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

Tibetan settlements in India house the largest population of Tibetan exiles and are crucial repositories of Tibetan culture and nationalism in the political struggle for Tibet. The settlements privilege the moral narrative of statelessness as an integral part of the Tibetan struggle. However, given the precarity of land tenure, these settlements are steadily hollowing out, with an increasing number of Tibetans choosing to migrate out of India. In response, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) and the Indian government have jointly framed the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy (TRP) to consolidate the Tibetan population in India. The TRP functions as a disciplinary regime that is delivered through a centralised process for creating secure land tenure for Tibetan settlements, and aims to retain the Tibetans as a stateless population in India. Using three case studies of Tibetan settlements across India, we demonstrate that Tibetans are resisting this moral injunction of statelessness by opting out of the disciplinary logic of the TRP. This resistance includes processes of outmigration and pursuing citizen-like claims in India. These forms of resistance reflect the fragmentation within the exile community over the political value of statelessness, with many Tibetans exploring new ways to imagine their struggle as rooted in citizenship claims.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

World University root node

Asian Studies Review

Disciplining Statelessness: Fragmentary Outcomes of the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy in India

On the eve of Indian Independence, as Britain prepared to devolve the Crown’s treaties with Tibet to the Indian government, the Tibetan government was debating its future treaty relationship with India under the 1914 Simla Convention and associated Indo-Tibetan Trade Regulations. Soon after Indian independence, Tibetan government made an expansive demand for return of Tibetan territory along the McMahon Line and beyond. This led to a long diplomatic exchange between Lhasa, New Delhi and London as India deliberated its response to the Tibetan demand. This article decodes the voluminous correspondence between February 1947 and January 1948 that flowed between the British/Indian Mission in Lhasa, the Political Officer in Sikkim, External Affairs Ministry in Delhi and the Foreign Office in London, on the Simla Convention and the ensuing Tibetan territorial demand. Housed at the National Archives in New Delhi, this declassified confidential communication provides crucial context for newly independent Indian state’s relationship with Tibet. It also reveals the intricacies of Tibetan elite politics that affected decision-making in Lhasa translating to a fragmented and often contradictory policy in forging its new relationship with India. Most importantly, this Tibetan territorial demand undermined the diplomatic efficacy of Tibet’s 1947 Trade Mission to India entangling its outcome with the resolution of this issue. This was a lost opportunity for both India and Tibet in building an agreement on the frontier which worked to their mutual disadvantage in the future. © 2021 Indian Council of World Affairs.

India Quarterly

Frontiers in Flux: Indo-Tibetan Border: 1946–1948

This paper proposes a novel design for a hermetically sealable device, consisting of charged linear and nonlinear membranes driven in the gigahertz range in vacuum setting, as a source of antibunched single phonons. Constraints for effecting phonon antibunching are found using the stationary Liouville-von Neumann master equation. Using analytical calculations and material and geometry optimization, we show that sizes of the proposed system can be upscaled to the near-micrometer range in a trade-off with the system operating temperature. The results are significant to realize quantum phononics, which has much promise as a modality for sensing and computing applications. © 2021 Author(s).

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Fulltext

AIP Advances

Novel hermetically sealed device to realize unconventional phonon blockade at near-micron dimensions and milliKelvin temperatures

High-quality 2D-hexagonal ordered mesoporous titania with a well-crystallized framework structure and a high surface area was successfully synthesized, in a reproducible way, using Pluronic F127, Pluronic P123, Synperonic F108 and CTAB as structure-directing agents, and the resulting nanostructured matrix is designed as TMF-127, TMP-123, TMF-108 and TMC-016/TMC-036, respectively. The periodic array of the pore structure of these mesoporous materials is described by combining small-angle X-ray diffraction, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and nitrogen sorption techniques. All these materials show significant amounts of intrinsic defects, viz., electrons trapped in oxygen vacancy and/or Ti3+ centres, by tuning the pore structure. These defects in-turn promote the charge separation of photogenerated excitons, and therefore exhibit excellent photocatalytic activity for the degradation of famotidine (TMP-123: DE100 = 75 min; P-25: DE100 = 120 min), and 4-chlorophenol (TMP-123: DE95 = 180 min; P-25: DE60 = 180 min). The superior activity of the mesoporous titania over the fumed titania (P-25) is ascribed to: (i) light absorption extending into the visible region, (ii) low charge-transfer resistance and high carrier density, and (iii) intrinsic Ti3+ defects, as deduced from DRUV-Visible, photo-electrochemical (Nyquist and Mott-Schottky) and EPR studies, respectively. © The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Department Of Chemistry

New Journal of Chemistry

Periodic mesoporous titania with anatase and bronze phases-the new generation photocatalyst: Synthesis, characterisation, and application in environmental remediation

This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality is related here to the legal and bureaucratic ‘inbetweenness’ that characterises and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. Tibetans born in India have been registered as voters in India’s electoral list albeit without an accompanying claim or path to citizenship. The paper argues that these voting rights are simultaneously contested and embraced by the Tibetan exile community. Responses of the exile community to voting rights are produced by the interaction between (a) the lived experience of statelessness and (b) complex constructions of cultural, political and legal identity. Both these factors are fundamentally informed by the liminal space that the exile community inhabits in India.

Asian Ethnicity

Enduring liminality: voting rights and Tibetan exiles in India

Global politics today is grappling with moral and epistemological questions arising out of the skewed distribution of power in the world. In this context, examinations of justice and equality are attended to with urgency in the contemporary cosmopolitan discourse that recasts the relationship between state and citizen within the framework of humanity. Cosmopolitanism addresses the loss of agency for the individual in the face of overwhelming state power, in the process engaging with the crisis of moral authority that the state as an agent faces today. As a redressal, cosmopolitanism offers the idea of cosmopolitan democracy that bridges the gap between those who take decisions and those who bear the consequences of these decisions. In this, cosmopolitanism demands and creates the discursive space for reinterpreting political community beyond the nation state.

Politics and Cosmopolitanism in a Global Age

Introduction

This article analyses strategies of minority education currently in place in Xinjiang in the context of the second generation ethnic policy debate in China. The article argues that the 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang coupled with the change of leadership in China has significantly hardened the state's approach to aggressively promoting Putonghua (standard Chinese). This policy is facing significant structural and political challenges in its implementation and acceptance in Xinjiang. The policy to universalise Putonghua in all Xinjiang schools is likely to produce more resistance to the statist agenda rather than resulting in the intended outcome of integration. © 2016 SAGE Publications.

China Report

Bilingual Education in Xinjiang in the Post-2009 Period

This article examines the EU weapons embargo on China as a major foreign policy challenge that China’s new leadership has inherited. The article argues that the continuation of the embargo constitutes a failure of Chinese foreign policy to project China as a responsible global player. The article examines the legal framework and the political debate within the EU to emphasise that the embargo has been largely ineffective in its objective of denying advanced military technology to China. The continuation of the ban, however, suggests that China, while becoming an economic and military power, is finding it difficult to overcome the significant political resistance to it being accepted as a responsible global actor.

Strategic Analysis

EU Weapons Embargo and Current Chinese Foreign Policy

The Taiwan and the South China Sea disputes have seen the application of multi-pronged military, political and economic strategies by China. This became possible with the declining influence of the communist ideology in China's foreign policy and the consequential “thickening of the elite”. It would be erroneous to characterize China's policy as aggressive based on its declaration to reserve its right to use force to resolve these disputes. The two disputes are fundamentally different in terms of their linkages to political legitimacy and China's national objectives. While the Taiwan question lies at the core of Chinese national identity, the South China Sea dispute is linked more to economic and strategic interests even though the sovereignty issue is important in both. The dual need for making an assertive nationalist stand on the Taiwan issue and following a pragmatic economic policy resulted in a strategy of encouraging greater economic integration of Taiwan with the mainland even while not ruling out military action. On the South China Sea problem, China has basically adopted a mix of political and military strategies. © 2005, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd,. All rights reserved.