Introduction

Nations across the world have committed to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which implies the urgency of protecting the human society, economy, and environment from the negative consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The global commitments guide the domestic policies, which further influence every organization. The recently concluded Conference of the Parties (COP) 26, where world leaders gathered to deliberate on mechanisms to prevent the impending climate catastrophe, emphasized the urgent need to deliver action on the Paris Agreement and make net zero commitments a norm. In this context, India has taken the lead, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi setting five ‘Amrit Tatva’ (Nectar Elements) on non-fossil energy capacity, emission reduction, carbon intensity, and a net zero target year.

India faces numerous development challenges, such as one-fifth of the population still living below the poverty line and a significant share of the population not having access to safe drinking water, clean cooking fuel, and all-weather roads. Owing to the limited financial and natural resources, pursuing twin goals related to socio-economic development such as poverty and climate change such as adaptation and emission mitigation requires strategic planning. The trade-offs and synergies involved in the process need to be identified for framing suitable policies. Policymakers need to make investments prudently that help meet the goals of high economic growth and decarbonization simultaneously. For example, a coal phase-out is required to reduce national emissions; however, this transition can have possible repercussions on entrenched businesses such as job losses or financial and socio-economic risks. Governments, companies, and society need to work together to surmount this dilemma.

Thus far it is evident that the rural livelihoods in southern Morang are embedded within a deeply inequitable agrarian structure, with dual surplus appropriation by landlords and merchant capital. However, it is important to remember that feudalism, like capitalism itself, is not a static system, but is dynamic and subject to evolution and flux. While changes to the feudal system over the last few centuries were explored in Chapter 3, this chapter explores the contemporary trajectory of change. The last three decades in particular have marked a new era in Nepal's agrarian political economy. As noted earlier in this book, pre-capitalist inequalities have not been undermined, and these in part contributed to the 10-year civil war and waves of more recent ethnic unrest. However, at a national level, Nepal has also undergone significant economic change following neoliberal restructuring.

Within this context, capitalism is articulating with rural pre-capitalist economic formations like never before. A key argument is that there is growing ‘agrarian stress’ associated with climatic-ecological pressures, expanding capitalist markets with an associated wave of monetisation and cultural change. In its wake, farmers are becoming more dependent than ever before on off-farm labour in the capitalist sector both locally and overseas, to supplement the meagre returns gained from the land under feudal agriculture This has intensified throughout the 17 years within which this research has taken place. We explore these changes in turn below.

In the previous chapter we learned how satellite data to estimate various water targets such as precipitation and surface water, can be combined in a model-reservoir system to track a reservoir’s dynamic state and understand river regulation. In this chapter we will cover how satellite data can be used to manage crops and irrigation. We will learn how satellite data can be used to estimate an area under a specific crop using classification techniques, which then helps us understand the water need for that area. Next we will learn methods to estimate crop water demand and actual crop water consumption.

Chapter 3 details the kinematics of satellite orbits and their use in InSAR processing and its automation. It covers the six parameters needed to describe an orbit (Kepler elements or Cartesian state vector), transforming coordinates from an Earth-fixed frame to the satellite frame, and methods to calculate a centimeter-accuracy satellite trajectory from a sequence of state vectors.

The Peloponnesian War affected how mass and elite interacted at Athens and how the public sphere worked there. The Athenians themselves thought in terms of two ruptures, one at the death of Perikles, one at the end of the war. But the degree of rupture in both cases has been exaggerated, and it is better to think in terms of how power was exercised. Here we see various ways in which the people’s control of the elite was strengthened during the war, and indeed the use of exile and atimia (disenfranchisement) as penalties fatally weakened Athens by causing factional strife. The Peloponnesian War concentrated the people inside Athens and the Long Walls and increased the number of spaces in which Athenians were mixed up with metics and enslaved people, enhancing the deep politicisation of Athenian culture, which affected the wealthy as well as the poor and promoted the hetaireiai and, eventually, concentration of political factions into particular spaces. War enhanced the Athenians’ emotional investment, and this came out in particular over the Sicilian Expedition. It was because war affected the Athenians in a variety of different ways, each with their own timescale, that the traumatic effects emerged only after fifteen years.

Moving pictures were first exhibited in Hyderabad and Secunderabad within a few months of the famed Lumiere exhibition in Bombay in 1896.1 S. C. Eavis brought ‘Edison's latest phonograph or the talking machine’ and ‘the marvellous kinetoscope [sic] or living pictures’ to the cantonment town of Secunderabad, after which he went to Madras in 1896. T. Stevenson, the proprietor of Madras Photographic Stores, exhibited films for the first time in Hyderabad in 1897 as a part of his south India tour.

However, we do not see Hyderabad and Secunderabad in any early cinema map of South Asia. This is because of two reasons. Most of the historiography of South Asia in general and film historiography in particular has focussed on British India, and the colonial cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.3 As a result, what we understand as the history of modern South Asia is most often the history of British India. Relatively, we know much less about the princely states of India4 that had control over significant land mass and people in South Asia. The focus on colonial cities is also because of the availability of sources. The colonial cities are relatively better documented and their sources are in English and hence easy to access.

The overabundance of examples in Schoenberg’s textbooks can often be overwhelming. When one solution might have sufficed to illustrate a particular concept, Schoenberg offered many. It was not uncommon for him to compose multiple alternative endings and ossia measures for a single solution, often devoid of aesthetic evaluation, and sometimes of explanatory text altogether. Readers of his texts are familiar with this quirk, but what was the point of such tireless exploration? Schoenberg believed that, through this systematic exploration of possibility, his students would gain the tools necessary to grapple with the unique problems of their own musical ideas. In turn, this emphasis on self-reliance and possibility fostered precisely the stylistic and creative diversity that we find among Schoenberg’s students, from Anton Webern to John Cage. Schoenberg’s emphasis on possibility encouraged a diverse pedagogical legacy that includes film composers, serialists, music theorists and even a composer who late in life saw no contradiction in adding punk rock performance to her résumé.

This chapter delves into the severe health impacts of climate change, focusing on issues such as heat stress, infectious diseases, and food insecurity. Medical doctor Sweta Koirala from Nepal shares insights on increasing heat-related illnesses and the spread of vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever. The chapter highlights the critical need for climate adaptation measures to protect human health, emphasizing the vulnerability of agricultural systems and labour productivity. Personal stories, such as those of outdoor workers facing extreme heat in Bangladesh, illustrate the direct effects on daily life and economic stability. The CVF’s Monitor and the Lancet the Lancet Countdown’s works on Health...’s works on Health and Climate Change address the interplay between climate adaptation, public health, and agricultural productivity, stressing the urgent need for comprehensive health and food security policies to mitigate these impacts.

This chapter resolves the problem posed in the previous chapter, namely, the Scotist objection to the instrument doctrine. It argues that of five different strategies, only one solves the problem of coherence, and it is a solution found not only in some of Aquinas’s mature statements on instrumental causality but also in the theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835-1888), who knew the intricate debates about the doctrine after Aquinas’s time and had developed a unique response to the Scotist objection. The chapter defends Scheeben’s view, known as ’extrinsic elevation’, as the way to preserve the coherence of the two claims that God alone is the cause of grace and that Christ’s humanity is an instrumental efficient cause of grace.

Introduction

India's independence marked a significant turning point in its economic history. As a result of British-led deindustrialization, the nation had suffered acute deprivation. According to historical statistics compiled by historian Angus Maddison, India's share of global income fell from 22.6 per cent in 1700 (almost equal to Europe's 23.3 per cent) to 3.8 per cent in 1952. Following independence, India had the difficult task of methodically organizing its economy. It was a tremendous task to overcome centuries-old disparities in resources and development. Economic planning was effective in command economies such as the Soviet Union and East European nations, and it was viewed as a way to address market failures (such as those experienced during the Great Depression in the 1930s). Economic planning was a logical choice for many newly independent developing countries because it allowed states to deploy resources and achieve prioritized goals within set time constraints (Sebak, 2023).

Sectoral composition of GDP of India (per cent)

The sectoral composition of India's GDP has undergone significant transformation over the decades (Figure 8.1), reflecting the changing dynamics of the Indian economy. In the 1950s, agriculture played a dominant role, contributing to over half of the GDP at 55.4 per cent. However, as the country embarked on economic reforms and modernization efforts in the 1960s and subsequent decades, the agriculture sector's share steadily declined. By the 1990s, it had dropped to 30.9 per cent. This shift was accompanied by a remarkable rise in the industrial sector's contribution, from 14.8 per cent in the 1950s to 23.3 per cent in the 1990s. The services sector, encompassing a wide range of industries such as finance, information technology, and healthcare, saw substantial growth evolving from 29.8 per cent in the 1950s to a dominant 61.5 per cent of the GDP in 2021.