Publications

A large-scale socio-cultural transition such as the ‘shift toward eCooking’ is a process (or a journey) rather than a destination. Apart from the business potential it offers, it would potentially create a large number of aware and educated citizens. Strengthening appliance and vessel manufacture would reinforce the country’s domestic MSME sector. Improved eCooking appliance safety culture would enhance manufacturers’ competitiveness (and also acceptability) globally. Academic training on energy efficiency, environmental benefits, nutritional benefits associated with eCooking, and hands-on training for appliance manufacturing, demonstration, servicing, and repairing, will lead to large capacity building in the country. The formation of efficient public relations channels would help improve the transparency of communication across the whole ecosystem encompassing industry, entrepreneurs, innovators, educators, policymakers, and consumers.

Methane (CH4) is one of the most abundant organic trace gases in the atmosphere having a strong global warming potential of 28 in 100 years, is a significant GHGs, and has a vital role in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. India is home to the largest number of livestock in the world and is responsible for higher methane emissions from enteric fermentation and manure management. In the present study, the methane emissions from Indian livestock, i.e., enteric fermentation, is estimated to be 11.63 Tg yr-1 in 2019 using IPCC methodology and recent census livestock activity data from the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Govt. of India, and corresponding country-specific revised emission factors. The CH4 emissions from livestock manure management system was found to be 1.11 Tg yr-1, resulting in 12.74 Tg yr-1 of CH4 emission from the Indian livestock sector. The district-level spatial CH4 emission pattern was developed to identify the potential emission hotspots across the country. Initial findings suggest that changing livestock population patterns plays an important role in governing methane emissions in rural India. The information generated could be important tools for policymakers to control methane emissions across the country.

Nonhuman primates – mostly apes – are known to combine gestural units in non-random ways, but they do not make novel meaning with these combinations. In this paper, we investigated, for the first time, the structure and functions of gesture sequences in the naturally occurring communication of wild bonnet macaques, using analyses akin to ape gesture studies. We discuss our findings in the light of a possibility that primate gesture sequences, coordinating the flow of social interactions, may be evolutionary precursors to pragmatic gestures in human language.

During the period 2020–2024, scientific investigations in the Himalaya incorporated various geological, geochemical and geochronological aspects of evolution of this mountain, including large-scale configuration and evolutionary models, determining of major unconformities in the Lesser Himalaya, integrated structure and geochronology of major tectonic boundaries, geochemistry and U–Pb dating of the Abor Volcanics, exhumation patterns using fission track zircon and apatite. Many Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic magmatic bodies were dated using U–Pb zircon methods from the Lesser Himalayan Jutogh Group metamorphics and Greater Himalayan Sequence. Active tectonic patterns from the frontal Sub-Himalaya belt are also worked out.

This paper presents for the first time comprehensive spectroscopic studies on the Mahadevpur H4/5 chondrite using Electron Probe Micro Analysis (EPMA) and laser micro-Raman spectroscopic techniques. The micro-petrography reveals a coarse to medium crystalline chondritic texture with various morphological  features dispersed in a relatively medium to fine crystalline matrix, which appeared in the cover page of the journal. We found that Mahadevpur meteorite has experienced the shock stage of S4 corresponds to  30–35 GPa.  This is independently validated by   XRD technique and observation of nanodiamonds. 

This paper attempts to theorize from two peripheries within the Indian ‘knowledge production nexus’: one which is spatial vis-à-vis a ‘peripheral’ city; and the other which is relational vis-à-vis more-than-human relations in the city. Drawing from Southern and postcolonial urban theory and more-than-human geographies, we postulate that first, the city of Guwahati in North-East India remains a ‘South within the South’ as a site to theorize from, and second, the everyday enmeshed lives and relations of animals within this landscape remain negligible within the above-mentioned discursive nexus. In a parallel enquiry over ‘other Souths’ and ‘other lifeforms’, we explore animals’ geographies in Guwahati, finding potential in the framing of ‘entanglements’ to encapsulate varied relations with pigs, rhesus macaques, bovines, and dogs – both historically and in the contemporary. More-than-human entanglements, we contend, unveil more-than-human material, spatial, and liminal relations in the city, striated along economic, gender, caste, and class lines. Such a framing is both located and dislocated, suggestive of a comparative analytic and a plural ethic.