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The focus of sustainable development goals (SDGs) is to promote the use of renewable energy so that countries can achieve better environmental quality. However, the progression is plodding, and still, 80% of energy comes mainly from conventional sources in developing countries. The implementation of procedures depends on the political attitudes, political stability, and quality of institutions. India has a diverse political structure ranging from central government to state government to local governments. In the late '80 s, India witnessed a stiff rise in regional and national political parties, which leads more political competition. This paper tries to explain the possible relationship between political competition and CO 2 emission in India. With the application of the time series non-linear ARDL (NARDL) model, this study tries to find the asymmetric relationship between political competition and CO 2 emission. In our empirical model, we also include other important elements of environmental quality like innovation and fossil fuel consumption. Empirical results show that political competition is asymmetrically related to CO 2 emissions in the long run. Fossil fuel consumption and innovation also have a significant relationship with emissions. Based on the results, a few policy recommendations have been discussed., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Population in South Asia is increasing ever than a faster rate, subsequently; food security, climate change, and capital intensive agro farming techniques are the prevailing challenges in this region. This is a tri-country penal analysis, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and the study covers the data throughout (1973-2020). This study has used modern farm input data besides demographic variables in the study. In this study, we use panel data set, ARDL (PMG) approach, autoregressive distributed lag model pooled mean group, which is an extensively dynamic modeling technique for heterogeneous data. The results of the study explore that transition in the demographic pattern in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh is the real cause of low crop productivity and land intensification. Technology innovation is the only ray of hope to fulfill the food demand of the future ahead and climate agriculture practices can hamper the further deterioration of the small farmlands., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

A key strategy for social development and sustainable urban expansion is building sustainable and affordable transport systems. In this study, we aim to test the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis and reveal the impact of infrastructure investment in transportation systems in China, Turkey, India, and Japan over the period 1995-2020 on environmental degradation. According to dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) method analysis, per capita GDP and per capita GDP 3 have a significant positive impact on per capita CO 2 emission, while per capita GDP 2 has a significant adverse impact on per capita CO 2 emission. These results confirm the validity of the N-shaped EKC assumption, while inconsistent with the results of the FMOLS technique, showing that per capita GDP is significantly positive, while per capita GDP 2 and per capita GDP 3 have a significant negative impact on per capita carbon emissions. Moreover, as clarified by the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and DOLS methods, road infrastructure investment (RO), aviation infrastructure investment, trade openness, and foreign direct investment (FDI) have significant positive effects, while railway infrastructure investment (RA) has a significant negative effect on per capita carbon emission. Country-level estimates of per capita carbon emission-based DOLS strategies in the model show that only China and Japan have N-shaped EKC hypothesis. Road infrastructure investment, aviation infrastructure investment, and trade openness have significant positive effects, while railway infrastructure investment has a significant negative effect on per capita CO 2 emission in selected central and east Asian countries. The latest electrified rail systems are well thought out and less polluting, so the contribution of rail infrastructure investment to the transport mix can support sustainable and safe transport systems at city center and intercity levels and reduce environmental pollution in central and east Asian countries. Moreover, the implementation of the basic environmental settings of trade agreements should be strengthened to condense the growing impact of free trade on environmental pollution., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

In recent years, environmental issues have become controversial, and policymakers are discovering new predictors of carbon emissions. Some economists/researchers have advocated for fiscal decentralization to improve the quality of the environment by offering more financial authority to provincial/local and sub-national governments. Therefore, this work aims to inspect the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth and environmental quality in India by taking data from 1996 to 2021. This work applies both ARDL and NARDL econometric models for empirical examination. The findings of this study suggest that expenditure decentralization has asymmetric long-term and short-term consequences on economic growth, and carbon emission in India. The result of the asymmetric ARDL model also indicates that positive and negative shock in expenditure decentralization contrarily affects economic growth and carbon emission. Moreover, the positive and negative shock in revenue decentralization helps in reducing carbon emissions both in the long run and short run in India. These outcomes are useful for policy analysis from the Indian economic policy perspective. The study also laid out potential outcomes that may benefit India's local governments and central government in resolving the issues of economic growth and environmental degradation., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Developing nations aim to industrialize and grow sustainably often ignoring the environmental consequences. However, few empirical studies have looked at the influence of industrialization-driven economic transition on carbon footprint in developing nations using a non-parametric approach. In this milieu, on the ground of Kaya's identity and the novel multivariate quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) (extension of Sim and Zhou's (2015) bivariate QQR model), the present research studies the impact of industrial value-added (IGVA), population, energy intensity, and carbon intensity on CO 2 emissions in India. This study is one of the first in the literature to evaluate the industrialization-carbonization nexus in the context of Kaya's identity for the Indian economy utilizing an innovative multivariate QQR approach, which makes a methodological and empirical addition to the literature. The outcomes of the multivariate QQR technique demonstrate that economic and environmental development requires continual long-run strategies. The empirical findings revealed that there is no authentication that India's carbon emissions increased due to its industrialization, which exhibited that IGVA has a negative and significant connection with CO 2 emissions. In some quantiles, population size positively impacts CO 2 emissions. On the other hand, carbonization in the Indian economy is asymmetrically affected by GDP per capita and energy and carbon intensity. The quantile Granger causality study further supported the aforementioned results. The current analysis also offers policy suggestions for environmentally friendly sustainable economic growth and to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of India., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Green growth refers to the economic growth strategy, which is less detrimental to natural assets, predominantly the environment. Therefore, the main motive of investment and innovation activities should be to attain economic growth while sustainably utilizing natural assets. In this regard, we aim to explore whether ICT diffusion and financial development matter for attaining green economic growth in BRICS economies. The long-run autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) results show that internet development exerts a positive influence on green growth in four BRICS economies excluding India. However, the long-run estimates of mobile cellular subscriptions are positive only in Russia and China. On the other side, the increase in bank credit and insurance premium also contributes to the long-run green economic growth in almost all BRICS economies. Policymakers should focus on the increased use of ICT in the economy that would replace the physical resources in the economy with information resources. Besides, financial services should be provided to individuals and small and medium enterprises involved in green consumption and production activities., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 agenda hinges on attaining a sustainable environment with the need to "take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts". Hence, this study empirically revisits the debate on the effect of nonrenewable energy and globalization on carbon emissions within the framework of the Kuznets hypothesis using an unbalanced panel data from seven South Asian countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) covering 1980-2019. The variables of interest are carbon emissions measured in metric tons per capita, energy use measured as kg of oil equivalent per capita, and globalization index. To address five main objectives, we deploy four techniques: panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), quantile regression (QR), and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). For the most part, the findings reveal that the (1) inverted U-shaped energy-Kuznets curve holds; (2) U-shaped globalization-Kuznets curve is evident; (3) inverted U-shaped turning points for nonrenewable energy are 496.03 and 640.84, while for globalization are 38.83 and 39.04, respectively; (4) globalization-emission relationship indicates a U-shaped relationship at the median and 75th quantile; and (5) inverted U-shaped energy-Kuznets holds in Pakistan but a U-shaped nexus prevails in Nepal and Sri Lanka; inverted U-shaped globalization-Kuznets holds in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but U-shaped nexus is evident in Bhutan, Maldives, and Nepal. Deductively, our results show that South Asia countries (at early stage of development) are faced with the hazardous substance that deteriorates human health. Moreover, the non-linear square term of the nonrenewable energy-emissions relationship is negative, which validates the inverted U-shaped EKC theory. Overall, the effect of energy and globalization on carbon emissions is opposite while the consistency at the 75th quantile result indicates that countries with intense globalization are prone to environmental degradation., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

This research investigated the association between financial inclusion, energy poverty alleviation, and economic development in South Asian countries and found significant connections. In order to make multilateral conclusions, we have created a panel of data for nations in South Asia and estimated not only the dynamic panel estimation but also the panel unit root, Kao (1999) estimates, and the ARDL tests for each country. A significant association between financial inclusion and economic development and poverty reduction is discovered by using dynamic panel estimates. Economic development has also been shown to have a favorable influence on energy poverty alleviation. According to the findings of the ARDL analysis, financial inclusion has a beneficial influence on economic development. Financial inclusion and economic growth have reciprocal causalities in energy poverty alleviation, as shown by the study's testing of this association. As a result, it is acceptable to infer that financial inclusion favors economic development and poverty reduction in South Asia. The study also suggests the policy implications for stakeholders., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Climate action got attention from the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although a large number of studies are investigating the said phenomenon, however, the literature on the top five responsible countries is unable to evaluate the role of environment-related technologies (ERTs) and institutional quality (IQ). The top five consumption-based carbon dioxide (CBCO 2 ) emitting economies, i.e., China, India, Japan, Russia, and the USA, are considerable stakeholders in this challenge. To fill this void, with the latest data available from 1992 to 2017, short- and long-run relationships are estimated with dynamic common correlated effects estimator and augmented mean group in the framework of EKC hypothesis. Reported results indicate the negative effect of ERTs and IQ towards CBCO 2 , which means that adoption of ERTs and better IQ is supportive in controlling environmental degradation. Findings are also robust to the policy implications for the UN's SDGs., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The main objective of this paper is to look at how environmental degradation in the form of climate change and air pollution affect international tourism for five countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) over the years 1990-2019. Other independent variables include information and communication technology (ICT) and democracy. We also look at the role of environmental regulation to see the validity of porter hypothesis in the tourism sector. To achieve this objective, we apply a novel method of moments quantile regression approach as well as a robust causality technique. The result shows that at lower and medium quantile, CO 2 emission has positive impact on tourism while at higher quantile, CO 2 emission has negative but insignificant effect on tourism in BRICS countries. The result for PM2.5 is uniform across all the quantiles, showing the negative effect on tourism. ICT and human capital positively affect the tourism while democracy has negative impact on the tourism sector of the BRICS nations. The result also validated the Porter hypothesis for tourism sector. We conclude that tourism industry stakeholders and the environmental policymakers must work together to integrate tourism policies with BRICS countries' environmental conservation policies as part of the transition to sustainable tourism industry., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

This working paper from the annual conference of the Indian Adult Education Association briefly describes the current state of adult education in India and outlines important steps that should be taken to make adult education an integral part of national development. (SK)

It is need of the hour to investigate the impacts of climate parameters on agricultural production in a developing region of South Asia. Therefore, this work attempts to explore the climatic indicators on agricultural production for selected South Asian countries over the annual data of 1961-2016. This study estimates the impacts of rainfall, temperature, rural population, land under cereal production, and CO 2 emissions (ECO 2 ) on agricultural production. For empirical analysis, we applied second-generation unit root tests. After examining the order of integration of time series, we check for the co-integration among the variables. Before the co-integration test, we check for cross-section dependence among the variables. CD and LM tests confirm the existence of cross-section dependence. Afterward, we apply the Westerlund co-integration test to confirm the strong association among the variables. Further, we applied two methods for long-run coefficients of independent variables. Dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) and fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) tests were applied to cross-check the findings. Our findings show that rural population and rainfall are negatively associated with agricultural production. Moreover, temperature, land area under cereal production, and ECO 2 are positively associated with agricultural production. Our findings shed light on some important policy implications for South Asian countries., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)