Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

DsbA is a ubiquitous bacterial oxidoreductase that associates with substrates during and after translocation, yet its involvement in protein folding and translocation remains an open question. Here we demonstrate a redox-controlled chaperone activity of DsbA, on both cysteine-containing and cysteine-free substrates, using magnetic tweezers-based single molecule force spectroscopy that enables independent measurements of oxidoreductase activity and chaperone behavior. Interestingly we found that this chaperone activity is tuned by the oxidation state of DsbA; oxidized DsbA is a strong promoter of folding, but the effect is weakened by the reduction of the catalytic CXXC motif. We further localize the chaperone binding site of DsbA using a seven-residue peptide which effectively blocks the chaperone activity. We found that the DsbA assisted folding of proteins in the periplasm generates enough mechanical work to decrease the ATP consumption needed for periplasmic translocation by up to 33%. © The Royal Society of Chemistry.

World University root node

Department of Biology

Fulltext

Chemical Science

DsbA is a redox-switchable mechanical chaperone

Department of English

Transdisciplinary Ethnography in India: Women in the Field

Traversing the otaak: Gendered fieldwork and boundaries of language

This paper examines the nature of inter-ethnic relations in North Macedonia drawing on the 2008 European Quality of Life Survey. Ceteris paribus, the self-declared level of subjective well-being is smaller among ethnic Albanians than among Macedonians. In the presence of relative income variables, subjective well-being among both ethnic groups is not significantly associated with their absolute income. The subjective well-being of ethnic Albanians is significantly associated with their income relative to Macedonians. However, the subjective well-being of Macedonians is not affected by income relative to ethnic Albanians. The results suggest that measures are needed to reduce income inequality between ethnic groups. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Department of Economics

Eastern European Economics

Ethnicity and Subjective Well-being in the Republic of North Macedonia

Mortality due to COVID-19 has varied across the states of India. We exploit this history to investigate the possible role of health policy in the outcome. Using three different measures of the death rate, we find to a varying degree, evidence that the level of public expenditure on health has made a difference to the state-wise mortality rate. Based on this, we proceeded to analyse the expenditure pattern in the states. The average level of expenditure on health is found to be low both of itself and in relation to spending by governments in South and Southeast Asia. In much of the territory of India spending on the police exceeds that of spending on health. Furthermore, richer states spend relatively less on it, implying that spending on health is a matter of choice for states rather than dictated by financial constraints. Two conclusions follow. First, some of the mortality from COVID-19 is policy induced and therefore was avoidable. Second, though the evidence is drawn from the experience with COVID-19, we may assume that assuring health security to the Indian population would require a radical restructuring of the spending priorities of the states.

Indian Economic Review

The importance of investing in a public health system: evidence from COVID-19 mortality

Growth has consistently remained a central topic in economic policy considerations of the government in India. However, there has also been a more scholarly interest in it among social scientists. As a part of the latter tradition, this paper addresses the proper delineation of the phases of growth in India, a matter of some discussion in the literature. Using state-of-the-art statistical methodology, it first establishes the trajectory of growth and then provides a theoretical explanation for that history. With data spanning the period 1950-2020, the procedure adopted is also able to assess the impact on economic growth of the policies of the present government. The results are conclusive. First, it is established that growth in India has accelerated continuously since the 1950s, implying that dynamism in the economy did not have to wait for the liberalising reforms launched in 1991. Next, the performance of India's economy is compared to growth that has taken place in the rest of the world. It is seen that while India's economy has, in recent years, shown a dynamism relative to the rest of the world, it has consistently fallen behind its most dynamic regions, notably in East Asia.

Economic and Political Weekly

Growth transitions in India myth and reality

This paper examines the impact of reduced availability of hard liquor in bars on sexual crimes against women outside their homes. We construct a district level panel dataset on reported crimes and use an identification strategy that exploits a natural experiment that led to a complete crackdown on bars selling hard liquor in a state of India. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that placing restrictions on alcohol sale through closure of on-premise drinking outlets that serve hard liquor reduces reported incidence of sexual assault and harassment against women but has no effect on reported rapes. We conduct placebo tests and show that the result is not driven by existing pre-trends. The result is also robust to an alternative estimation strategy using a synthetic control construction and the most conservative estimate shows a reduction in sexual assaults by 10%. These results have policy implications for regulating social drinking spaces due to their impact on women's public safety.

Journal of Development Studies

Public Safety for Women: Is Regulation of Social Drinking Spaces Effective?

We investigate the sectoral and the distributional effects of a food subsidy program, where food consumption in the economy is subsidized by taxing the manufacturing good producers. In a two-agent model comprising of farmer and industrialist households, agents consume food to accumulate health. Simulations indicate that while the subsidy program increases food output and agents' health both in the short run and the long run, manufacturing output and aggregate real GDP appear to fall in the short run and increase only in the long run. The program does not make both agents better off and exhibits social welfare gains for a limited range of subsidies. © Cambridge University Press 2019.

Macroeconomic Dynamics

TAX POLICY and FOOD SECURITY: A DYNAMIC ANALYSIS

Carbon dioxide utilization is necessary to reduce carbon footprint and also to synthesize value-added chemicals. The transition metal pincer complexes are attractive catalysts for the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to formic acid. There is a need to understand the factors affecting the catalytic performance of these pincer complexes through a structure–activity relationship study using computational methods. It is a well-established fact that aromatic functionalities offer stability and selectivity to transition metal catalysts. However, their impact on the performance of the catalysts is lesser known in the case of metal pincer complexes. Hence, it is necessary to investigate the catalytic performance of Mn(I)NNN pincer complexes with variably activated aromatic functionalities. In this context, 15 catalysts are designed by placing different types of aromatic rings at the pincer carbons and two terminal nitrogen of Mn(I)NNN pincer complexes. A benzene moiety, placed at C2–C3 carbons of Mn(I)NNN pincer complex with identical aromatic groups at the terminal nitrogen, is found to be most efficient toward CO2 hydrogenation than the rest of the catalysts. On the other hand, when N,N-dimethyl aniline is placed at C2–C3 carbons of Mn(I)NNN pincer complexes, then the catalytic performance is significantly decreased. Thus, the present study unravels the impact of aromatic groups in Mn(I)NNN pincer complexes toward the catalytic hydrogenation of carbon dioxide. Copyright © 2021 Parmar, Avasare and Pal.

Other Publications

Frontiers in Chemistry

Unraveling the Effect of Aromatic Groups in Mn(I)NNN Pincer Complexes on Carbon Dioxide Activation Using Density Functional Study

A large surface-to-volume ratio is an essential feature of 2D materials used in many potential electronic applications. This work proposed that the haeckelite-structured phosphorus can be another promising alternative to the known phosphorus allotropes by DFT calculations. This allotrope can be considered a suitable anode material that may provide outstanding performance in LIBs and SIBs. Our simulations confirm that the haeckelite-structured P, composed of alternate square and octagonal rings, is thermally and mechanically stable. The phosphorus haeckelite exhibits a semiconductor with a bandgap of 2 eV and converts to a metallic phase after Li/Na adsorption, which is profoundly the basis for ideal performance of a battery. It provides a high specific capacity and a small OCV with a minimal volume expansion during lithiation/sodiation. The haeckelite-structured P exhibits much higher Li/Na adsorption properties with a small Li/Na migration barrier, which are highly essential in the charge-discharge performance of LIBs/SIBs. Based on the details mentioned above, our study would supply supportive guidelines to advance better opportunities to design and develop flexible Li/Na-ion batteries for future energy conversion and storage applications. This journal is © the Owner Societies.

Department of Chemistry

Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics

Haeckelite phosphorus: An emerging 2D allotrope of phosphorus for potential use in LIBs/SIBs

Opioid abuse is an increasingly global phenomenon. Rather than assuming it to be a uniformly global or neoliberal pathology, how might we better understand comparative and locally specific dimensions of opioid addiction? Working with neighborhoods as a unit of analysis, this article analyzes the striking differences between patterns of addiction and violence in two proximate and seemingly similar urban poor neighborhoods in Delhi, India. Rather than global or national etiologies, I suggest that an attention to sharp ecological variation within epidemics challenges social scientists to offer more fine-grained diagnostics. Using a combination of quantitative and ethnographic methods, I show how heroin addiction and collective violence might be understood as expressions of what Durkheim called “suicido–genetic currents.” I suggest the idea of varying currents as an alternative to the sociology of neighborhood “effects” in understanding significant differences in patterns of self-harm and injury across demographically similar localities. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association