IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Drawing on primary research on trade unions that mobilise women workers in the informal sector in Tamil Nadu, the possibilities for diverse union strategies to emerge, sustain themselves over time, and even win contingent victories in particular contexts are enquired into. Ethnographic accounts of union struggles highlight when trade unions resort to workplace-based activism for wages and when they prioritise agendas such as skill-enhancement, “development,” or workers’ welfare rights. What conjuncture of local contexts and circumstances enables one and which makes the other necessary? A discussion on three case studies shows how both “old” and “new” forms of collective organising co-constitute trade union activism involving women labouring in precarious livelihoods in the informal sector. © 2019 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Economic and Political Weekly

‘Old’ and ‘New’ trade union activism organising women informal workers in Tamil Nadu

The paper explores the processes of gendered identity formation and subjectification in a Latin Catholic Christian artisanal fisher community in Kerala (South India) in the throes of capitalist modernization and the associated transformation of workspaces and work cultures. Macro-changes in fishing and fish marketing in Kerala have forced women fish vendors to travel greater distances and spend long hours away from their homes and communities. In these changed circumstances, this paper examines how local communities exercise social control over women fish workers and the forms of self and peer monitoring and regulation the women fashion in response to the surveillance of their personal and work lives. Women responded to the relentless policing of their lives by generating discourses of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (vending) women that may be regarded as processes of self and other identity formation that divided women from each other. This ethnographic study primarily uses qualitative research tools.

World University root node

Women's Studies International Forum

Good woman, bad woman: Social control and self-regulation in Kerala's artisanal fisheries

Women’s work in fisheries in the Global South is valorized for its role in sustaining small-scale fishing in the face of complex challenges from corporate-backed industrial fishing. This paper examines how capitalist modernization of fisheries and its attendant changes have transformed the worlds of work of artisanal fisherwomen in a Latin Catholic fisher village in the South Indian state of Kerala. Using ethnographic research and qualitative methods, the paper explores women’s interfaces and antagonisms with new actors in the commission shops and seashore auctions where they procure fish as well as the public fish markets where they sell fish. The paper discusses women’s survival strategies in the face of growing competition in the vending business and examines their implications for women’s engagement in collective action for improved work conditions and the rights of artisanal fish workers.

Gender, Technology and Development

Women’s work, survival strategies and capitalist modernization in South Indian small-scale fisheries: the case of Kerala

This paper explores the changing dynamics of women's labor in a Muslim fishing village in the South Indian state of Kerala in the back drop of two global processes viz., state-initiated capitalist modernization of the fisheries sector and state-sponsored livelihood promotion programs. It traces the shifting contexts in which Muslim fisherwomen, alternately, engaged in and disengaged from, paid work outside the household and shows how women experienced different kinds of paid work, as self-employed fish vendors and wage earners of employment guarantee schemes. Changes in women's labor force participation were mediated by the social institutions of family and religion, community patriarchies and ideologies of female domesticity and the state's endeavors to constitute women as entrepreneurial actors who take responsibility for the economic well-being of their households. The paper maps women's struggles to secure and retain paid work in the face of a resurgent domestic feminine ideal and its zealous defenders in their village. © 2018 Bridgewater State College.

Journal of International Women's Studies

The 'stigma' of paid work: Capital, state, patriarchy and women fish workers in South India

Grinding is an expensive and complex machining process, characterized by cutting grits undergoing non-uniform wear. The worn out grits influence the surface finish of the part, necessitating timely dressing. Conventionally, the dressing interval is decided either based on the wheel life end criteria viz. visual identification of the workpiece burn mark, chatter occurrence and deterioration in the part finish or on the number of parts produced. Improper dressing interval increases auxiliary machining time and grinding wheel wastage. Prevailing demands towards next generation smart manufacturing include product and process related benefits such as low operational cost, better customer service support, operation optimization and control. In the present work, we propose a low cost, process non-intrusive sensor technology with IoT enabled operational intelligence platform to estimate the redress life of grinding wheel based on wheel condition. Traverse grinding tests were carried out in a CNC surface grinding machine installed with Al2O3 wheel against D2 tool steel under wet condition. During experimentation, the spindle motor current, grinding forces and grinding wheel surface images were acquired using the Hall-effect sensor, dynamometer, and CCD camera respectively. Data acquisition, network connectivity, and cloud communication were empowered by serial output. Statistical time, frequency and wavelet domain features signifying the wheel life characteristic were extracted. To show the usefulness of motor current signals, the extracted features thereof were confirmed against grinding forces and wheel surface images. A time series Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) predictive model was developed to estimate the grinding wheel redress life using the selected root mean square (RMS) feature of a current signal. An android application was also developed for a graphical visualization of dressing time based on the RMS value of the spindle motor current signal. The developed methodology thus, allows operators and machines with sensors to communicate with each other and facilitates real-time traceability, visibility and control over the dressing action to perform automatic dressing before the wheel reaches its end of life. © 2018 The Author(s).

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Fulltext

Procedia Manufacturing

Multi-Sensor Data Analytics for Grinding Wheel Redress Life Estimation- An Approach towards Industry 4.0

Since the 1980s and 1990s, there has been growing global recognition and endorsement of women as economic actors whose income-earning activities contribute to the survival and livelihood security of impoverished households and communities in many parts of the developing world. Women's economic contribution is considered particularly valuable when population groups living below the income-poverty line have struggled to cope with the adverse social effects of neo-liberal economic reforms. Given this backdrop, the aim of this study is to examine closely women's experience of laboring in the lower end of the informal labor sector, their workspace negotiations and conditions of labor, and to assess the significance of women's work to the survival and well-being of their households. The paper focuses on a case study of home and neighbourhood-based food production units in order to show how women's labor in these units is shaped by the intersecting dynamics of household patriarchies on the one hand and the profit maximizing ends of private capital, on the other. Primary data was gathered through interviews and focus group discussions with women workers and owners of these units located in the working class and industrial belt of North Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The paper argues that there has been an excessive responsibilizing of the women who work long hours in unregulated workspaces and feed and care for their families, often in the face of male disengagement from supporting the household. While aid agencies and national governments valorize women for their efficiency in 'managing' household poverty and sustaining fragile livelihoods with skill and ingenuity, this study foregrounds the gender-unjust implications of vesting poor women with the prime responsibility for alleviating global poverty. © 2016 Journal of International Women's Studies.

Feminizing responsibility? women's 'invisible' labor and sub-contracted production in South India

This book discusses women-oriented microfinance initiatives in India and their articulation vis-à-vis state developmentalism and contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. It examines how these initiatives encourage economically disadvantaged rural women to make claims upon state-provided microcredit and connect with multiple state institutions and agencies, thereby reshaping their gendered identities. The author shows how Self-Help Group (SHG)-based microfinance institutions mobilise agency and create channels of empowerment for women as well as make them responsible for alleviating poverty for themselves and their families. The book also brings out the importance of factoring in women’s dissenting voices when they negotiate developmental projects at the grassroots level. Rich in empirical data, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, gender studies, economics, especially microeconomics, politics, public policy and governance. © 2017 K. Kalpana.

Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-Liberal India

Women, microfinance and the state in neo-liberal India

The Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana was launched as an integrated programme for self-employment of the rural poor. Being a targeted anti-poverty intervention, the SGSY prescribes quotas for women (40%) among the eligible poor and also mandates that 50% of self-help groups formed in an administrative block under the scheme be women's SHGS. This essay, through the prism of the SGSY scheme, attempts to understand how policy seeks to "mainstream" rural women from low-income households into market-oriented economic activities that seemingly facilitate a linear movement out of poverty. It examines how women themselves perceive the SGSY policy and the entrepreneurial identities it proposes they assume, and how selected women swarozgaris strive to engineer a fit between the imperatives of policy and their divergent life circumstances.

Subverting policy, surviving poverty: Women and the SGSY in rural Tamil Nadu

The nacre structure consists of laminated interlocked mineral platelets separated by nanoscale organic layers. Here, the role of close proximity of mineral to the proteins on mechanical behavior of the protein is investigated through steered molecular dynamics simulations. Our simulations indicate that energy required for unfolding protein in the proximity of mineral aragonite is several times higher than that for isolated protein in the absence of the mineral. Here, we present details of specific mechanisms which result in higher energy for protein unfolding in the proximity of mineral. At the early stage of pulling, peaks in the load-displacement (LD) plot at mineral proximity are quantitatively correlated to the interaction energy between atoms involved in the latching phenomenon of amino acid side chain to aragonite surface. Water plays an important role during mineral and protein interaction and water molecules closer to the mineral surface are highly oriented and remain rigidly attached as the protein strand is pulled. Also, the high magnitude of load for a given displacement originates from attractive interactions between the protein, protein-bound water, and mineral. This study provides an insight into mineral-protein interactions that are predominant in biological nanocomposites and also provides guidelines towards design of biomimetic nanocomposites.

Department of Applied Mechanics

Mineral and Protein-Bound Water and Latching Action Control Mechanical Behavior at Protein-Mineral Interfaces in Biological Nanocomposites

Proteins in biological nanocomposites play an important role in their mechanical response. Proteins in nacre, the inner layer of seashells, have been shown to have exceptional mechanical properties. One of the important nacre proteins, Lustrin-A, has abundance of polypeptides in zig-zag conformation called β-sheets. β-sheets of protein when present close to each other in multiple numbers could take the shape of a planar β-sheath like structure or a β-barrel to form a domain. In natural proteins both these types of structures are commonly found. However, the conformation of β-sheets in Lustrin-A is not known at this time. Effort has been made through this work to study the mechanical response of these β-planar sheath and β-barrel structures when subjected to external loads. Comparative study of the stress-deformation characteristics of these two types of structures has been made. Both these structures with almost similar number of amino acids have been extracted from one single spinach protein: Ferredoxin Reductase (1FNR). Steered molecular dynamics has been used to conduct these studies. The article deals with the separation of the two domains from the main protein, simulation details, and results comparing the responses.

Impact of β-Sheet Conformations on the Mechanical Response of Protein in Biocomposites

Nanosized montmorillonite clay dispersed in small amounts in polymer results in polymer nanocomposites having superior engineering properties compared to those of the native polymer. These nanoinclusions are created by treating clay with an organic modifier which makes clay organophilic and results in intercalation or exfoliation of the montmorillonite. The modifiers used are usually long carbon chains with alkylammonium or alkylphosphonium cations. In this work, we have investigated the use of some alternative molecules which can act as modifiers for clay composites using clay for reinforcing a matrix of biopeptides or proteins. Such composites have potential applications in the fields of biomedical engineering and pharmaceutical science. In this work, the amino acids arginine and lysine are used as modifiers. The intercalation and mechanical behavior of the interlayer spacing with these amino acids as inclusions under compression and tension are studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Significant differences in the responses are observed. This work also provides an insight into the orientation and interaction of amino acids in the interlayer under different stress paths.

Mechanical Properties of the Sodium Montmorillonite Interlayer Intercalated with Amino Acids

The mechanical response of the interlayer of hydrated montmorillonite was evaluated using steered molecular dynamics. An atomic model of the sodium montmorillonite was previously constructed. In the current study, the interlayer of the model was hydrated with multiple layers of water. Using steered molecular dynamics, external forces were applied to individual atoms of the clay surface, and the response of the model was studied. The displacement versus applied stress and stress versus strain relationships of various parts of the interlayer were studied. The paper describes the construction of the model, the simulation procedure, and results of the simulations. Some results of the previous work are further interpreted in the light of the current research. The simulations provide quantitative stress deformation relationships as well as an insight into the molecular interactions taking place between the clay surface and interlayer water and cations.