007 to cater to the needs of linguistic resources required for the development of language technology in Indian languages. LDC-IL worked silently for more than a decade with a team of around regular fifty people and involving thousands of resource persons, covering twenty major languages of India. Part of the output of LDC-IL was launched in April 2019 by the Hon'ble Vice President of India. This paper, the first introductory paper in an academic journal, aims to give a brief of the works done by LDC-IL and how these works are crucial in the development of language technology for Indian languages. Within a short span of eight months of its release, the language resources released by LDC-IL have been procured and utilized by scores of industry and academic bodies and individual researchers, including major industry leaders like Microsoft, Google, Samsung etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the determinants of stated individual support towards environmental action. The analysis is realized by means of an original Partial Least Squares Path model of Environmental Awareness-Social Capital-Action and it is based on survey data provided in the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (2005–2009) regarding 34.612 individuals from 42 different countries. Besides the global estimates obtained on the whole set of countries, the paper proposes a subsample analysis for developed and developing countries, as well as country analyses for four major economies: China, India, Germany and the United States. We find that environmental awareness and trust in not-for-profit organizations are important determinants of individual action in support of environmentally friendly policies. In general, trust in science and technology does not crowd-out individual support towards the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ratio-based prevalence and absolute headcounts are the two most commonly accepted metrics to measure the burden of various socioeconomic phenomenon. However, ratio-based prevalence, calculated as the number of cases with certain conditions relative to the total population, is by far the most widely used to rank burden and consequently for targeting, across different populations, often defined in terms of geographical areas. In this regard, targeting areas exclusively based on prevalence-based metric poses certain fundamental difficulties with some serious policy implications. Drawing the data from the National Family Health Survey 2015–2016, and Census 2011, this paper takes four indicators of child undernutrition in India as an example to examine two contextual questions: first, does the choice of metric matter for targeting areas for reducing child undernutrition in India? and second; which metric should be used to facilitate comparisons and targeting across variable populations? Our findings suggest a moderate correlation between prevalence estimates and absolute headcounts implying that choice of metric does matter when targeting child undernutrition. Huge variations were observed between prevalence-based and absolute count-based ranking of the districts. In fact, in various cases, districts with the highest absolute number of undernourished children were ranked as relatively lower-burden districts based on prevalence. A simple comparison between the two approaches—when applied to targeting undernourished children in India—indicates that prevalence-based prioritization may miss high-burden areas where substantially higher number of undernourished children are concentrated. For developing populous countries like India, which is already grappling with high levels of maternal and child malnutrition and poor health infrastructure along with intrinsic socioeconomic inequalities, it is critical to adopt an appropriate metric for effective targeting and prioritization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at our knowledge of the risks associated with nanotechnology, one wonders to what degree should its products and applications be regulated? Do we need any governing body to regulate nanotechnology research and development? Do individuals have a right to know to make informed decisions through labelling mechanism? The question of regulation and responsibility in the interaction between science, technology and society is one of the most pressing issues. Risks and regulations regarding nanoscience and nanotechnology are mostly debated amongst policy-makers and not amongst the nanoscientists, who actually produce the new science. Thus, the paper makes an attempt to contribute significantly to an increased body of knowledge regarding how scientists think and talk about science. Little has been documented about perceptions of nanotechnology regulation and responsibility in developing countries. Given the importance of perceptions in the genetically-modified foods debate, the way nanotechnology is perceived holds serious repercussions for the framing of its ethical, legal and social implications. Through a field-survey that records the opinions of leading Indian nanoscientists, the paper examines scientists' perceptions about nanotech-regulation. Such discussion is imperative to address technological risks and uncertainties. The paper further explores whether scientists have different views on what responsibility amounts to and under what conditions one is responsible. Though the study has considered Indian nanoscientists due to access issues, the research questions raised and addressed in this study are universal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  The IHY Secretariat and the United Nations Basic Space Science Initiative (UNBSSI) assist scientists and engineers from all over the world in participating in the International Heliophysical Year (IHY) 2007. A major thrust of IHY/UNBSSI is to deploy arrays of small, inexpensive instruments such as magnetometers, radio telescopes, GPS receivers, all-sky cameras, etc. around the world to allow global measurements of ionospheric and heliospheric phenomena. The small instrument programme is envisioned as a partnership between instrument providers and instrument hosts in developing nations. The IHY/UNBSSI can facilitate the deployment of several of these networks world-wide. Existing data bases and relevant software tools will be identified to promote space science activities in developing nations. Extensive data on space science have been accumulated by a number of space missions. Similarly, long-term data bases are available from ground-based observations. These data can be utilized in ways different from originally intended for understanding the heliophysical processes. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of IHY/UNBSSI, its achievements, future plans, and outreach to the 192 Member States of the United Nations as recorded in the UN/NASA workshop in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is perceived to be one of the most attractive Non-Annex I countries for CDM project development. There are more than 350 projects in the CDM pipeline, largely in the areas of renewable energy, energy efficiency in industries and fossil fuel switching. This paper examines the socio-economic component of sustainable development commitments of the CDM projects to see if they can make any impact on rural poverty in India, since the goal of poverty alleviation lies at the core of the country's development priorities. The study concludes that CDM is not contributing to rural poverty alleviation to any notable extent. Nearly all the projects have a business orientation and are not directed to the development of rural poor. Even the renewable energy projects will have limited role in up-liftment of the masses below poverty line due to their weak resource base. For CDM to emerge as a "win--win" strategy for poverty alleviation projects should be aimed at the rural communities and designed to accelerate agricultural growth in the rainfed regions of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the popular imagination and certain academic fields, sex workers' experiences of sexuality and intimate relationships are often "naturalized," to the point where they are assumed to be deviant or completely different than those of women in mainstream society. Researchers and sex worker organizations are challenging these reified constructions by examining more diverse and representative models of sexuality and relationships. However, the experiences of women selling sex in the "third world" are consistently portrayed as violent, non-pleasurable, and oppressive, characteristics often applied universally to "third world women." Using data from ethnographic fieldwork with girls and women who belong to the Devadasi (servant/slave of the God) tradition of sex work in rural Karnataka, India, this paper examines the cultural dynamics of sexuality and relationships. Gender and dominant models of feminine identity emerge as powerful factors in shaping these facets of life, producing experiences among Devadasis that are similar to those of other Indian women. Yet, Devadasis also encounter additional constraints in their lives because of their participation in the morally and culturally contested Devadasi system. These data contribute to emerging research that destabilizes images of sex workers as "different" from other women, while also highlighting the impact of tradition on sexual mores and relationship structure in this unique cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]