Archive for September, 2009

Asset creation in private lands using NREGA: Problems & opportunities

Published by Vivek September 24th, 2009 in NREGA and Social Policy. 0 Comments

National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is primarily a programme aimed at creating public assets that would be useful for the society at large. When NREGA was created, it relaxed this principle by allowing projects in private lands of selected marginalised communities including SCs and STs. The Minister for Rural Development is now [...]

Friendships and “research methods”

Published by Vivek September 17th, 2009 in My research. 0 Comments

The temptation and pressure to confirm in one’s research topic is tremendous – especially if you are a PhD student. In the course of the last 3 years many of my friends have asked me to include some quantitative element in my research. When I tell them that it does not suit my [...]

History in the future

Published by Vivek September 14th, 2009 in Academic Themes and Teaching social sciences. 0 Comments

I just saw this amazing presentation in TED Talks about an application called photosynth. It allows photos taken by anyone and uploaded to the web to be synthesized together. Together, these can give us a multidimensional view of a building or an event using images collected by people who may not even know [...]

What is NREGA-2?

Published by Vivek September 11th, 2009 in NREGA. 0 Comments

The Minister for Rural Development, Mr C P Joshi has announced that he will revamp NREGA with some major changes, and the new scheme of things has been informally labelled “NREGA-2”. News reports have indicated that the new scheme will be unveiled on the birthday of Rajiv Gandhi. As of now the Ministry has not made available for public discussion the set of changes that will be made, but some ideas have been making their way to the media periodically. This article synthesizes these ideas, and provides links to articles debating the so-called NREGA-2.

Zotero: The best citation tool around, and it’s free

Published by Vivek September 7th, 2009 in Research tools: software & utilities and Software & Utilities. 0 Comments

Zotero is a free-software to manage bibliographies and citations with advanced functions and an easy interface
As a doctoral student a lot of my time goes into managing my references. Thankfully there are many tools around to help me manage my references and to speed up the process of inserting citations while I write my [...]

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