Abhijit Das

In a world facing multiple intersecting crises, the push for healthier, more resilient societies has never been more urgent. This timely book reveals how empowered and organised communities can lead this change. It offers policy makers, academics, and activists research-driven insights, decolonial perspectives and real-world examples of organising and collective actions from across the global North and South. By centring on the power of community development, participation, and social movements, the book delivers actionable frameworks to tackle inequality and advance the right to health, making it an essential resource for anyone committed to health justice and for building equitable and sustainable health systems worldwide.

In a world facing multiple intersecting crises, the push for healthier, more resilient societies has never been more urgent. This timely book reveals how empowered and organised communities can lead this change. It offers policy makers, academics, and activists research-driven insights, decolonial perspectives and real-world examples of organising and collective actions from across the global North and South. By centring on the power of community development, participation, and social movements, the book delivers actionable frameworks to tackle inequality and advance the right to health, making it an essential resource for anyone committed to health justice and for building equitable and sustainable health systems worldwide.

Over the past seven decades, the outcome of international trade negotiations at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have significantly influenced economic policymaking world over. With unparalleled access to first-hand accounts of key negotiators from India and other developing countries,Strategies in GATT and WTO Negotiations systematically identifies and analyses the strategies and tactics deployed by the main players at the GATT/WTO negotiating table, particularly from the perspective of developing countries. It decodes the role that strategy plays in the developed countries prevailing in WTO negotiations on most occasions and demystifies the factors and strategies underlying the rare successes of many developing countries in countering entrenched power dynamics at the GATT and WTO negotiating table. Moreover, it includes a fascinating analysis of action behind the scenes and the strategies deployed by many developing countries in securing their key negotiating objectives on three specific issues in the Doha Round of the WTO, namely, the Singapore issues, agriculture, and food security.

This book presents a socio-economic analysis of the issues linking technological innovation in providing arsenic-safe drinking water in rural areas. It presents concrete field based experiences of experiments and case studies depicting the plight and sufferings of people due to failed technological deployment strategies over the past two decades in West Bengal, the most arsenic-exposed state in India and also the first to act for remediation of the crisis. One of the greatest challenges in arsenic-exposed zones is to provide sustainable access to reliably arsenic-safe free water. For nearly twenty years the Government of India and national water distribution institutions in collaboration with multi-lateral funding agencies have sought to pump in money, push technology collected through global tenders, and enlist the support of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but their efforts have yielded little success. This book is the outcome of the authors’ intensive fieldwork, guided by theconceptual framework of the latest literature on environmental economics and consumer behaviour. It presents a framework and estimates based on field level primary data. Secondary official source-based data are also collated from various scattered sources into a valuable, comprehensive collection. Lastly, the book includes a revealing analysis of factors affecting households’ participation.

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems extends optimal control and adaptive control design methods to multi-agent systems on communication graphs. It develops Riccati design techniques for general linear dynamics for cooperative state feedback design, cooperative observer design, and cooperative dynamic output feedback design. Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical multi-agent systems are treated. Optimal cooperative control is introduced and neural adaptive design techniques for multi-agent nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics, which are rarely treated in literature are developed. Results spanning systems with first-, second- and on up to general high-order nonlinear dynamics are presented. Each control methodology proposed is developed by rigorous proofs. All algorithms are justified by simulation examples. The text is self-contained and will serve as an excellent comprehensive source of information for researchers and graduate students working with multi-agent systems.

This book presents a socio-economic analysis of the issues linking technological innovation in providing arsenic-safe drinking water in rural areas. It presents concrete field based experiences of experiments and case studies depicting the plight and sufferings of people due to failed technological deployment strategies over the past two decades in West Bengal, the most arsenic-exposed state in India and also the first to act for remediation of the crisis. One of the greatest challenges in arsenic-exposed zones is to provide sustainable access to reliably arsenic-safe free water. For nearly twenty years the Government of India and national water distribution institutions in collaboration with multi-lateral funding agencies have sought to pump in money, push technology collected through global tenders, and enlist the support of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but their efforts have yielded little success. This book is the outcome of the authors’ intensive fieldwork, guided by theconceptual framework of the latest literature on environmental economics and consumer behaviour. It presents a framework and estimates based on field level primary data. Secondary official source-based data are also collated from various scattered sources into a valuable, comprehensive collection. Lastly, the book includes a revealing analysis of factors affecting households’ participation.

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems extends optimal control and adaptive control design methods to multi-agent systems on communication graphs. It develops Riccati design techniques for general linear dynamics for cooperative state feedback design, cooperative observer design, and cooperative dynamic output feedback design. Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical multi-agent systems are treated. Optimal cooperative control is introduced and neural adaptive design techniques for multi-agent nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics, which are rarely treated in literature are developed. Results spanning systems with first-, second- and on up to general high-order nonlinear dynamics are presented. Each control methodology proposed is developed by rigorous proofs. All algorithms are justified by simulation examples. The text is self-contained and will serve as an excellent comprehensive source of information for researchers and graduate students working with multi-agent systems.

Developed from the author’s popular graduate-level course, Computational Number Theory presents a complete treatment of number-theoretic algorithms. Avoiding advanced algebra, this self-contained text is designed for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in engineering. It is also suitable for researchers new to the field and practitioners of cryptography in industry. Requiring no prior experience with number theory or sophisticated algebraic tools, the book covers many computational aspects of number theory and highlights important and interesting engineering applications. It first builds the foundation of computational number theory by covering the arithmetic of integers and polynomials at a very basic level. It then discusses elliptic curves, primality testing, algorithms for integer factorization, computing discrete logarithms, and methods for sparse linear systems. The text also shows how number-theoretic tools are used in cryptography and cryptanalysis. A dedicated chapter on the application of number theory in public-key cryptography incorporates recent developments in pairing-based cryptography. With an emphasis on implementation issues, the book uses the freely available number-theory calculator GP/PARI to demonstrate complex arithmetic computations. The text includes numerous examples and exercises throughout and omits lengthy proofs, making the material accessible to students and practitioners.