Department of Liberal Arts

Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

Providing an ethnographic account of the everyday life of a household of artisans in the Telangana state of southern India, Chandan Bose engages with craft practice beyond the material (in this case, the region's characteristic murals, narrative cloth scrolls, and ritual masks and figurines). In situating the voice of the artisans themselves as the central focus of study, simultaneous and juxtaposing histories of craft practice emerge, through which artisans assemble narratives about work, home, and identity through multiple lenses. These perspectives include: the language artisans use to articulate their experience of materials, materiality, and the physical process of making; the shared and collective memory of practitioners through which they recount the genealogy of the practice; the everyday life of the household and its kinship practices, given the integration of the studio-space and the home-space; the negotiations between practitioners and the nation-state over matters of patronage; and the capacities of artisans to both conform to and affect the practices of the neo-liberal market. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019.

Perspectives on Work, Home, and Identity From Artisans in Telangana: Conversations Around Craft

Perspectives on work, home, and identity from artisans in telangana: Conversations around craft

The paper conducts a detailed examination of the existing evaluative frameworks for microfinance institutions to gauge the differences and similarities. Efficiency evaluates how MFIs are meeting the performance standards considering time and budget constraints. Outreach evaluates the effectiveness of MFIs in reaching the beneficiaries. Relative efficiency scores were calculated using data envelopment analysis and outreach was measured in five different dimensions (pentagon model). Further, cluster analysis assisted in categorizing the MFIs into five value clusters. The study compares both outreach performance and relative efficiency scores employing ANOVA and correlation analysis. The study was conducted among the Indian context when the sector was hit by crisis during 2010. Paper brought out important insights about the sample. Indian MFIs were found to be more socially efficient, since the social dimension taken into consideration was number of female clients and majority of Indian MFIs has exclusive female focus. The correlation tests found that relative efficiency scores are positively related to depth (poor focus) and length (sustainability) outreach. The results showed that cluster analysis model basing outreach scores was more comprehensive and captured more information compared to the data envelopment model relative efficiency scores. The study is original in its approach in using cluster analysis for outreach performance and in the objective of comparing the two different models. © 2019 Aruna Balammal et al., published by Sciendo 2019.

World University root node

Fulltext

Foundations of Management

Performance Evaluation Frameworks in the Context of Indian Microfinance Institutions

The Indian graphic novel’s investment in the written word makes it a politically and socially ambiguous representational enterprise. The continued prevalence of illiteracy in India, especially among members of disadvantaged social groups, restricts access to the written word. The visual arts, on the other hand, are generally perceived as much more accessible. This asymmetry of access and its social implications, we suggest, are particularly relevant to the work of Orijit Sen (1963-), who is the first Indian graphic novelist to incorporate in his works journalistic reportage, social commentary and a concern for history. Through close readings of two of his works -The River of Stories and “Hair Burns Like Grass” -we explore the ways in which the thematization of speech-based cultures puts significant pressure on the alliance of word and image in the graphic novel form. The River of Stories, which is based on the debates around a government acquisition of ancestral tribal lands, represents an indigenous oral culture in conflict with a hybrid Indian modernity. In “Hair Burns Like Grass,” Sen again accesses a space governed by speech rather than writing, this time through the work of the poet-saint Kabir. Here, as in the earlier text, the graphic novel must renegotiate its investment in the written word: This leads to highly-wrought, if ultimately ironic, fantasies of the image overcoming script. © 2019 Taylor & Francis.

Word and Image

Word, image, and alienated literacies in the graphic novels of Orijit Sen

We examine the government revenue and government expenditure nexus using a panel of 26 Indian states from 1980–1981 to 2014–2015. While most of the previous literature claims that revenue and expenditure series are non-stationary at level, we employ both Narayan and Popp two structural break and cross-sectional augmented Im-Pesaran-Shin (CIPS) panel unit root tests, and found two series are stationary. Further, our results derived from Dumitrescu–Hurlin panel causality test support the ‘fiscal synchronization’ hypothesis for Indian states. Finally, the revenue and expenditure of Indian state governments are segregated into revenue account and capital account, and again our results support the existence of ‘fiscal synchronization’ hypothesis. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Applied Economics Letters

Is there any evidence of tax-and-spend, spend-and-tax or fiscal synchronization from panel of Indian state?

Aims: To examine the relationship between diabetes-related emotional distress (DED) and illness perceptions among Indian patients with Type II diabetes (T2D). Material and methods: 92 patients with T2D completed questionnaires on their demographic and medical details, DED and illness perceptions. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the association between demographic, medical and illness perceptions variables and DED. Results: Increased number of children, personal control and illness-related concern were associated with increased levels of DED. Conclusions: Additional support is needed for Indian patients with T2D who have more children, greater sense of personal control and higher levels of diabetes-related worry. © 2018

Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research and Reviews

The relationship between diabetes-related emotional distress and illness perceptions among Indian patients with Type II diabetes

Inflation targeting (IT) has been popular in emerging economies despite its early adoption in advanced countries. This paper seeks to find out whether the presence of the IT regime for the Asian countries enhance credibility of the central banks. The study makes use of two episode methods in the calculation of sacrifice ratio for the period 1970–2014 for 13 Asian economies. Empirical findings based on annual data suggest that an IT regime indeed enhances credibility of the central banks. The low sacrifice ratio in IT countries is explained by the implementation of IT regime. The IT policy has potential to reduce sacrifice ratios by 3.7–5.7 points. Among other determinants initial inflation is found to be significant in Asian economies. However, the speed of disinflation remains insignificant irrespective of the method used in the analysis. These findings do not support the idea that IT and speed can be used alternatively as credible monetary policy. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Economic Change and Restructuring

Credibility of inflation targeting: some recent Asian evidence

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial inclusion (FI) and economic growth in India. Design/methodology/approach: To measure FI, a multidimensional time-varying index is proposed following the Human Development Index method. The long-run relationship between FI and economic growth is examined by using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and nonlinear ARDL approach. Further, the direction of causality is investigated by employing the Toda–Yamamoto Granger causality test. Findings: The linear cointegration test confirms a long-run relationship between FI and economic growth for India. The improvement in both demand-side and supply-side financial services has a positive impact on economic growth. These results suggest that India can attain long-run economic growth by improving the coverage of FI. However, there is no evidence of nonlinear cointegration, indicating that there is no asymmetric effect of FI on economic growth. Further, the causality test shows that FI granger causes economic growth but not vice versa. Research limitations/implications: The major limitation of the study is the availability of time series data for all important variables. The index for both demand- and supply-side indicators can be extended with several other important variables in later date once the data are available for those variables. Practical implications: As the study confirms that FI is one of the main drivers of economic growth, it is suggested that the policy maker emphasizing on financial sector reforms can enjoy economic growth in the long run, especially in developing countries. Therefore, the government and policy makers need to address the issues involved in access to financial services to spur economic growth. Originality/value: The study examines the long-run relationship between FI and economic growth employing ARDL bound testing approach and nonlinear ARDL approach, separately for demand-side and supply-side indicators. Further, the study uses the Toda–Yamamoto granger causality to find the direction of causal flow between FI and economic growth. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

International Journal of Social Economics

Financial inclusion matters for economic growth in India: Some evidence from cointegration analysis

This paper empirically tests the dynamics of credit cards and monetary policy in the context of Indonesia. Using monthly data from 2006 to 2018 and a structural vector autoregressive model, our findings indicate that credit card usage is mainly driven by Indonesia's fast economic growth over the last decade, which indeed reflects the role of credit cards in consumption smoothing. The study also finds that monetary policy transmission through the lending channel is weak, with a more prevalent role for exchange rates and global oil prices in the transmission process. © 2019 Bank Indonesia Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Buletin Ekonomi Moneter dan Perbankan

Monetary policy transmission and credit cards: Evidence from Indonesia

This paper aims to characterize the relationship between information as defined in the information-theoretic approach and linguistic meaning by way of formulation of computations over the lexicon of a natural language. Information in its information theoretic sense is supposed not to be equivalent to linguistic meaning, whereas linguistic meaning has an intrinsic connection to information as far as the form and structure of the lexicon of a language (in a non-lexicological sense) is concerned. We argue that these two apparently conflicting aspects of the relationship between information and linguistic meaning can be unified by showing that information conserves linguistic meaning, only insofar as computations of a certain kind are defined on the symbolic elements of a lexicon. This has consequences not merely for the nature of lexical learning - natural or artificial or otherwise - but also for the conservation of information in axiomatic systems. © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Pragmatics and Cognition

How linguistic meaning harmonizes with information through meaning conservation

In 2018, a day before the Supreme Court of India commenced hearing the curative petition on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which criminalised �carnal intercourse against the order of nature�), the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) issued an official statement that homosexuality is not a mental pathology. In 2014, a year after the top court recriminalised homosexuality, the then IPS president had termed it as a pathology requiring treatment. By examining articles on LGBTQIA+ rights published in two flagship Indian journals in psychiatry and clinical psychology, position statements by professional bodies, and international and national developments in human rights mechanisms, we argue that psychiatry�s voice for human rights protection of the marginalised has been akin to whispering sweet nothings in tune with the juridico-penal system. In turn, clinical psychology appears to huddle with biomedical psychiatry without raising its voice against coercive and traumatising practices within mainstream technocratic psychiatry. We seek to explore the troubled relationship between mainstream psy disciplines and LGBTQIA+ persons characterised by psychological evasion: failure of mainstream psy disciplines to take up sensitive, socio-political issues like same sex love in a broader human rights framework leading to individualisation- pathologisation complex which further side-lines persons living on the margins of society.