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About the Book: China's attempts to comprehensively overhaul and modernize its armed forces, and its emphasis on access to modern technology indicate the determination of the Chinese leadership to build an all-round military capability to fight well beyond its immediate periphery. Coercion, and if that fails, resorting to use of military force have been the logical and natural steps in China's strategy. This marked propensity to use force makes one take note of China's fast burgeoning military capabilities. The rapid-fire modernisation process of China's military would permit it to extend its influence and power well beyond its immediate proximity. This development has serious implications for India's security. However, to exaggerate the "Chinese threat" is counter-productive, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the PRC would like the world to respect it even if out of fear or awe, it is axiomatic that India guard itself against an overestimation of the threat while assessing its potential.

This paper reviews the complex impact of climate change on gender relations and associated vulnerability on the Eastern Gangetic Plains of Nepal and India. Field research has identified that gendered vulnerability to climate change is intricately connected to local and macro level political economic processes. Rather than being a single driver of change, climate is one among several stresses on agriculture, alongside a broader set of non-climatic processes. While these pressures are linked to large scale political–economic processes, the response on the ground is mediated by the local level relations of class and caste, creating stratified patterns of vulnerability. The primary form of gendered vulnerability in the context of agrarian stress emerges from male out-migration, which has affected the distribution of labour and resources. While migration occurs amongst all socio-economic groups, women from marginal farmer and tenant households are most vulnerable. While the causes of migration are only indirectly associated with climate change, migration itself is rendering women who are left behind from marginal households, more vulnerable to ecological shocks such as droughts due to the sporadic flow of income and their reduced capacity for investment in off-farm activities. It is clear that policies and initiatives to address climate change in stratified social formations such as the Eastern Gangetic Plains, will be ineffective without addressing the deeper structural intersections between class, caste and gender.