The Indus Delta Between Past and Future: Precarious Livelihoods and Neoliberal Imaginaries in a Parched Coastal Belt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Indus delta, at the terminus of the Indus river system, is presently home to 300,000 residents. Over the last century, upriver hydrology has reduced the flow of water through the river. The result is salination and seawater incursion that has led to the loss of arable land and with it, agriculture as a sustainable livelihood. This has created precarious livelihoods, as people are forced either into the informal fishing sector, or to migrate; this is a departure from earlier times when agriculture was the primary vocation, and forests covered large swathes of the region. I also discuss future plans for port development in the delta that is constitutive of a neoliberal developmentalist imaginary. This vision, in which a future Pakistan will be connected to markets in Asia through its ports, has been propagated for decades, and most recently as a consequence of China’s ongoing investment regime in Pakistan. In the conclusion, I reflect on the paradox of fixation on fantastical futures while the population is caught up in an uncertain present.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".