Research

Microplastic-removal technologies can achieve high treatment efficiencies yet remain difficult to deploy because performance gains may be offset by lifecycle costs, infrastructure demands, and institutional constraints. We hypothesized that Plas-Stick, a magnetised tamarind-seed bio-coagulant, would provide competitive microplastic removal at lower infrastructural burden than established approaches, but that economic attractiveness alone would be insufficient to predict institutional adoption. Plas-Stick was synthesized from waste-derived tamarind polysaccharide and magnetite nanoparticles and tested across dosage, pH, contact time, reuse cycles, and real-water conditions. Maximum removal reached 87 ± 2% at 0.5 g/L, neutral pH, and 30 minutes, while efficiency remained above 75% after three reuse cycles; laboratory-scale preparation cost was approximately US$0.78/L of stock solution. Comparative benchmarking placed this performance near reported bio-based coagulation approaches (approximately 82–87%) and conventional Indian drinking-water treatment (approximately 85%), but below advanced processes capable of 95–99.9% removal. Lifecycle comparison therefore identified Plas-Stick’s principal advantage not as maximum removal efficiency, but as the combination of reusable magnetic recovery, waste-derived feedstock, and low infrastructure requirements. Institutional analysis further identified regulatory incentives, validation requirements, procurement risk, retrofit compatibility, maintenance capacity, and operational reliability as six barriers capable of separating modeled economic attractiveness from adoption. The findings demonstrate that water-treatment innovation should be evaluated simultaneously through technical performance, lifecycle economics, and institutional feasibility.

A widely intuitive claim in the financial-inclusion literature is that deeper digital inclusion displaces harmful borrowing. This article shows that, in one common form, the claim can be an artefact of measurement. Using a cross-sectional survey of 188 adult women in informal work across six village clusters in Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan, a preliminary specification reproduced exactly the expected dramatic result — an arithmetic identity, because the inclusion index contained formal-credit access while the outcome was defined as its precise inverse. Once the two are separated, the relationship disappears. Bank-account ownership and a digital transaction history do not distinguish moneylender or loan-app borrowing. Recent Unified Payments Interface use is associated with a lower prevalence of such borrowing, but the association is correlational and, under inference appropriate to six clusters, only borderline. What remains is credit sorting: formal entry, active digital use and access to regulated credit are distinct institutional positions rather than rungs on a single ladder. India now has substantial digital-lending regulation; the policy problem is whether those protections become usable at the last mile.