Aspects of Inclusion and Peoples’ Empowerment Related to National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, launched in the year 2006, is dubbed as one of the major flagship strategies of the Government of India, in coherence with the objective of removing poverty and unemployment. While scope of employment in rural asset creation protects environment, the earning opportunities address the issue of financial and social inclusion. Principal Component Analysis has been applied to calculate Financial, Social, Environmental, and finally Overall Inclusion Index as well as Empowerment Index. The results reveal significant association between Overall Inclusion and Empowerment index. Using multiple regression, Overall Inclusion is explained by certain significant variables.     

Institutions and abused women: an interactional model to access justice in India

The discourse on domestic violence has steadily moved from solely the realm of private family affairs into the institutional domain, through changing perceptions and the enactment and enforcement of laws. This article aims to understand how women approach institutions and how institutions perceive, translate, and respond to complaints within human rights discourses. The study analysed all cases registered in a family counselling centre in Rajasthan, India, with ten cases then randomly selected for in-depth interviews. The institutions are a catalyst of social change; however, they need to partner with specialists for medical interventions, and network with line departments more effectively to improve social resilience.     

‘I,the people’: a deflationary interpretation of populism,Trump and the United States constitution

This paper advances a deflationary interpretation of populism, Donald Trump and the United States Constitution. It accepts that Trump utilizes a populist pose but rejects populism as too reductive for understanding his ascension and constitutional challenge. First, it argues that, although he merits the designation, Trump reveals more about populism than populism does about him. Trump illustrates populism’s conceptual elasticity, but employing it as a frame to understand him imposes coherence upon a figure whose monetized politics are chaotic, shallow and unanchored by principle. Second, populism provides a necessary but insufficient condition for critically explaining Trump’s ascension, either in terms of electoral populism or populism in power. Third, while democratic deconsolidation under Trump’s presidency cannot be discounted, the Constitution remains resilient in most important respects. A dispassionate constitutional sociology counsels a deflationary understanding rather than an uncritical alarmism that too frequently reproduces and reinforces the darker aspects of Trump’s populist political logic.     

Institutional duration and growth in Africa

We argue that there are strong reasons to believe that continuous competitive, multiparty elections produce different growth dynamics than first competitive elections. We test this conjecture by looking at the effects of competitive elections and their endurance on growth rates in African countries from 1970 to 2001. We find that initial competitive elections do not offer a growth dividend over having no elections at all, although noncompetitive elections may result in a growth penalty. However, over time, countries that hold competitive elections slowly begin outperforming those without them—especially those that hold noncompetitive elections. Africa’s poor growth experience may therefore be related less to an unwillingness to experiment with democracy, than to an inability to consolidate democratic reforms once in place. Karen E. Ferree is assistant professor of political science at University of California, San Diego. She specializes in the study of elections in new democracies, especially those in Africa. Her work has examined the political economy of elections as well as the role of ethnicity in elections. Smita Singh is Special advisor to Global Affairs at the William and Flora Hewlett Foudation. Her research interests include the political economy of development and violence in Africa and Southeast Asia. We wish to thank Robert Bates for support and advice at all stages of this project. Thanks also to Macartan Humphries, Naunihal Singh, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors atStudies in Comparative and International Development for helpful comments.     

Evaluation of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and particle concentration fluorescence immunoassay (PCFIA) methods for the screening, quantitation and pharmacokinetic study of furosemide in horses

Equine plasma and urine samples were analyzed by using a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and particle concentration fluorescence assay (PCFIA). Although ELISA and PCFIA were rapid, simple and sensitive for the screening of furosemide, they did not give reproducible quantitative results. The HPLC method, which required relatively longer analysis time, provided simple and reproducible quantitative analysis of furosemide in plasma and urine. The performance of the three methods was compared for the quantitation of furosemide in plasma obtained from thoroughbred mares dosed intravenously with furosemide (500 micrograms/kg (n = 7) and 1.0 mg/kg (n = 5)). Although the plasma furosemide profiles determined by ELISA, PCFIA and HPLC were similar, ELISA and PCFIA methods exhibited considerable variation in values. At high furosemide concentrations, the PCFIA method gave better quantitative values than ELISA. However, at trace furosemide concentrations the PCFIA method gave false positive values which were not confirmed by HPLC or ELISA. The pharmacokinetic values obtained from the HPLC data and the pharmacokinetic values obtained previously from the gas chromatographic data were comparable. The data obtained by ELISA and PCFIA were not suitable for the pharmacokinetic calculations.     

STR data for the Amp FlSTR Profiler Plus loci among 27 populations of different social hierarchy from southern part of Andhra Pradesh, India

Allele frequency for the 9 STR loci (D3S1358, vWA, FGA, D8S1179, D21S11, D18S51, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820) were estimated from a total of 1096 individuals belonging to 27 endogamous populations from the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, covering the entire gamut of socio-economic variation of the linguistic region. These loci are found to be highly polymorphic within the populations with high levels of average heterozygosity (>0.80). However, the allele frequency distributions are fairly uniform across the populations in case of these loci suggesting relatively greater homogeneity among the populations. Regrouping populations into five broad socio-economic categories further reiterated the homogenous pattern of genetic diversity.