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

The “strength of weak ties” has been established in the context of labour market outcomes, with theoretical and empirical investigation showing how weak ties lead to an increase in mobility and job opportunities. The impact of weak ties on community organisation is less well understood. We contribute to this literature by investigating if weak ties, generated via membership of livelihood programmes, can lead to the creation or enhancement of social capital. Based on data from one of the largest independent primary surveys for India, we find that participation in self-help groups had little impact on livelihoods, but led to the creation of significant social capital, as measured by indicators related to personal efficacy and collective action. We use Entropy Balancing to estimate mean effects to tackle the problem of non-random selection into the programme. In contrast to the bulk of existing evidence on livelihood programmes that is based on small samples, our large sample size and innovative survey design allow us to detect a larger number of effects with greater certainty. We argue that the social capital generated by the programme is a significant positive impact (even though the main target of the programme is to strengthen livelihoods), as it strengthens the process of women's empowerment.

Department of Economics

World University root node

Fulltext

World Development

Can weak ties create social capital? Evidence from Self-Help Groups in rural India

The paper examines political economy consequences of a third party (World Bank) intervention in India. The intervention was a capacity building initiative that trained local politicians in various governance procedures in a sample of villages. We show that the state government reacted to the intervention by allocating additional resources to program villages with aligned incumbents. Consequently, party switching by opposition incumbents in favor of the ruling party went up significantly in program villages. Moreover, the reelection rate of opposition party incumbents went down due to the intervention, especially for those who didn't switch parties. The results highlight the importance of considering political economy consequences of such interventions, even in countries not heavily reliant on foreign assistance, to better understand their overall welfare effects.

Journal of Public Economics

Political economy of third party interventions

Smart city projects collect data on urban environments to identify problems, inform policymaking, and boost citizen engagement. Typically, this data is collected by static sensors placed around the city, which is not ideal for spatiotemporal needs of certain sensing applications such as air quality monitoring. Vehicular crowdsensing is an upcoming approach that addresses this problem by utilizing vehicles' mobility to collect fine-grained city-scale data. Prior work has mainly focused on designing vehicular crowdsensing systems and related components, including incentive schemes, vehicle selection, and application-specific sensing, without understanding the motivations and challenges faced by drivers and passengers, one of the two key stakeholders of any vehicular crowdsensing solution. Our work aims to fill this gap. To understand drivers' and passengers' perspectives, we developed Turn2Earn, a generic vehicular crowdsensing system that incentivizes drivers to take specific routes for data collection. Turn2Earn system was deployed with 13 auto-rickshaw drivers for two weeks in Bangalore, India. Our drivers took 709 trips using Turn2Earn covering 79.2% of the city's grid cells. Interviews with 13 drivers and 15 passengers revealed innovative information-based strategies adopted by the drivers to convince passengers in taking alternative routes, and passengers' altruism in supporting the drivers. We uncovered novel insights, including viability of offered routes due to road closure, issues with electric vehicles, and selection bias among the drivers. We conclude with design recommendations to inform the future of vehicular crowdsensing, including engaging and incentivizing passengers, and criticality-based reward structure. © 2021 ACM.

Other Publications

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Understanding Driver-Passenger Interactions in Vehicular Crowdsensing

Background Maternal malnutrition is a major source of regional health inequity and contributes to maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Bihar, a state in eastern India adjacent to Jharkhand and West Bengal, has relatively high neonatal mortality rates because a large portion of infants are born to young mothers. Bihar has the second-highest proportion of underweight children under 3 in India, with infant mortality rates of 48 per 1000 live births. Maternal malnutrition remains a major threat to perinatal health in Bihar, where 58.3% of pregnant women are anaemic. Methods We examined dietary beliefs and practices among mothers, mothers-in-law and community members, including Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), using focus group discussions (n=40 groups, 213 participants), key informant interviews (n=50 participants) and quantitative surveys (n=1200 recent mothers and 400 community health workers). We report foods that are added/avoided during the perinatal period, along with stated reasons underlying food choice. We summarise the content of the diet based on responses to the quantitative survey and identify influencers of food choice and stated explanations for adding and avoiding foods. Key findings Analyses for all methodologies included gathering frequency counts and running descriptive statistics by food item, recommendation to eat or avoid, pregnancy or post partum, food group and health promoting or risk avoiding. During pregnancy, commonly added foods were generally nutritious (milk, pulses) with explanations for consuming these foods related to promoting health. Commonly avoided foods during pregnancy were also nutritious (wood apples, eggplant) with explanations for avoiding these foods related to miscarriage, newborn appearance and issues with digestion. Post partum, commonly added foods included sweets because they ease digestion whereas commonly avoided foods included eggplants and oily or spicy foods. Family, friends, relatives or neighbours influenced food choice for both mothers and ASHAs more than ASHAs and other health workers. Perinatal dietary beliefs and behaviours are shaped by local gastroecologies or systems of knowledge and practice that surround and inform dietary choices, as well as how those choices are explained and influenced. Our data provide novel insight into how health influencers operating within traditional and biomedical health systems shape the perinatal dietary beliefs of both mothers and community health workers. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.

BMJ Nutrition, Prevention and Health

Tradition, taste and taboo: The gastroecology of maternal perinatal diet

Let K(X,Y) be the space of compact operators. For a proximinal subspace Z⊂Y, this paper deals with the question, when does every Y-valued compact operator admit a Z-valued compact best approximation? For any reflexive Banach space X and for a L1-predual space Y, if Z⊂Y is a strongly proximinal subspace of finite codimension, we show that K(X,Z) is a proximinal subspace of K(X,Y) under an additional condition on the position of K(X,Z). When Y is a c0-direct sum of finite dimensional spaces we achieve a strong transitivity result by showing that for any proximinal subspace of finite codimension Z⊂Y, every Y-valued bounded operator admits a best Z-valued compact approximation. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Linear Algebra and Its Applications

Best approximation in spaces of compact operators

We examine the impact of exposure to biomass burning events (primarily crop burning) on the prevalence of hypertension in four North Indian states. We use data from the National Family Health Survey-IV for 2015-16 and employ a multivariate logistic and linear model to estimate the effect of exposure to biomass burning on the prevalence of hypertension and blood pressure, respectively. The adjusted odds ratio of hypertension among individuals living in areas with high intensity of biomass (HIB) burning (defined as exposure to &gt; 100 fire-events during the past 30 days) is 1.15 [95% CI: 1.003–1.32]. The odds ratios further increase at a higher intensity of biomass burning and downwind fires are found to be responsible for the negative effect of fires on cardiovascular health. We also find that the systolic and diastolic blood pressure for older cohorts is significantly higher due to exposure to HIB. We estimate that elimination of HIB would prevent loss of 70–91 thousand DALYs every year and 1.73 to 2.24 Billion USD (in PPP terms) over 5 years by reducing the prevalence of hypertension. Therefore, curbing biomass burning will be associated with significant health and economic benefits in North India. © 2021 The Authors

SSM - Population Health

Crop Fires and Cardiovascular Health – A Study from North India

Let (Formula presented.) be the space of bounded linear operators between real Banach spaces X, Y. For a closed subspace (Formula presented.) we partially solve the operator version of Birkhoff–James orthogonality problem, if (Formula presented.) is orthogonal to (Formula presented.) when does there exist a unit vector x 0 such that (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) is orthogonal to Z? In order to achieve this we first develop a compact optimization for a Y-valued compact operator T, via a minimax formula for (Formula presented.) in terms of point-wise best approximations, that links local optimization and global optimization. Our result gives an operator version of a classical minimax formula of Light and Cheney, proved for continuous vector-valued functions. For any separable reflexive Banach space X and for (Formula presented.) is a L 1-predual space as well as a M-ideal in Y, we show that if (Formula presented.) is orthogonal to (Formula presented.) then there is a unit vector x 0 with (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) is orthogonal to Z. In the general case we also give some local conditions on T, when this can be achieved. © 2021 Taylor &amp; Francis Group, LLC.

Numerical Functional Analysis and Optimization

Operators Birkhoff–James Orthogonal to Spaces of Operators

We analyse the impact of work-life balance policies enacted by the government of Japan on the share of time allocated by Japanese women to paid employment, home production and leisure on a typical working day. Using panel data and employing fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that these policies have had some success in increasing married women's share of time spent in paid employment. However, the increase in the share of time spent in paid employment is not largely compensated by cutting down the share of time spent in home production. This necessitates the need to cut down the share of time spent for leisure, implying a “double burden” of work for women. Further, work-life balance policies in married men's firms do not appear to significantly influence their time allocation between various activities on a typical working day. We find that although work-life balance policies do not appear to influence the desirability of having a child for all women, they help women with children younger than six years raise the share of time spent in paid employment by largely cutting down their time allocation to home production.

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies

The Impact of Work-Life Balance Policies on the Time Allocation and Fertility Preference of Japanese Women

We study the parity-odd sector of 3-point functions comprising scalar operators and conserved currents in conformal field theories in momentum space. We use momentum space conformal Ward identities as well as spin-raising and weight-shifting operators to fix the form of some of these correlators. Wherever divergences appear we discuss their regularisation and renormalisation using appropriate counter-terms. © 2021, The Author(s).

Department of Physics

Journal of High Energy Physics

Momentum space parity-odd CFT 3-point functions

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Sociological Bulletin

Pandemic of Inequality and the State: A Response to Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s ‘COVID-19 and Structural Inequalities: Some Reflections on the Practice of Sociology’