Publications

Room air conditioners (RACs) and laundry washing machines (LWMs) are crucial green energy products linked with economic growth in India, since both have a much lower level of market (and household) penetration than refrigerators. The key issues often overlooked while creating the aspiration-driven, larger picture are the availability of resources and indigenous industrial capability. The aspiration for the large-scale green transition needs to be revisited periodically to realign the priorities and chart out the most viable trajectory for the transition to a cleaner future. Energy-efficient RACs and LWMs necessitate using Rare Earth (RE) permanent magnets in their motor architecture because of their superior performance compared to their ferrite counterparts. All the motors and magnets used in the air conditioners, washing machines, and EVs are currently imported. More than 80% of the usage of rare earths in value terms is in RE permanent magnets. The industrial capabilities to manufacture RE permanent magnets and customized motors for the ecosystem would require appropriate incentives, uninterrupted availability of the critical RE materials used in the magnets, and demand for indigenous products.

We are confronting, in recent times, an urgent need to investigate multispecies ethnographies of non/humans and delineate the potential of such unexplored approaches to understand the sentient lives of animals within increasingly human-dominated, ecological contexts of the Anthropocene. This is especially true for a country like India, where the close physical and emotional proximity of human and nonhuman species over thousands of years have not only led to intense interspecies behavioural exchanges and the generation of immersive and affective, more-than-human environments but also, in turn, to the slow, but irreversible, synurbisation of wild nonhuman populations in recent times. Drawing on our ongoing studies on the synurbisation of macaques, a group of remarkably adaptable nonhuman primate species, from across the country, we highlight, in this chapter, what living in drastically altered socioecological environments might mean to both macaques and humans, and, in the process, reflect on the urban ecologies of our future.

Banks are financial institutions. In a way, it is a bartering system. Collect money from you, give interest, lend it to people who need it, and collect interest (including your operating cost). The Indus Valley Civilization is known for practising a barter system. Recognising the vitality of the banking system, the UN adopted a resolution designating 4 December as the "International Day of Banks". Financing policies do not work in isolation. Well-run national development banks can help countries develop financing options for Sustainable Development Goal-related investments.

This book offers a comprehensive perspective on policy theories, policy formulation and implementation, and alternative paradigm for dealing with complex social and economic systems. It presents insights into policies on major development sectors, including health, education, urbanization, climate change, innovation, advanced manufacturing, and economic growth. It delves into why public policies matter more than resources and are crucial for shaping the future of a country. It attempts a pioneering effort and delineates a complexity theory framework to deal with uncertainty, nonlinearity, emergence, and evolution. It comprises systems thinking, design thinking, complexity thinking, and tools for complexity analysis. Applicable to a policy system, economy, business, and organization, the complexity theory relies on phenomena like emergence, self-organizing property, adaptation, coevolution, and path dependency, in a clear departure from reductionism and Newtonian paradigm. Through academic rigor, it makes a convincing case for better understanding of application of complexity theory. It covers real-world examples and case studies related to evolution of economies of silicon valleys – Bengaluru (India) and San Francisco Bay (USA). These cases underscore the essentiality of complexity theory.

In terms of policy formulations, the book contains a policy design framework covering the science of policymaking, innovative approaches, and methodology for policy design. To deal with dynamic systems, it includes a step-by-step guide for the application of system dynamics. It articulates alternative paradigm – adaptive policies and policy design; alternative theory – complexity theory; and new public organizations and institutional development for meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

Aiming to reduce fuzziness, the book combines both researcher’s in-depth analysis as well as practitioner’s perspective, thus serving as a vital read for scholars of public policy, management, and economics. It emphasizes the primacy of policy process to discern deep understanding from the ground and to integrate micro-level realities and macro-level requirements. It argues for change from Weberian bureaucratic model to adaptive approaches and recommends policy system reforms, highlighting that countries should make the right policy choices early to steer ahead. In doing so, the book serves the requirements of policymakers and thought leaders.

This article provides arguments through case studies across the world on how culture can be a great determinant of human-wildlife coexistence

The article chronicles the multifaceted relations between the Adivasi( Tea Tribe) community and the wild Asian elephants in the Udalguri district of Assam, India