The Khwarizmi Science Society is organizing a series of Astronomy Fairs to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, 2009.  The society has organized three fairs till now. The first was held at the Punjab University in Lahore. For the subsequent ones, they ventured out to smaller cities, having one at Government High School, Phool Nagar (about 50km from Lahore, formerly known as Bhai Pheru) and the most recent one at District Public School, Okara.
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A recent paper by Dr Asim Khwaja (Harvard) and Dr Atif Mian (U of Chicago), with graduate student Prashant Bharadwaj, is an excellent example of quantitative social science research on a locally relevant issue. Titled “The Big March: Migratory Flows After the Partition of India”, the paper analyzes archival records to answer questions about the volume of people who migrated to India or Pakistan at the time of the partition in 1947.

This is a controversial topic, to say the least. Estimates of those who died in the process vary significantly across sources, especially depending on the national or religious affiliations of the source. More importantly, there have hardly been any scientific studies of perhaps the most significant event in the history of the subcontinent.

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