Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.     

A praxis-based global ethical discourse on development and women

This article explores a praxis-based moral approach to the study of development and women. Drawing upon an illustrative case-study of Ankur Kala – a non-governmental organisation devoted to the development of destitute women in Kolkata, India – the article shows how studying actual development practices on the ground generates valuable insights without which our ethical understanding of women's development globally would be incomplete.     

Allele frequency distribution based on 17 STR markers in three major Dravidian linguistic populations of Andhra Pradesh, India

Allele frequencies for 15 tetranucleotides and 2 pentanucleotides repeat loci were determined in 317 unrelated, healthy individuals of Andhra Pradesh, India, belonging to three pre-dominant endogamous populations namely, Kappu Naidu, Kamma Chaudhary and Kapu Reddy. Adherence to the expectations of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) was confirmed for all loci with few exceptions, which were not significant after applying Bonferroni's correction. Statistical parameters of forensic interest; observed heterozygosity, probability of homozygosity, probability of extact test, power of discrimination, match probability, polymorphism information content, power of exclusion and mean paternity index were determined for all loci. The present study reveals that Penta E and D2S1338 are the most informative loci in all the studied populations. The combined power of discrimination was greater than 0.976, whereas the cumulative power of exclusion gave an expected value of 0.9999 for all the tested microsatellite loci. No difference was observed in the discriminatory power of 15 loci in studied populations on comparison with other populations of India. Population differentiation tests revealed significant differences between the studied and neighboring populations at several loci. Analyzed parameters indicate the utility and efficacy of the studied 17 STR systems as a powerful tool in forensic human identification, paternity testing and human population genetic studies.     

Genotypic polymorphisms at seventeen autosomal short tandem repeat loci in four tribal populations of Andhra Pradesh, India

Four tribal populations of Andhra Pradesh, South India (1), Chenchu (n=100), Lambadi (n=107), Naikpod Gond (n=104) and Yerukula (n=101) were analyzed for DNA polymorphisms at 15 tetranucleotide and 2 pentanucleotide short tandem repeat (STR) loci in the present study.     

Allele frequencies of 20 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat loci in a tribal population of Deccan Plateau, India

Population: Eighty male individuals from a nomadic tribal population belonging to Dravidian and Indo-Caucasian ethnicities from Deccan Plateau, Andhra Pradesh, India, were analyzed in the present study.