Jai Asundi

This policy briefs about the problems in urban areas and proposes solutions some highlights are here: Problem Highlight:
• 65 million Indians live in slums or substandard housing
• Prohibitive costs of private housing projects make them unaffordable
Proposed Solutions:
• Bank loans for purchasing land for affordable housing
• Reduce land costs through higher FSI/FAR provision
• Lower registration charges
• Shorter approval cycle

Emergency and disaster management involves four stages: Mitigation (Planning), Preparedness, Response and Relief. Concerned authorities at different levels (central, state, district, etc.) play different roles and have different responsibilities in each phase of emergency and disaster management. GIS-based tools have been shown to be useful in the response and recovery phases of an emergency. In this paper, we propose how GIS-based simulation tools can be used in the Mitigation and Preparedness phases of emergencies and disasters.

CSTEP undertook a project to develop a platform that would help model the scale and impact of disasters and provide analysis, tools and exercises to handle it. The researchers examined processes that will help refine procedures for institutional arrangements, resources and asset management. The platform envisaged in the project, called the "Living Lab", can be the central location for the Emergency Management System where all major decisions are made.

This paper is concerned with the economic trade-offs associated with open-sourcing, the business strategy of releasing the source code of a commercial software product. We model open-sourcing as a strategic option for firms that compete in the market for software products. At the core of our model is the effect of open-sourcing on customer values, as well as the relative ease of customizing the open-source products.We show that open-sourcing can arise as an equilibrium outcome in our two-stage game.

The variable nature of wind speed and direction affects the critical zones of chemical incidents (spills and effluents). We describe a method to develop a GIS-based “plume rose” using its corresponding wind rose to map the areas that might be affected by a chemical release incident. The plume rose can thus be used in the preparation and response phases of emergency management for an industrial chemical incident. In this study, we examine an industrial region in Bangalore, India and show that seasonal variation in winds significantly change the nature (size and direction) of the plume rose.

With the increase in simulation of urban environments for the purpose of planning, modelling vehicular traffic has become important. While empirical evidence on traffic flow is relatively sparse, models representing the same are being increasingly used for planning urban roads and environments. In this paper, a simple explicit model is proposed to approximate the speed versus density of vehicular traffic flow.

In December 2015, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notified emission standards for limiting sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and mercury emissions in coal-based thermal power plants. As of December 2017 (the deadline for meeting these standards), compliance was poor. Further, other government departments under the Ministry of Power (MoP) are mulling over a delay in implementation of these standards. In this context, this study evaluated the benefits and costs associated with the implementation of these emission standards.

In this article, we suggest the use of the Gini Index to measure the inequality in infrastructure services provided within an urban region. We develop a functional form for the Lorenz Curve, the basis of measurement of the Gini Index. The sparse nature of data available to measure the distribution of infrastructure services within an urban region results in a challenge in estimating the Lorenz Curve.

We analyze the economic trade-offs associated with open-sourcing, the business strategy of releasing free open-source versions of commercial software products. We argue that the effect of the release of open-source versions on the customers' perception of products is an important determinant of open-sourcing outcomes.Open-sourcing is modeled as a strategic option for duopolists that compete in a market for software products. We show that open-sourcing can arise as an equilibrium outcome in our simple two-stage game.

Emergency and disaster management has become a widely researched area in the last decade. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been highly advocated for addressing the obstacles and improving decision-making in the event of a disaster. A number of ICT support systems and frameworks, both conceptual and application-based, have evolved over time to support the highly time and collaboration intensive task of emergency and disaster management. The use of ICTs like GIS has helped the relief worker to a great extent.