DETERMINANTS OF ADULT MORTALITY IN INDIA

This study attempts to evaluate the factors affecting adult mortality with special emphasis on the lifestyle factors using the 1998–1999 National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The sample size, N, in this analysis is 330,267. It includes those aged 15–59 of which 2.6 per cent died during adulthood. In the Poisson regression model, the independent variables used are age, sex, place of residence, lifestyle factors of other members of the family, standard of living, literacy composition, caste, religion, mass media exposure, household type, fuel for cooking and region of residence. This analysis has been adjusted for the clustering of deaths at the family level. The findings suggest that there is a strong positive relationship between lifestyle factors and premature mortality, even after controlling for other background characteristics of the deceased person. Further, age, standard of living index (SLI), literacy composition, religion, household type and region of residence are some important determinants of adult mortality in India.     

INTERNAL VERSUS INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION AND THE ROLE OF MULTIPLE DEPRIVATION

This study disentangles the concept of relative deprivation by distinguishing feelings of individual and collective relative deprivation as sources of individual aspirations. Both concepts are then operationalised and empirically tested with regard to their relative importance in migration decision-making. Based on data from the National Sample Survey in 2008, two factors turn out to be relevant in understanding the Indian migration pattern. First, individual and collective relative deprivations are both strong predictors for out-migration, but only for short-distance, intra-state movements. The likelihood of out-migration towards international destinations is significantly higher for households with lower levels of individual and collective relative deprivation. Second, leaving aside the effects of relative deprivation, absolute deprivation plays a rather ambivalent role: while economically better-off households have a higher propensity for sending (primarily male) migrants to distant inter-state and international destinations, shorter distance out-migration is mainly dominated by female migrants stemming from poorer households.     

DAUGHTER DISCRIMINATION AND FUTURE SEX RATIO AT BIRTH IN INDIA

This paper examines recent trends in sex ratio at birth in all the major states of India, based on three rounds of the National Family Health Survey. It finds evidence of an increase in the ratio, particularly at the second-order birth among women having a first daughter in many states in the northwestern region of the country. Also, there are signs of daughter aversion emerging in Odisha, an eastern state. Based on parity progression ratios and the trend in sex selection, an attempt is made to estimate the peak of sex ratio at birth in India. With moderate intensification in sex selection in the northwestern region, sex ratio at birth is expected to reach a peak of 117–119 males per 100 females around the period 2021–2026. If, in addition, sex selection spreads further in the southeastern region, the sex ratio at birth in India could even increase to a level of 124.     

MARRIAGE-RELATED DECISION-MAKING AND YOUNG WOMEN'S MARITAL RELATIONS AND AGENCY

There is little research that has explored how marriage arrangements, i.e., family-arranged, semi-arranged marriages with some say in spouse selection and self-arranged marriages, affect young women's married life in settings traditionally characterised by arranged marriage. Using data from 13,912 married young women aged 15–24 in India, we explore associations between marriage arrangements and young women's marital relations and agency. Logistic regression analysis shows that women experiencing semi- and self-arranged marriages were more likely than those in family-arranged marriages to communicate and interact with their husband (OR, 1.3–2.8), and exhibit agency in their life (OR, 1.2–2.3); those in semi-arranged marriages were less likely to experience marital violence. These associations were, however, stronger and more consistent among women from southern and western states than in northern and eastern states. Findings call for expanding the discourse on marriage to ensure young people's right to free and full consent in spouse selection.     

UN Population Division's Methodology in Preparing Base Population for Projections: Case study for India

Preparation of the base population plays a substantial role in the accuracy of projections. This paper reviews analytical strategies involved in the preparation of the UN World Population Prospects to reconcile existing discrepancies between data sources and derive robust estimates of population counts, distribution, and demographic changes. The case study of India is used to illustrate the challenges and benefits of using a cohort-component population projection approach in reconstructing its population between 1950 and 2010, including the preparation of bias-free population counts and distributions by age and sex; estimation of consistent fertility and mortality trends; and integration of all demographic components for obtaining a reliable base population for projections.     

Land-holding,participation in agriculture and short-term migration in rural India

ABSTRACT

We analyse a nationally representative data set from India for the year 2013 in order to provide evidence on how short-term migration is affected by household ownership of land and participation in agricultural activities. We estimate a recursive-bivariate-probit model recognising the simultaneity between short-term migration and the decision to operate the land. The results of the likelihood ratio test imply that it would be incorrect to ignore this simultaneity. Households with less than 1?ha of land and those leasing out land are more likely to have a short-term migrant. Households leaving their land fallow, a common occurrence in South Asia, are also more likely to have a short-term migrant. Moreover, the choice of crops and livestock farming has a significant role to play in the migration decision. Current initiatives to increase coverage of irrigation and facilitate access to formal finance could improve the livelihoods of small and marginal farmers, thereby reducing the probability of distress-related short-term migration.     

Ultramodern contraception

The measured success of family planning policy in the developing world rests on increases in the ‘modern’ methods of contraception. By extension, ‘traditional’ methods of contraception are equated with traditional mentalities and insufficient motivation to control fertility. But contraceptive use differentials in India suggest that in fact it is the most ‘modern’ women (those with a college education and living in urban areas) who are the most likely to use these traditional methods of birth control and to use them very efficiently as well. The paper locates this counter-intuitive preference among urban, educated women in what may be called ‘ultramodern’ attitudes to the body and to modern medicine and tries to situate such modernization in the contemporary developmental paradigm. Finally, the paper implies that population policy and contraceptive research may be unduly attributing contraceptive ineffectiveness to the users of traditional birth control today.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

Texts,Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India**

This essay will discuss the hegemonic role that texts have come to play in the historiography of subcontinental mathematical traditions. It will argue that texts need to be studied as records of practices of people's working lives, grounded in social hierarchies. We will take particular mathematical texts to show how different occupational registers have come to shape practices that defy the binaries of concrete and abstract, high and low mathematics or the pure and applied conundrum. Measuring, counting and accounting practices as part of the routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations then provide us with a spectrum of the computational activities that controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. In the process the act of computing itself gained certain political values such as cunning and manipulation, identified with professions of village accountant and merchant, for example. Drawn from my earlier work on these records, I discuss the occupational role of the accountant as a political functionary who assessed and authenticated the measurements of land and produce in the village, making values of the labor performed by others, and creating avenues for his own proficiency as a mathematical practitioner.     

1949—1951年美国如何阻挠和破坏西藏和平解放

1949—1951年间,美国策划达赖喇嘛出走,破坏西藏和平解放。起初,美国反对达赖喇嘛离藏,支持噶厦抵抗人民解放军解放西藏。美国后来认识到不可能阻挡人民解放军的进军,因而要求达赖喇嘛流亡锡兰或泰国,不得已时到美国"避难"。《十七条协议》公布后,美国反对达赖喇嘛返回拉萨,要求达赖喇嘛在靠近西藏的地区流亡或"访问"印度。中华人民共和国中央人民政府采取因地制宜的措施,达赖喇嘛最终返回西藏并通电拥护《十七条协议》。美国的企图必然破灭,西藏的和平解放是历史发展的必然。