Why do many engineering graduates remain unemployed despite earning degrees? This research explores placement disparities, their impact on employability, and policy recommendations to bridge the gap between academic learning and industry expectations.
Digital identities persist beyond death, yet GDPR and India’s DPDPA protect only the living. This paper argues that effective post-mortem privacy governance demands an interdisciplinary framework uniting privacy law, succession law, and constitutional principles to safeguard human dignity.
Authors: Aryan, Yash, Pooja, Vasu, Parth, Ayetri, Lavanya, Kanak, Priyal, Srija ABSTRACT This study evaluates plastic pollution present in water bodies worldwide. The impact and the negative nature of microplastics on Mother Nature and human lives make this thing that needs to be tackled like an emergency. These larger sizes of plastics, which go into the water bodies, tend to become smaller and smaller pieces, which are called microplastics, through various kinds of natural and human-made things like sunlight, chemicals released in water bodies, etc. This process leads these big amount of plastics to become smaller and smaller ones, which tends to become the cause of infertility in both men and women and sometimes cancer in people. Both these categories of plastic pose serious risks to aquatic organisms and can also enter human food and water systems. In this study, the occurrence, transport pathways, detection technologies, and research gaps associated with plastic contamination in aquatic environments are examined. This is conducted through a comprehensive review of recent literature and secondary analysis of 4 major global datasets. A secondary data analytical approach is used following these recognised databases: the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) global marine litter model, the Atlas of Ocean Microplastics (AOMI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Plastics Outlook dataset, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centres for Environmental Information marine microplastics database. These long-term trends in plastic production and waste generation were analysed. It was also used to identify the global hotspots of plastic contamination. Further, transboundary transport pathways for plastic pollutants were mapped, and modelled pollution distributions were compared with real field-based observations. Findings of this study also account for anthropogenic factors such as urbanisation, industrial discharge, agricultural runoff, and improper waste disposal. While technologies like the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, deep learning detection systems and automated monitoring systems have improved the detection of plastics more smoothly, there are still a few methodologies that are not able to compare between the studies. Due to dissimilarity between the mesh sizes, digestion protocols and other techniques, the results are not reliable. This can easily complicate the policy formulation. It is seen that the main reason behind the pollution in water bodies is the unstandardized methods used for monitoring the pollution in water. INTRODUCTION Plastics are made by humans, produced with the help of petroleum-based chemicals, which is why they are so stretchable and durable, making them a daily used product. The same properties that make them useful (they don’t break down easily) make them a serious environmental hazard (Barnes et al., 2009). When plastics enter water bodies, they don’t disappear. Sunlight (UV radiation), physical friction, wave action, and microbial activity break them into smaller and smaller pieces – but the plastic molecules remain intact, potentially for hundreds to thousands of years. A single plastic bottle can eventually fragment into millions of microplastic particles, each capable of being ingested by tiny organisms (Peters and Bratton, 2016, Sanchez et al., 2014; Silva-Cavalcanti et al., 2017). Plastic debris is generally assessed according to size, like macro-plastics, i.e., plastic items larger than 5mm. Bigger than a grain of rice, and microplastics – 1um, i.e., plastic items smaller than a sesame seed, down to invisible (Arthur et al., 2008; Barnes et al., 2009; Thompson et al., 2009). Microplastics can be classified as (i) primary microplastics which are intentionally manufactured to be tiny, example – microbeads used in facial scrubs, cosmetic glitter, and industrial plastic pellets (nurdles), and as (ii) secondary microplastics that are created when larger macro-plastic break down, example – sunlight (UV rays), waves, and weathering degrade larger plastic items over time, breaking them into specks (Cooper and Corcoran et al., 2010, Derraik et al., 2002, Napper et al., 2015, Williams and Simmons et al., 1996). Macro-plastics directly cause physical damage to wildlife, such as birds, turtles, and marine life. The animals usually get trapped in them or accidentally ingest them, filling their stomachs, which leads to starvation. Microplastics are small enough to be eaten by the smallest marine creatures (like plankton) and work their way up the food chain. Microplastics have also been found in human organs, placentas, and bloodstreams, and studies are underway to explore their links to inflammation, cancer and cell damage (Jabeen et al., 2017; Jemec et al., 2016). Both the detection and categorisation of plastic contamination are still technical challenges. Visual representation, pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy and many more techniques are used for identifying the microplastics in the water bodies. There are alternative methods for monitoring the macro-plastics. There has been a reallife field deployment, which is cost-efficient and scalable to an extent, including the UAV-based platforms, which are used for spatial coverage of the large water bodies. Helping with on-site assessment. In addition, some architectures have demonstrated considerable automation in identifying and classifying the microplastics, with the help of methods like the Canny edge detection algorithm and Nile red fluorescent, substantially increasing the detection process across difficult-to-understand environmental matrices. There are many ways by which the water gets contaminated by the plastics, these are municipal waste, uncleaned drainage systems in regions (area-wise), littering of plastic waste by street shops and throwing them into the pipelines, which ultimately goes inside the larger water bodies. (Andrady, 2011; Cole et al., 2011). The plastic waste, which is increasing day by day due to the fast urbanisation, gets collected in one place, which chokes the flow of the river and other smaller water bodies inside the city region, helping various diseases to grow. Here, the important role is played by the water drainage pipelines that flow inside the cities and are the ones needed to be assessed in regular intervals. (Wagner et al., 2014). This is a big concern for all of us that plastic, which was once a part of human settlements, can now be seen far beyond the regions where there are no human traces found, for miles away all thanks to the ships and the water bodies which
This study examines emerging geopolitical alliances through Social Network Analysis of UNGA voting patterns. Using Voeten’s dataset, similarity scores, Louvain clustering, and centrality measures, it identifies fragmented voting blocs and highlights the shift toward fluid, issue-based geopolitical partnerships.
This study evaluates whether India’s Make in India initiative, launched in 2014, actually raised tariff rates and whether it reduced India’s import dependence on China. Using WITS and World Bank data from 2010–2023, the authors compare pre- and post-policy tariffs across six priority sectors — food products, footwear, machinery and electronics, textiles, transportation, and chemicals — through independent sample t-tests and panel regression models. The results show that tariff increases were statistically significant only in footwear; every other sector saw no meaningful change, and in several cases tariffs actually fell post-2014. Regression analysis further finds that tariffs had no statistically significant effect on China’s share of India’s imports, while GDP was the strongest predictor. The paper concludes that Make in India’s goals were likely advanced more through infrastructure, technology, and ease-of-doing-business reforms than through tariff protection itself.
This study examines how India’s free trade agreements and critical mineral pacts with Africa influence macroeconomic growth, supply chain resilience, and industrial performance. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research addresses the void regarding mineral diplomacy in trade literature. It evaluates whether strategic partnerships with initiatives like KABIL enhance India’s industrial security and clean-energy transition while balancing resource acquisition, domestic value addition, and sustainable development.
This paper examines the legal and ethical challenges surrounding digital remains, post-mortem privacy, and personality rights in India. Through comparative analysis, it highlights gaps in existing laws and advocates comprehensive legislation protecting dignity, autonomy, and informational privacy after death.
When a person dies, their physical belongings are settled — but their digital footprint lives on. This study examines post-mortem privacy, comparing how India, the European Union, and the United States handle the protection, ownership, and management of a deceased person’s personal data. It finds that current legal frameworks offer only limited safeguards and calls for a more balanced approach that honors the dignity, privacy, and wishes of the deceased alongside evolving technology.
AUTHORS: RASHI SINGH, AROHI, ANANYA GUPTA, HANNAH, DISHA GOSWAMI, HARSHAD, PRINCE, PARVATHY Abstract India’s public expenditure on school education has increased over the past two decades, although independent evaluations of early learning are much lower than required competencies for grades. The difference between investment expenditure and learning outcomes achieved is precisely the issue addressed in this paper. Drawing on a state-level panel that pairs disaggregated education-budget data with structural inputs (pupil-teacher ratios) and independently assessed learning outcomes (ASER), the study progresses from macro-level trend analysis to pooled cross-sectional correlation and a first-differenced, state-fixed-effects panel. The descriptive record shows education’s share of state budgets drifting downward even as classroom staffing improved, while learning followed a non-monotonic, V-shaped path of pandemic-era decline and partial recovery. Once state heterogeneity is differenced out, neither aggregate expenditure share nor pupil-teacher ratio retains a statistically significant association with learning. Rather than implying that public spending is irrelevant, the results indicate that aggregate expenditure is a poor proxy for the quality of education: the expenditure-learning relationship in India is conditional, regime-dependent, and heterogeneous across states. The paper argues that whether, and by how much, expenditure improves learning in India’s lowest-performing states remains the critical unanswered question in Indian education finance, and it specifies threshold and quantile regression on disaggregated data as the targeted next step this baseline evidence motivates. Keywords: public education expenditure; learning outcomes; ASER; state-level panel; fixed-effects regression; threshold regression; quantile regression; NEP 2020; NIPUN Bharat; expenditure composition; education finance; India 1. Introduction Imagine a large, three-storey building -well maintained, equipped with classrooms, laboratories, and air conditioning: a government school. You enter a Grade V classroom and, for the sake of curiosity, ask three students to solve a long-division problem. Only one can; the others visibly struggle. What went wrong? The question is not rhetorical. A World Bank assessment reports that nearly half of India’s ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text, and ASER 2024 finds that three out of four Standard III students in government schools cannot read a Standard II textbook. They are not only numbers, they represent the reality of students in government schools today. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” has been a common quote for many years, but the facts on basic education speak a different tale. India’s school-education system presents one of the most consequential puzzles in contemporary public policy: which is an increased investment in schooling for children without any commensurate gain in learning levels. Since the introduction of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program, which made universal elementary education central to national policy, there has been a significant rise in government expenditure on schooling. But when the question shifts from whether children attend school to whether they learn while attending it, the picture changes completely. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which measures foundational reading and arithmetic among school-going children, has documented for nearly two decades that most children in government schools cannot read or perform arithmetic at grade-appropriate levels. This paper uses the above dilemma as the central analytical issue and poses a series of questions: Is greater spending better for learning, and under what circumstances would the public money spent have the biggest impact on learning? The questions need to be explored with a better understanding than just asking whether there is a relationship between spending and learning. Issues such as what type of spending, spending levels, and the conditions of spending need to be considered. As equally important is the diversity of the federal education system in India where expenditures and learning outcomes differ from one state to another. With regard to this problem, the need for an effective educational policy was greatly emphasized by the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which symbolizes an unprecedented institutional change with respect to India’s perception of educational success from “schooling for all” to “learning for all.” This reframing is, in effect, an official acknowledgement that the input-expansion model of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan era has reached diminishing returns with respect to what ultimately matters. The existing literature on the expenditure-learning relationship in India leaves an important gap. No prior study estimates that relationship on a multi-year, multi-state panel while simultaneously allowing for non-linear threshold effects and permitting the effect to differ between low- and high-performing states. Every earlier design falls short on at least one dimension: two-point compound-growth comparisons and single-state case studies produce findings that cannot be generalised and cannot identify the functional form of the relationship, while simple correlational designs impose linearity and assume that the relationship between spending and learning is constant across all spending levels -an assumption the literature itself predicts to be wrong. This paper therefore examines the relationship between public education expenditure and learning outcomes across Indian states within a state-level panel framework. It advances two propositions that the ASER 2024 pedagogy-driven recovery makes plausible: first, that the composition of spending moves learning outcomes more than its volume; and second, that treating education expenditure as a single aggregate is the central measurement failure of the prior literature. The novelty of the study lies less in asking new questions than in replacing poorly posed ones with better ones, and in deploying a tiered empirical strategy in which each estimator is a targeted response to a documented failure of previous work. The analysis reported here establishes the descriptive and fixed-effects baseline; on the strength of what that baseline reveals, it specifies threshold and quantile regression on disaggregated fiscal data as the analytical program the evidence motivates. 2. Literature Review Public expenditure on school education in India has risen substantially, in nominal and real terms, over the past two decades, yet independent assessments continue to record learning levels far below grade-appropriate competency. This chapter reviews the empirical, theoretical, and policy literature bearing on that paradox, drawing on descriptive budget-trend analyses, regression-based panel studies, efficiency-frontier estimations, systematic reviews, and state-specific case studies. The review is organised thematically rather than source by source;
This review examines the sources, transport pathways, and human exposure routes of micro- and macroplastics in Indian water bodies, and the limitations of current detection methods. It finds that smaller, health-relevant particle fractions are consistently under-detected