The popularly known Human Development Index (HDI) is obtained through linear averaging (LA) of indices in three dimensions- health, education and standard of living. This paper questions the appropriateness of LA method and proposes an alternative measure, which is the inverse of the Euclidian...

Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure are two gender-based indicators provided by the United Nations Development Program. Population share of the genders enter the formulation of these indicators in such a way that it favours the better performing gender. This can lead to...

An 'Energy Index', which is aggregated from energy indicators is a rich source of information and is helpful in providing an assessment of a country's performance. This has, however, resulted in mushrooming of a plethora of indices, which claim to quantify the performance of a country in...

As population and human activities expand they exert heavy environmental pressure through the resource requirement, their production and consumption. Hence, it is important to understand the resource flows into the city, the transformations that take place and the resulting products and wastes....

With the alarming rate of growth in vehicle population and travel demand, the energy consumption has increased significantly contributing to the rise of GHG emissions. Therefore, the development of a viable environmentally benign technology/fuel, which minimises both global and local...

Physical energy intensity indicators for Indian manufacturing sector is developed and analyzed. Energy consumption in five industrial sub-sectors, namely, iron and steel, aluminium, textiles, paper and cement is examined for the period 1990─2005.

An ex post analysis shows that avoidance, as against associating, by smoker and non-smoker when the former smokes is a Nash outcome. Ex ante, passive smoking occurs because socio-legal structures allow smokers to take non-smokers for granted. This can be done away with if smoker’s cost...

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer- household’s returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The state of the vast majority of small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers is even worse. An extreme form of response to...

India is increasingly focusing on its rainfed areas due to demand for food and nutrition security, and escalating farmer distress. But agricultural policy paralysis has meant that the familiar, external input-intensive, technological approaches of the Green Revolution are to be transferred to...

This note provides an estimate of incidence of poor and poverty risk in India across NSS regions for 2004-05 and 2009-10 in rural and urban areas. It raises concern on increasing poverty risk and also incidence of poor in some regions. These are not necessarily among the relatively worse-off...