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

This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across generations. It highlights the ways in which changes in Vattima marriage practices, women's access to education as well as migration to, and employment in, urban areas, have contributed to significant changes in attitudes to menstrual pollution. Observing menstrual pollution, however, is seen as crucial in sustaining notions of Brahmin-hood within their homes and among other Brahmins. This is made possible by constantly rede-fining the space and time that should be kept pollution-free.

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Adjusting distances: Menstrual pollution among tamil brahmins

Bihar has a rich history of out-migration from the state, which goes back to as early as the nineteenth century. However, during the last few decades, migration for work has increased manifold. The sheer scale of out-migration in contemporary Bihar is astounding. At any given point of time, as many as nearly one-half of the total number of working men are absent from the state, as they are working elsewhere in urban and rural centres in the country and abroad. Migration from the state is almost exclusively that of the male population and is embedded in the lives and life choices of the people. It is not just a livelihood strategy but a way of life in rural Bihar. While there is considerable research on various aspects of migration including the nature and pattern of migration from Bihar, the profile of migrant workers, migration destinations and other such correlates of a migrant’s life outside the village, there is sparse literature on the impact of this migration on people, especially on the women who are left behind in the village. Many research questions remain unanswered. How are institutions such as patriarchy in the village affected by male migration? How does male migration influence women’s well-being and agency? Does migration have an effect on women’s mobility? Does it empower or disempower the women who are left behind? What role does technology such as mobile phones play in enabling those left behind to communicate with their migrant family members? What impact does this have on the women left behind in the villages?. © 2011, Springer India. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Indian Journal of Labour Economics

Glimpses of women’s lives in rural Bihar: Impact of male migration

This article investigates the long-run relationship between labour productivity and employment, and between labour productivity and real wages in the case of the Indian manufacturing sector. The panel data set consists of 17 two-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1973-1974 to 1999-2001. We find that productivity-wages and productivity-employment are panel cointegrated for all industries. We find that both employment and real wages exert a positive effect on labour productivity. We argue that flexible labour market has a significant influence on manufacturing productivity, employment and real wages in the case of Indian manufacturing. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.

Empirical Economics

The productivity-wage and productivity-employment nexus: A panel data analysis of Indian manufacturing

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Reply to Mahalingam Narayanan

This paper aims to explore the labour productivity convergence in manufacturing sector across fifteen major Indian states during 1979-80 to 2000-01, using cross-section analysis. The analysis examines the convergence hypothesis taking both absolute and conditional convergence into consideration. The results indicate that though absolute β convergence in labour productivity does not exist during overall period of analysis, labour productivity does converge in pre-reform period. Analyzing conditional convergence using dynamic panel model, we find that labour productivity in rich states grew faster with reasonably high initial productivity levels, indicating a divergence across the states. In light of the above-affirmed empirical results, the study suggests that better endeavors for productivity growth of manufacturing sector in backward states are quite essential. The government should give more emphasize to the labour intensive manufacturing industries which can absorb the mass un-skilled labour force in eastern and northern states of India.

Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies

Did productivity converge in manufacturing sector across Indian states?

This paper is aimed at uncovering a unifying computational grounding beneath a diverse range of cases of quantificational scope effects both within and across languages. Since quantificational scope readings are quite variable and interspersed with issues of modularity and interfaces of grammar, an underlying and universal generalization is certainly hard to come by. Research on quantification is not new at all; studies and research done on quantification have not yet been able to arrive at a useful but universally valid and satisfactorily unified account of how quantificational readings are derived at all, let alone computationally. Here in this paper, a preliminary sketch of a unified three-tier computational model will be drawn up to show how quantificational scope readings across languages can be computed and derived. For this purpose, principles drawn from recent derivational accounts of quantificational scope will be aligned properly to eliminate their incompatibilities with each other. © 2010 by Prakash Mondal.

PACLIC 24 - Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

Toward a unified computational model of quantificational scope readings

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of virtualness on extra-role performance within software development teams and the moderating effect of task interdependence on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 192 software professionals from 33 software development teams. Teams were taken as the unit of analysis. Extra-role performance was measured using organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) scale and task interdependence within the team was measured by interdependence scale developed by Pearce and Gregersen. Virtualness was measured using an objective measure developed by the authors. Regression was used to study the moderation and main effects. Findings: Virtualness negatively influenced overall extra-role performance within the team. In terms of individual dimensions, virtualness had a negative influence on extra-role performances directed towards team as an entity (civic virtue and generalized compliance) but it had no impact over extra-role performances directed towards other team members (altruism and courtesy). Although task interdependence had a positive impact on OCBs, it did not moderate the relationship between virtualness and OCBs. Practical implications: The findings will help teams understand the need to manage virtualness within the team in order to increase extra-role performance among its members. Originality/value: The authors have developed an objective method to compute virtualness within the team context. The moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between virtualness and extra-role performance has been studied for the first time and is documented in this paper. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Team Performance Management

Impact of virtualness and task interdependence on extra-role performance in software development teams

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans' work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages.

Fulltext

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India

Explicator

Oates’s first love

Joyce Carol Oates has often been charged with sensationalizing and commercializing issues of poverty and violence. The present paper seeks to prove that Oates's powerful depictions of America's disenfranchised and violence-ridden world is no mere ploy of sensationalism or catharsis but a leitmotif that enables her to expose the lack of dignity and the absence of basic human rights in the lives of the powerless. In her recent novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), Oates forcefully articulates the problematic of racial discrimination, economic deprivation and violence that characterized the status of immigrant Jews in post-World War II America. The despicable condition of the Schwart family in The Gravedigger's Daughter is strikingly similar to what developmentalists like Martha Nussbaum call the absence of all 'capabilities'. Nussbaum's 'capability approach', which assesses human development not through crude measures such as Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), but by measuring an individual's growth vis-à-vis the quality of life, can be seen as an appropriate tool in the analysis of literary texts such as Oates's, which often deal with economic and cultural deprivations. By reading The Gravedigger's Daughter in tandem with Nussbaum's development ethics, the present paper seeks to establish how Oates's radical social critique calls for reinstating the basic rights of the poor and an immediate revision in the field of human development. © 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.