Abstract

Low carbon development has gained policy prominence and is a concern of both environment and development policy globally and in China and India. This paper discusses the role of China and India as important global actors in light of development imperatives in the two countries. The article then looks at emerging approaches in the two countries related to financing, science, technology & innovation policy, and sub-national actions. The objective is to review efforts in China and India for contributing to learning experiences for other countries. The final section discussed the ways forward in terms of examining the role of China and India in terms of national policy strengthening as well as in global agenda setting. Implementation of sub-national initiatives in both countries faces challenges due to lack of adequate financing as well as knowledge such as greenhouse gas inventories and disaggregated resource and socio-economic assessments. Both India and China are making efforts in technology and innovation domains to set foot on a trajectory of low carbon development with varying degrees of success. In finance, both China and India have experimented with various instruments—the key difference is that China has taken the support of regulation more while India has leaned on to market based instruments. Both China and India are moving on an encouraging track regarding low carbon development with fairly well-designed domestic policies and consistent international engagement.

Abstract

Application of the SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), based on the database Scopus, of Elsevier, to analyze the scientific output of the major Asian countries and their global impact, measured by the number of citations received. It can be observed a production increase of the Republic of Korea, India and especially China

Abstract

The core city in Pune is highly congested, and the number of motorised vehicles on the street is increasing rapidly in the whole city. This creates problems like air pollution, high noise levels, long travelling times and an unpleasant urban environment etc. The thesis presents some solutions for these problems, based on sustainable transport principles, methods for creating a pleasant walking environment and best practice examples. The planning proposal is divided into a concept plan for the whole core city, as well as a detailed planning proposal for a pedestrian street on a part of Laxmi Road - one of Pune’s most well-known streets. Different aspects of the core city area and Laxmi Road have been mapped thoroughly and a traffic count, function analysis, a target point analysis and a Lynch analysis have been performed. Focus is to improve conditions for pedestrians. To achieve this it is important to limit the motorised traffic. An origin- destination survey performed on Laxmi Road displayed that over 40% of the traffic on the street in peak-hour is through traffic. The proposal is therefore to limit through traffic and improve the pedestrian environment. This thesis evaluates and discusses this proposal; including an analysis of the improvements to the air quality, the effect on different groups of people, and the necessary elements for the project to succeed.

Abstract

The air transport sector including airlines, airports and providers of air navigation services have largely been State controlled. Formerly, most airlines were State owned. However, the ownership pattern of airlines has changed gradually to the majority of the airlines being privately owned as a part of globalization and liberalization of economies. These observations can be made in the case of airports too. State owned airports are being privatized in many States due to various reasons. The trend started with the privatization of British Airports Authority (BAA) owned airports in United Kingdom (UK). Europe, Asia and Latin America are now witnessing privatization of airports on a fast track basis. Australia and New Zealand have also privatized their State owned airports in the last decade. Though the models vary depending upon the economic policy of the State, the concept of privatization or private participation in airport infrastructure is gaining momentum in these States. However, the United States of America (USA) remains an exception to this trend of airport privatization. In 2006, India joined the global trend of privatization in airport infrastructure, by privatizing two State owned airports in New Delhi and Mumbai. Though the first privately owned international airport started operations in 1999 in Kochi (Cochin),1 two other privately owned airports were operationalized in Bangalore and Hyderabad only in 2008.

Abstract

In most of the metropolitan cities in India, the road use patterns are very different from those of developed countries. In Indian cities, roads are shared by non- motorized vehicles in large numbers. The rapid urbanization in India after independence has resulted in the faster development of 23 metropolitan cities as per the 2001 census. While the alarming increase in road accidents has become a major concern in the country, which takes away more than 90,000 lives every year, a significant share of it is from the major cities. The aim of the present paper is to develop models by analyzing the road accident data at an all India level as well as for major metropolitan cities. The data for the 25 year period from 1977 to 2001 were analyzed to build models to understand the nature and extent of the causes of accidents using the concept of Smeed's formula and Andressen's equations. On the basis of population and motor vehicle growth rates, which were derived from the empirical formulae, the above models were used for estimating road accidents in seven metropolitan cities for the years 2007 and 2010. As the variation between model and observed values is negligible, models seem to perform well for both equations. Document type: Article

Abstract

The paper investigates changing levels of online concern about the Kashmiri Pandit migration of the 1990s on Twitter. Although decades old, this movement of people is an ongoing issue in India, with no current resolution. Analysing changing reactions to it on social media may shed light on trends in public attitudes to the event. Tweets were downloaded from Twitter using the academic version of its application programming interface (API) with the aid of the free social media analytics software Mozdeh. A set of 1000 tweets was selected for content analysis with a random number generator in Mozdeh. The results show that the number of tweets about the issue has increased over time, mainly from India, and predominantly driven by the release of films like Shikara and The Kashmir Files. The tweets show apparent universal sup-port for the Pandits but often express strong emotions or criticize the actions of politicians, showing that the migration is an ongoing source of anguish and frustration that needs resolution. The results also show that social media analysis can give insights even into primarily offline political issues that predate the popularity of the web, and can easily incorporate international perspectives necessary to understand complex migration issues.

Abstract

Driving rain is one of the most critical sources of moisture affecting the hygrothermal and durability performance of building envelopes. The estimation of severity in terms of annual driving rain indices using annual and monthly weather data (aaDRI and maDRI respectively) aids towards contemplating potential moisture loads, and hence in the efficient design of buildings in the geographical area of interest. In this study, monthly and annual gridded datasets of wind and rainfall, pertaining to the thirty-year period of 1988-2017 have been used to design a spatially continuous driving rain map for India at 0.5°×0.5°(lat./long.) resolution. The observations reveal that the use of annually averaged data leads to underestimation of the driving rain severity thereby highlighting the inefficiency of a coarser temporal scale. A linear relationship has subsequently been developed to enable refinement of aaDRI into maDRI. The analysis of the monthly driving rain map reveals that the entire western coastal belt and a few regions in the north-eastern part of the country observe high to severe exposure conditions. Furthermore, a trend analysis of the yearly driving rain index values reveals statistically significant decreasing trends over the northern and eastern regions of the country, whereas increasing trends in the shielded regions surrounding central India is observed.