Innovative Technologies, Institutions and Policies for Successful Value Chains for Tur Farmers: A Case Study of NCDEX Spot

The electronic spot exchange provides synergy among the existing marketing systems in the country with its improvised technology and reach through the online system as it brings a variety of benefits to the existing system such as price transparency, better price realization for farmers and lot of arbitrage opportunities for trader community. These exchanges are aimed at enhancing efficiencies of the existing value chain of commodities by developing appropriate platforms for modern spot markets, financing of commodities based on credible warehouse management arrangements, reducing transaction costs, supporting Futures Exchanges, regulators and the Government with standardized and structured spot markets for compulsory delivery in all agri-commodities. Successful operation of such technologiesdriven initiatives require congenial policy support as these are largely governed under the state laws of APMC. From the case study of NCDEX SPOT market in the Gulbarga district of Karnataka state, it has been observed that for facilitating the small and marginal farmers in participating in new age marketing system, it is required that all the stakeholders work seamlessly in an integrated manner, which are state agencies (warehousing, APMC, Mandi, Board, etc.), financial institutions, other infrastructural facilities, etc. With the help of NCDEX SPOT, tur grower-farmers in the Karnataka states are able to reduce the marketing cost by 50-70 per cent and are also able to sell their produce, whenever they want by paying a small charge for warehousing. It is also evident that the farmers could realize, on an average, 5-10 per cent higher price for their produce as compared to traditional APMC market. Although the business model seems to be working successfully and showing reasonable confidence to all the stakeholders, requires for upscaling across the board customization according to the law of land of respective states. However, it is a win-win proposition for the farmers-state governments-NCDEX SPOT-banks, etc, as its creates values at every stages of value chain.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Spatial ordering due to hydrodynamic interactions between a pair of colliding drops in a confined shear

Pair-collision between viscous drops in a confined shear is numerically simulated to show that the confinement drastically alters the trajectories of the drops. In contrast to free shear, drops here move towards the centerline giving rise to a zero cross-stream separation and a net stream-wise separation. The latter varies as inverse of capillary number and the cube of the confinement (distance between the walls). The stream-wise separation does not depend on the initial positions of the drops. An analytical theory for the phenomenon is offered

Further Results on Geometric Properties of a Family of Relative Entropies

This paper extends some geometric properties of a one-parameter family of relative entropies. These arise as redundancies when cumulants of compressed lengths are considered instead of expected compressed lengths. These parametric relative entropies are a generalization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. They satisfy the Pythagorean property and behave like squared distances. This property, which was known for finite alphabet spaces, is now extended for general measure spaces. Existence of projections onto convex and certain closed sets is also established. Our results may have applications in the R\'enyi entropy maximization rule of statistical physics.Comment: 7 pages, Prop. 5 modified, in Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor