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

A study in three slum communities in Delhi identifies and analyses the problems and challenges that parents and children from economically weaker sections and disadvantaged groups face while accessing the right to education. These problems are partly on account of the apathetic administration of private schools and partly due to the lack of accountability from the state government, and the lack of awareness about the provisions of the RTE Act. © 2019 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Other Publications

Economic and Political Weekly

Roadblocks towards the right to education experiences from Delhi

Department of Economics

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Missing women: A review of underlying causes and policy responses

Most states lack the ability to maintain a uniform presence at the local level. While in some places, citizens experience an attentive and present state that is quick to address their demands, in other parts, the same state can be unresponsive and absent. The unevenness in state presence shapes its capacity to delivery services and its legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens. What explains the spatial unevenness in local state presence? This paper argues that the transfer preferences of mid-level bureaucrats are an important determinant of local state presence. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines insights from qualitative fieldwork and a unique dataset on the transfers history of mid-level bureaucrats in Indian land bureaucracy, I show that bureaucrats have strong transfer preferences and regularly lobby to avoid being placed in jurisdictions further away from their homes or being relocated over long distances. Jurisdictions less preferred by bureaucrats are more likely to experience state absence at the local level. Further, spatial disparities in local state absence are concentrated according to historical patterns of development across different regions of the state; historically less developed regions with lower bureaucratic representation within the state and experience a more prolonged duration of bureaucratic absence on account of bureaucratic lobbying against transfer directives. This paper highlights the importance of transfer preferences of individual bureaucrats and their collective representation in shaping the quality of local <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/governance">governance</a>.

Transfer preferences of bureaucrats and spatial disparities in local state presence

Open Source Social Media Intelligence (OSSMInt) is a field that focuses on extracting useful information and actionable insights from publicly available and overt sources of data on social media platforms. There are several applications that can be built by applying OSSMInt techniques on this human-sensor data. In this paper, we present some of the use-cases of OSSMInt that are useful for the public sector agencies for e-governance. E-governance on social media include the identification of complaints and grievances reported online by the public citizens for the government authorities and facilitate public agencies to response those complaints, provide better services and improve their connections with public citizens. We present the basic Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning based framework, tools and techniques within the context of OSSMInt and E-governance. The focus of this paper is on mining user-generated content on Twitter (the most popular social media and microblogging website) to identify public citizens complaints and grievances. In particular, we focus on two important applications: (1) complaints which are reported to spread awareness among other citizens and to bring government’s attention to the issues reported in the complaint, and (2) complaints which seek for immediate action and response from the concerned authorities. In addition to the basic introduction and motivation, we will discuss the unique challenges to these applications, open research problems, important literature, proposed approach, experimental results, and future directions.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Investigating the role of twitter in E-Governance by extracting information on citizen complaints and grievances reports

Psychotic Like Experiences (PLEs) have been reported in several cultures. The 16 item Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale-Extended (LSHS-E) measures hallucination like experiences (HLEs) in the general population. This study investigated the psychometric properties and the factor structure of LSHS-E Hindi among healthy adults of Delhi. LSHS-E was translated from English to Hindi and then back to English. It was administered as a paper pencil questionnaire to 182 adults from the general population. Reliability of LSHS-E Hindi was measured using Cronbach's alpha and factor structure was established using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). It was tested against the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE-42) for convergent and divergent validity. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was performed to identify subgroups with different endorsement of HLEs. Among 182, 18 participants reporting mental and neurological disorders were excluded. LSHS-E Hindi had good reliability (0.85; 95% CI: 0.82 to 0.88). CFA of Hindi LSHS-E revealed the a priori four-factor solution to be best, namely: ‘intrusive thoughts’, ‘vivid daydreams’, ‘multisensory HLEs’, ‘auditory and visual HLEs’. LSHS-E Hindi showed stronger correlation with positive domain of CAPE than with negative and depression domains. LCA revealed three classes: low, intermediate and high endorsement of HLEs. Participants with highest endorsement of HLEs were less educated and had highest endorsement on all CAPE dimensions. LSHS-E Hindi has good psychometric properties and can be used to study HLEs in Indians. The four-factor structure model depicts the multidimensionality of HLEs, with ‘intrusive thoughts’ being the most commonly reported HLE in the sample. LCA supports the continuum hypothesis of HLEs. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Asian Journal of Psychiatry

Validation of the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale among Indian Healthy Adults

Introduction: India accounts for one-fifth of the global burden of cervical cancer cases and mortality. A safe and effective vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV) infections, the primary cause of cervi- cal malignancies, is available in India but multiple barriers lead to its low uptake in the country. Physicians are a key stakeholder and communicator in the Indian health system and have the potential to increase HPV vaccine uptake. Objective: We undertook formative research to understand awareness, perceptions and choices of physi- cians when recommending the HPV vaccine to parents of adolescent girls. Methods: We conducted in-depth interviews with 32 physicians in two districts of West Bengal. Data col- lection was carried out between July and August 2019. The data was transcribed, coded, and analyzed using NVivo software using the thematic analysis technique. Results: Our findings suggest that while physicians are generally aware about the burden of cervical can- cer and its prevention by HPV vaccination, they face several barriers to recommending the HPV vaccine routinely and strongly. These include the lack of national-level guidance on the age eligibility and dosage, lack of practice-level opportunities such as well or non-sick visits and other routine adolescent vaccines, practice-level barriers like out-of-pocket cost and vaccine availability, and perceived parental hesitancy arising from reluctance to discuss cervical cancer, its prevention, and HPV vaccination. Conclusions: Physicians in our study exhibited hesitancy when recommending the HPV vaccine. They also faced logistical barriers. It is important that the barriers pertaining to when and how physicians recom- mend the vaccine be tackled through further education, policy change, and development and implemen- tation of interventions that are evidenced-based.

Vaccine: X

Awareness, perceptions, and choices of physicians pertaining to human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in India: A formative research study

Using a massive malaria eradication program in India during the 1950s as a natural experiment, we examine the effects of disease environment on child health outcomes and fertility. We harmonize a rich dataset on malaria endemicity with fertility histories of women to exploit the cohort level variation in exposure to the program. We find that the program leads to a significant decline in infant and neonatal mortality and leads to a significant increase in the probability of birth during adolescent years in high malaria-endemic regions. We confirm that a fall in the mother's age at first birth in the post-eradication period drives the fertility response.

The Journal of Development Studies

Disease eradication, infant mortality and fertility response: Evidence from malaria eradication in India

Department of Chemistry

Inorganic Chemistry

<a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.inorgchem.4c01112">Bioinspired Diiron Complex with Proton Shuttling and Redox-Active Ligand for Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution</a>

Modeling studies estimated severe impacts of potential service delivery disruptions due to COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and child nutrition outcomes. Although anecdotal evidence exists on disruptions, little is known about the actual state of service delivery at scale. We studied disruptions and restorations, challenges and adaptations in health and nutrition service delivery by frontline workers (FLWs) in India during COVID-19 in 2020.

Fulltext

Plos ONE

Disruptions, restorations and adaptations to health and nutrition service delivery in multiple states across India over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: An observational study

Social insects have evolved a variety of architectural formations. Bees and wasps are well known for their ability to achieve compact structures by building hexagonal cells. Polistes wattii, an open nesting paper wasp species, builds planar hexagonal structures. Here, using the pair correlation function approach, we show that their nests exhibit short-range hexagonal order (no long-range order) akin to amorphous materials. Hexagonal orientational order was well preserved globally. We also show the presence of topological defects such as dislocations (pentagon-heptagon disclination pairs) and Stone-Wales quadrupoles, and discuss how these defects were organised in the nest, thereby restoring order. Furthermore, we suggest the possible role of such defects in shaping nesting architectures of other social insect species.