Impact of climate variation on agricultural productivity and food security in rural India

This research paper analyzes the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity in quantity terms, value of production in monetary terms and food security in India. The study undertook state wise analysis based on secondary data for the duration of 1980 to 2009. Climate variation affects food grain and non-food grain productivity and both these factors along with other socioeconomic and government policy variables affect food security. Food security and poverty are interlinked with each other as cause and effect and vice versa, particularly, for a largely agrarian economy of India. Regression results for models proposed in this study show that for most of the food grain crops, non-food grain crops in quantity produced per unit of land and in terms of value of production climate variation cause negative impact. The adverse impact of climate change on the value of agricultural production and food grains indicates food security threat to small and marginal farming households. The state wise food security index was also generated in this study; and econometric model estimation reveals that the food security index itself also gets adversely affected due to climatic fluctuations

Reliability of the Model for Clustering of Longitudinal datasets of Infant Mortality Rate in India

Because of the natural tendency of human beings and heavenly bodies to form groups, the technique of cluster analysis or segmentation analysis find its importance and applications in many fields of study. A model for clustering of time trends was proposed by authors whose beauty is that 2-way dimensions that is the horizontal flow of the trend and vertical distance of the trend from a common base are considered to obtain the natural clusters. In the present paper, the reliability of this model is studied in two steps namely (i) by repeating the analysis but using different interval distance measures and (ii) by repeating the analysis but using different hierarchical clustering techniques. Dissimilarity coefficients were calculated for the time trends of infant mortality rates in India using this model. In SPSSv17.0, four different clustering methods were applied using generalized power function. Agglomeration schedules were obtained and elbow criterion diagrams were made for each trend. Five stable clusters were suggested by these methods. K-means clustering technique was applied to obtain the actual members of these five clusters