On 9 June 2024, Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister for a third consecutive term, a feat previously accomplished only by Jawaharlal Nehru. However, this historic victory also began one of the most uncertain periods of his prime ministership. The fractured outcome of India’s 18th general election has created a fundamentally different political landscape. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured just 240 seats, a significant drop from its 2019 tally, and was therefore short of an absolute majority. Although the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) did win a majority, Modi will now be dependent upon coalition partners, necessitating a shift towards a more collaborative governance style.

This chapter critically examines theoretical frameworks—including anthropocentrism, intrinsic value theory, and Deep Ecology—to argue for a fundamental shift in how humans relate to the environment. It maintains that the prevailing dynamic of domination and exploitation must be replaced by one rooted in care and ethical responsibility.

The Kannada Language Comprehensive Development (Amendment) Bill, 2024, ratified by the Karnataka Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council, stands as a legislative landmark with profound implications. This commentary critically analyses the socio-economic-political implications, unravelling the intricate web of influences that the Kannada Language Comprehensive Development Bill introduces within the diverse and dynamic landscape of Karnataka.

This article examines Tamil Nadu’s policy response to caste violence in schools through Justice K Chandru’s 2024 committee report. Despite the state’s anti-caste ethos, structural and everyday caste discrimination persists. The report’s recommendations highlight enduring paradoxes of democracy in India and the challenges of dismantling caste-based fissures in public life.

Dhruv Rathee exemplifies the rise of YouTube as a platform for political commentary and social media activism in India. Blending factual rigour with conversational style he mobilises audiences against authoritarian drift under Modi. His influence highlights the transformative role of digital platforms while exposing tensions between YouTube influencers and traditional journalism.

In the 2023 Madhya Pradesh assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party emerged victorious with a landslide majority. This electoral triumph, characterised by a significant mandate for the BJP, has undoubtedly reshaped the political dynamics of MP. In this context, the various strategic factors that cleared the BJP’s path from incumbency to dominance in MP are analysed.

This research article investigates the role and influence of nominated members in the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of Parliament. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of representation theory and deliberative democracy, the study examines the contributions and effectiveness of nominated members in shaping legislative discussions and policy decisions. Findings indicate varying levels of engagement among nominated members, with some actively participating and advocating for specific causes. The study highlights the significance of nominating individuals with relevant expertise and diverse interests to enhance inclusivity in parliamentary representation.

Political science, as a discipline, encompasses the systematic study of the state and its associated institutions through empirical and normative methods. However, the scope of political science has expanded to include research on various socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological factors that affect the functioning and governance of the state. Despite the global attention to political science research, there is a scarcity of studies specifically focused on political science literature in Asia. Therefore, this research article aims to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of political science publications in Asia. Utilizing Bibliometric Analysis data extracted from the Scopus database spanning the period from 1991 to 2023, various bibliometric indicators were employed to examine the political science literature. The indicators included measures such as annual growth of publications, international collaborations, impact factor, highly cited articles, active countries, institutions, journals, and authors. The findings shed light on the growth trajectory of political science publications, the extent of international collaborations, the influence of highly cited articles, and the key countries, institutions, journals, and authors contributing to the field. This study is a significant contribution to the field, as it addresses the gap in literature reviews specifically focused on political science in Asia.

India’s achievement in launching the Chandrayaan 3 lunar mission marks a turning point in its space exploration endeavours, with far-reaching implications that extend beyond technological success. This article discusses the strategic importance of Chandrayaan 3’s successful landing on the lunar surface, emphasizing its implications for India’s technological advancement, defense capabilities, education sector and economic growth. Furthermore, it delves into the challenges faced by the Indian space program, including limited budget allocations, technological dependencies, and market access. Drawing insights from global space initiatives, the article proposes strategic recommendations for realizing India’s full potential in the space domain, such as substantial investment, expertise in human spaceflight and private sector participation. Through a comprehensive analysis of Chandrayaan 3’s multidimensional impact, this article contributes to the scholarly discourse on space exploration and underscores India’s growing prominence in the global space community.

The current study examined the association of social support and background variables with resilience among young adults exposed to traumatic and stressful events of armed conflict in Kashmir, India. Data were collected from 693 participants using a multi-stage sampling method. Findings revealed that social support and gender were positively associated with resilience, whereas education, income, and maternal education were negatively associated with resilience. Moreover, feeling insecure and psychologically distressed as a result of conflict was negatively associated with resilience, whereas, perception that Kashmir conflict will be resolved was positively associated with resilience. The findings suggest fostering of resilience in this population.

The Indo-Canadian standoff has sent shockwaves throughout the diplomatic world, furthering a clash of words and tension in the India-Canada relationship. Trudeau’s claims, suggesting Indian involvement in the assassination of a Canadian Khalistani leader, have sparked scepticism and heightened tensions, jeopardizing trust between the nations. The complexities are manifold, given Canada’s significant role as an ally and founding member of NATO, thus introducing multiple layers to this high-stake diplomatic standoff. Canada’s allegations are bolstered by recent concerns expressed by the United States along similar lines and the Five Eyes’ increased concern in the matter involving Indian intelligence agencies operating abroad. The future of India-Canada relations hangs in the balance as both nations embark on a path that could redefine their shared narrative amid turbulence and opportunity. This commentary analyses the development and ramifications of India- Canada deteriorating ties.

In upcoming iterations of the internet of vehicles (IoVs), seamless communication will be facilitated among individuals, vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and communication platforms. The overarching objectives include enhancing transit efficiency, ensuring comfort, improving road safety, and concurrently fostering environmental conservation. This research introduces a secure fog service for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), enabling diverse traffic data services such as road alerts, congestion control, and autonomous driving. The authors propose a novel authentication approach for fog services. Leveraging physical unclonable function (PUF) and blockchain, this approach facilitates authentication between vehicles and road-side units (RSU), circumventing potential fraudulent fog nodes. A comprehensive security analysis demonstrates its resilience against known attacks. Comparative evaluation against existing approaches underscores our protocol's superior balance of security and overhead, making it well-suited for secure vehicle fog environments

This book highlights the types and importance of multitasking fungi and provides critical analysis of fungi involved in production of important enzymes. It also covers additional tasks of fungi such as biosorption, remediation, soil fertilization, and water treatment. This book discusses the types of fungi, their cultivation, execution of multitasking, and the analysis and recovery of products. This information can be used to understand and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of fungi in the production of a variety of products, such as antibiotics, enzymes, and biofuels.This book would be of interest to researchers working in industrial biotechnology, fungal physiology, environmental sciences and technology, sustainable technologies, and agricultural sciences.

The book aims to highlight the application of microbial electrochemical technologies, their fundamental to advanced, recent applications, management strategies, and relevant case studies. The book also attempts to highlight existing research and technological advancements on all facets of instruments and methods for assessing and keeping track of water contaminants. The section on current trends and advancements in this book discusses the most recent advancements in microbial electrochemical technologies and related technologies to lessen the contamination of water resources. The book goes into great detail about the fundamental aspects of water pollution, including their causes, primary sources, detection, treatment, and mitigation using microbial electrochemical technologies and management systems as well as commercialization and economics thoughts that are currently of significant importance. Additionally, with the aid of appropriate tables and figures, all of these chapters havebeen arranged according to recent developments and aspects of the field. The book's goal is to give readers a fundamental understanding of how microbial electrochemical technologies work. It is intended for a wide range of readers, including undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, academicians, environmentalists, policymakers, businesspeople, and R&D teams. We gratefully thank all of the authors. We'll be open to recommendations for making the next book or edition better.

Nowadays with the emergence of Industry 4. 0, there is therefore the need to have sustainable manufacturing in order to increase operational efficiency as well as relieve the pressure on the environment. A potential weakness of conventional approaches is time-dependency while processing real-time data to prevent dysfunctions in the company’s resource management, energy consumption control, and predictive maintenance. Thus, in this work it is proposed an innovative approach to address these problems with the use of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Energy consumption, machine performance and environmental data are collected by IoT sensors in real-time and fed into a DRL model. This concept effectively eliminates the vices that are characteristic of conventional approaches in that it seeks to optimize production processes by cell design. The approach suggested above attains an unprecedented 98. 2% accuracy rate. This is in a bid to exemplify its capability in predicting these phenomenal and balance forecasts, to improve the overall performance and sustainability of manufacturing. Thereby, the method offers a robust answer to the acute questions arising in front-line manufacturing today and sets a brand-new reference for intelligent and sustainable behavior in the context of the fourth industrial revolution 4.0.

The widespread usage of mobile devices and social media has led to a growing interest in face recognition technology. This study introduces a novel deep ensemble method designed to enhance facial recognition accuracy on a mobile selfie dataset by integrating three pre-trained models, viz. Inception-v3, ResNet-50, and EfficientNet B7 for automatic feature extraction and representation. The approach utilizes feature-level fusion through concatenation, followed by dimensionality reduction via principal component analysis (PCA). Feature optimization is carried out using the Firefly algorithm, and classification is achieved through a soft voting ensemble of classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and a Deep Neural Network (DNN). When evaluated on the LFW, UTK face, and Wild Selfie datasets, the proposed method achieved recognition accuracies of 99.76%, 98.92%, and 98.73%, respectively, demonstrating competitive and significantly improved performance over existing models. The results indicate that the system performs effectively in real-world conditions, especially in environments with varying conditions.

Federated Learning (FL) is decentralized machine learning, which preserves data confidentiality and security but suffers challenges such as high communication overhead, latency, and scalability issues in large scale smart city networks. We propose a Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) framework which takes advantage of fog nodes to address these problems. HFL framework ensures that the cost of communication is cut back through the introduction of the multilevel aggregation strategy where local models are aggregated first at fog nodes before they are combined at a central server. Communication costs are reduced while latency is improved and scalability is enhanced by this HFL framework through simulations on real-world smart city datasets. On edge devices, our simulation results with real-world datasets from smart cities show that compared to traditional FL it reduces communication overhead by up to 50%, achieves faster model convergence with similar accuracy, and leads to lower energy consumption. This framework represents a big step forward towards deployment of FL in smart cities making it efficient and scalable in resource-constrained environments.

The Process of Grading and Segregation of chicken eggs in various breeds plays a Vital role to assess the standards of eggs that can enable the market to provide Quality eggs to the consumers. The current traditional grading mechanisms are manual and carried on observable traits like shell color and form, that are prone to human mistakes. These manual methods not only make the process cumbersome, but also raises the management cost. To overcome these challenges, this research aimed to differentiate Rhode Island red and white leghorn chicken eggs using non-destructive hyperspectral imaging techniques. Unlike manual inspection or invasive tagging, a nondestructive hyperspectral imaging setup captures a wide range of spectral information from chicken eggs, identifying minor differences in color and texture among different egg breeds in poultry farming. In this experiment, a sample set of 72 Rhode Island red and 72 white leghorn chicken eggs has been tested by using hyperspectral imaging. Spectral features of each breed say Rhode Island red and white leghorn chicken eggs have been identified to differentiate both the breeds.

This review article analyses the wide-ranging influence of Hindutva in Indian politics over the decade of Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister of India. The study analyses the survival, reproduction, and development of Hindutvain conflict with modernisation processes in India despite the country’s secular constitutional democracy. This is achieved by examining the developments in the Indian political landscape and policy administration through the prism of the symbiotic relationship between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), signalling the fusion of political power and Hindu religious principles. By contributing to the literature on religion and politics, through a comprehensive examination of political rhetoric, policy shifts, and societal attitudes, this review article examines the role of Hindutva in shaping the trajectory of governance and politics in India during Narendra Modi’s leadership.

Over the past few decades, the rhetoric of smart and futuristic cities has defined the agenda of urbanisation in India. The underpinnings of these projects are heroic assumptions of modernity(ies) to achieve new goals and aspirations often assuming forms of urban utopia and taking a disruptive approach to urban planning. Our research, which focuses on the capital project of Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh, shows how the idea of Amaravati in its built and imagined form makes sense to various stakeholders. The research was conducted using qualitative field-based research methods in four villages (Neerukonda, Kuragallu, Ionolu and Nowluru) in the Amaravati capital region. Based on recent interventions in the studies of postcolonial urbanism we propose three key arguments. First, Amaravati in its built and imagined form confirms and negotiates the global discourse on world class city. The second, idea of Amaravati is conceived and progressed by presenting a futuristic vision rooted in the historical patterns of Telugu aspirations for a modern technocratic state. Third, Amaravati embodies the spirit of speculative urbanism, and the project is propelled by the grammar of speed. Lastly, the chapter shows how the idea of world-class in the Global South is imagined and formed by a complex network of inter-referencing and worlding practices.