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It was Gandhi who gave centrality to the debate on sanitation from the perspective of bio-power. The category of sanitation for him was not something to be used as a form of control but an instrument for transforming the structural caste-based hierarchy. Gandhian idea on sanitation resonates well with the anthropological notion of holism. He has visualised sanitation across the domains of soma, polis and psyche. Sanitation for Gandhi is not limited by its technical definition requiring only technical solutions but in its expansion that assumes a metaphorical significance. For Gandhi, swaraj (self-rule) in political sphere can only be achieved if there is a collective sense of sanitation and hygiene. The field of sanitation, therefore, can be seen as a testing ground for the ability and preparedness to achieve political swaraj. Sanitation reforms for him are based on reforming the collective sense of social self. This kind of reformation leads sanitation into the domain of the 'moral-political' that invoke collective and municipal efforts from the state to address insanitation. It is within these contexts that the article tries to understand the Gandhian philosophy on sanitation that traverses through the conceptions of bio-power, caste hierarchies, colonialism, scientism, nationalism and morality.

SummaryCentral obesity has been associated with the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic disease in children. A total of 358 Delhi school girls aged 6–11 years were measured for height, weight, waist circumference and hip circumference. The study demonstrates a linear correlation between body mass index (BMI) and waist and hip circumference and suggests an indirect method of estimating waist and hip circumferences, whose high values may be used for the diagnosis of metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease. Further investigations on different groups are needed to substantiate these results and attribute BMI a predictive value in the clinical setting for the risk and diagnosis of childhood obesity-related metabolic disorders.

AbstractRecurrence relations for the product moments of order statistics from a doubly truncated exponential distribution are obtained. These relations allow us to evaluate the product moments for all sample sizes.

Sen's entitlement thesis rooted in social contract theory has been used to explain access to food, and is used by states to design social protection programs as transfer entitlements to diffuse food insecurities. Social protection programs have now burgeoned in several countries as a strategy to enable the poor to overcome risks, vulnerabilities and poverty. These social protection programs have inclusion and exclusion errors, which current theorization attributes mainly to political clientalism, social vulnerability, elite capture, targeting inefficiency, leakages and corruption, lack of information transparency and improper designing of social protection programs. This paper argues that the errors are due to a more fundamental assumption made in application of social contract and entitlement-based approach to social protection programing. It identifies an uncritical application of Sen's entitlement thesis to social protection programs, as leading to inclusion and exclusion errors. The main problematic, the paper shows is that the social contract-led entitlement thesis works within the domain of formal rights situated within the state-citizen relations, and as such, misses out on the non-formal entitlements and non-state influences that impact materialization of social protection programs in practice. Evidences from flood prone Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, India indicate that non-state rules linked with clientele and patronage relations, moral and local political economies trump over formal rights to mediate social protection entitlement outcomes. Rather than abstract state-citizen social contract, it is the moral contracts of reciprocal exchanges with influential patrons embedded in the moral economy of the villages that ultimately ground the social protection entitlement claims of poor villagers. Conceptualizing this process of access as cultures of entitlement, the paper builds a framework for reinterpretation of entitlements and their outcomes, suggesting a recalibration of application of Sen's entitlement thesis to social protection programs. In conclusion it argues that Sen's entitlement thesis which is pitched at transfer of economic resources through social protection from the state to the poor is inadequate. Learning from social movements currently leading the transparency and accountability struggles in India, it calls for an instituting and recognition of accountability as new cultural resource and entitlement. In conclusion it argues that information, and accountability as new cultural entitlements, when mobilized through collective agency of the poor can potentially challenge the current cultures of entitlements evidenced in this paper that presently underlie social protection outcomes.