Suchergebnisse

The political landscape of South Africa with its complicated history of race relations provides a very intriguing and complex setting for many of J. M. Coetzee's novels. Coetzee is one of the most prominent authors to have emerged from the painful history of apartheid in the land of South Africa. Widely appreciated for his sensitive and nuanced treatment of the race relations, Coetzee's women characters have formed a niche of their own in the canon. The present paper is an attempt to study the intensively critiqued and discussed character of Magda in Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country published in 1977. The narrative technique, language and the issues of race, sexuality and self determination of the protagonist Magda in the novel has birthed numerous interpretations as well as raised newer questions of womenhood and the legacy of colonialism in South Africa. To form an informed and cohesive analysis of the subject at hand the paper refers to some of the existing authoritative discourse on the matter and structures the arguments within the theoretical frameworks of Lacan, Freud and Postmodern narrative technique

In April 2017 the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, organized a national consultation on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). Five key issues aligning in the RRI framework were discussed in the meeting, which are namely public engagement, open access, gender equality, science education, and ethics. As pointed out by the expert panelists, the aspects of ethics in research and academia include the research integrity, minimization of research misconduct and plagiarism, besides a few others. Recently launched "RRI-Practice Report from National Case Study: India", extensively analyzed the public policy instruments facilitating the governance of responsible research in India. The fundamental tenets of responsibility in research and innovation are to be based on the ideas of Access, Equity, and Inclusion (AEI), as identified by the said country case study. On the other hand, the idea of Scientific Social Responsibility (SSR) was advocated by the Prime Minister of India in lines with the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) during the 104th Indian Science Congress, 2017. RRI framework addresses many of the critical issues related to SSR. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges in the RRI Framework while ensuring the research integrity in India. This paper includes the highlights from the INSA Policy Statement on "Dissemination and Evaluation of Research Output in India" (2018), UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations (2018), and RRI-Practice's "Report from National Case Study: India" (2018).

In the scholarly communications world, the concept of open access publishing has proliferated at faster pace since the global open access declarations such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in February 2002 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003. After one decade of these two epoch-making declarations, we see growing instances of open access resources due to collective efforts put by the advocacy organizations, advocacy groups and individual advocates for open access. As a library and information professional, all you need to do is to promote creation, deployment, mobilization and utilization of OA resources to your users groups, particularly to young researchers, academics and students communities. Some countries also have started social movements with appropriate national legislations promoting students' access to research, as well as taxpayers' access to public funded research. There are also advocacy groups in different geographical regions, who are trying hard to influence their respective national legislators and policymakers in making open access a national mandate for achieving universal access to research literature. Recent two European projects aim at engaging academic researchers in creating and contributing OA literature out of their public-funded research projects. In this Unit, various global advocacy initiatives are briefly discussed to help the library and information professionals in strengthening their efforts in sensitizing, awareness raising and promoting the concept of open access to knowledge at the local and national level.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine national skills development initiatives in India as the country embarks on building skilled manpower to meet the demand of SME sectors in the coming decade. This paper identifies two national level programmes namely, National Skill Development Mission (NSDM) and National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) which are implemented by an array of organisations in PPP (public-private partnership) mode. National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a major actor for NSDM, has identified 21 high-growth sectors and formulated action plan for skills development in those sectors. NRLM's Aajeevika Skill Development Programme and its sub-schemes ensure skills building of rural youth and help them in coming out of poverty. This paper identifies how skills building of rural youth will lead to job-diversification and lift them out of poverty through placement-linked skills-based jobs. This research paper analyses key national skills development initiatives and how the federal government is making efforts to build skills of marginalised communities as well as helping SME sectors and high growth sectors in bridging projected skills gaps.

Water security is a fairly new concept in the field of security studies. The global water crisis and human vulnerability as a result of water shortages have heightened the utility of the concept of water security. The Teesta River in Bangladesh has been experiencing water shortages over many years, water security has remained elusive. Recently, China has attempted to resolve the Teesta River water crisis in collaboration with Bangladesh in order to meet its water security challenges. This study attempts to examine the efficacy of the China-led Teesta project on the Teesta River in Bangladesh from the lens of water security.

Purpose
The research investigates the determinants of corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending and CSR disclosures by the Bangladeshi commercial banks. In the process, it explains the relationship between CSR disclosures and CSR expenditure by Bangladeshi commercial banks.


Design/methodology/approach
Legitimacy theory has been used to explain the motivation for such expenditure and disclosure. For purpose of analysing the determinants, ordinary least square (OLS) regression analysis has been used for the first test with CSR expenditures and ordered PROBIT regression analysis has been used for test with CSR disclosures.


Findings
The result found that CSR expenditure depend on banks' size, age and government ownership, whilst CSR disclosures depend on CSR expenditure, profitability, age, government ownership and Islamic compliance.


Practical implications
The practical contribution of this study includes the assistance for the public policy development by providing better understanding of extent and credibility of CSR reporting by the Bangladeshi banking sector.


Originality/value
The study contributes to the academic literature by presenting preliminary findings from different focus on a developing economy like Bangladesh. The study leads to draw a standard for the developing country to find out the differences compared to developed country.