The politics of anti-poverty artefacts: lessons from the computerisation of the food security system in Karnataka

The last few years have seen a rapid increase in the discussion of the role of new technologies in strengthening social safety nets. However, the hypothesis that technology design is intertwined with political agendas - aiming at instilling specific visions and policy objectives in anti-poverty programmes - has remained to a large extent unexplored, being either taken as implicit or neglected by technical discourse. In this paper, we look at computerization of a large food security programme - the Public Distribution System in Karnataka, India - to argue that technology, far from simply affecting the functioning of existing processes, can be built to advance specific political agendas, which carry clear stances on the ways in which social welfare targets are to be reached. However, recipients' perception of these programmes depends highly on how technology affects access to their entitlements, which need therefore to be set at the core of anti-poverty technology design. The case study is used to draw lessons for policy, specifically aimed at countries embarking into computerization of their social safety nets

Green supply chain performance assessment: exploration fuzzy logic to tackle linguistic evaluation information

Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) has appeared as an environmental innovation integrating environmental concerns into the supply chain management. Due to recent modification in environmental requirements, Govt. rules and regulations that affect manufacturing operations and services; growing attention is being given towards inclusion of environmental management strategies into traditional concept of supply chains. A Green Supply Chain (GSC) aims at confining the wastes within the industrial system so as to conserve energy and prevent the dissipation of harmful materials into the environment. In order to assess GSC performance extent, ‘green attributes’ must be considered along with traditional SC performance indices. The present work aims to discuss a methodology to deal with linguistic evaluation information through fuzzy logic for evaluating green supply chain performance and also attempts in identifying and prioritizing the key factors towards increasing ‘green competitiveness’. Here, the performance criteria/attributes have been evaluated by the expert group through linguistic variables which have further been transformed into Generalized Trapezoidal Fuzzy Numbers (GTFNs). Linguistic assessment of GSCM has been carried out based on different attributes, such as customer value, quality evaluation, performance measurement, appropriate price and environmental effect. Each attribute is followed by several criterions. Because of the vague and inconsistent nature of decision-makers’ linguistic evaluation information associated with GSCM; a fuzzy-based approach is indeed required to convert linguistic data into appropriate fuzzy numbers, for the analysis purpose. Apart from computing overall green performance extent, this research has been extended to identify ill-performing areas of an organizational GSC. Moreover, a case study has been reported in support of application feasibility of the proposed module

Static properties of nuclear matter within the Boson Loop Expansion

The use of the Boson Loop Expansion is proposed for investigating the static properties of nuclear matter. We explicitly consider a schematic dynamical model in which nucleons interact with the scalar-isoscalar sigma meson. The suggested approximation scheme is examined in detail at the mean field level and at the one- and two-loop orders. The relevant formulas are provided to derive the binding energy per nucleon, the pressure and the compressibility of nuclear matter. Numerical results of the binding energy at the one-loop order are presented for Walecka's sigma-omega model in order to discuss the degree of convergence of the Boson Loop Expansion.Comment: 40 pages, 13 figure