Does Subsidising the Cost of Capital Help the Poorest? An Analysis of Saving Opportunities in Group Lending

This paper shows that subsidising the cost of capital restricts the ability of the poorest to participate in the group lending mechanisms that include saving opportunities. We document the group lending mechanism used by a typical microfinance lender in Haryana, India. Individuals can participate in the group either as a borrower or a saver. The lender requires that the borrower partly self-finance their project with their own cash wealth. Consequently, a borrower requires a minimum amount of cash wealth to borrow. The poorest participate in the group by co-financing the borrower's project with their meagre savings. In return, they obtain higher than market returns on their savings. Subsidising the cost of capital reduces the cash wealth required to participate in the group as a borrower. Conversely, it increases the cash wealth required to participate as a saver, thus curtailing the opportunity for the poorest to enrich themselves.Group Lending, Microfinance, Savings, Outreach

Self Help Groups: Use of modified ROSCAs in Microfinance

The paper documents the group lending mechanism used by a typical microfinance lender in Haryana, India. The mechanism had three interesting features. Firstly, the groups were initially formed as Rotating, Saving and Credit Associations. This enabled the lender to screen the groups. Second, there was significant heterogeneity within the group in terms of income and educational achievements. Third, the relatively wealthy individuals dominated the decision making process in the group and were able to obtain a disproportionate amount of credit allocated to the group.

Fact-based Court Judgment Prediction

This extended abstract extends the research presented in "ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation" \cite{malik-etal-2021-ildc}, focusing on fact-based judgment prediction within the context of Indian legal documents. We introduce two distinct problem variations: one based solely on facts, and another combining facts with rulings from lower courts (RLC). Our research aims to enhance early-phase case outcome prediction, offering significant benefits to legal professionals and the general public. The results, however, indicated a performance decline compared to the original ILDC for CJPE study, even after implementing various weightage schemes in our DELSumm algorithm. Additionally, using only facts for legal judgment prediction with different transformer models yielded results inferior to the state-of-the-art outcomes reported in the "ILDC for CJPE" study

FUEL CELLS: CONTAMINATION AND RECENT ADVANCEMENTS FOR ITS STABILIZATION

A Fuel cell will soon be a very robust weapon to replace current highly carbonized fossil fuel generation of electricity by a more cleaner and efficient source of generation. The kind of electricity generation that is being used nowadays impacts environment badly and contributes to Global Warming. In this context, Fuel Cell can prove to be significant in generation of cleaner energy. In addition to this, fuel cell is more efficient as it doesn't operate as any heat engine; so not bound up to Carnot efficiency. Certain impurities either from the fuel that is being supplied or from the environment might result into undesirable reactions that cause fuel cell contamination. This becomes the reason for the dramatic drop in the performance of a fuel cell that has been observed from our working "Solar Hydrogen Plant"Fig A model. For testing and extending the life of a fuel cell by detecting and mitigating the cause of degradation, the researchers has passed the sample of distilled water and Ultra-pure water (Type I) after electrolysis through Ion Chromatographer, Total Dissolved Solid test, Electrical Conductivity Test, and pH test. The cell has been allowed to run in the lush green campus of Banaras Hindu University whose environmental conditions are considered to be less polluted in the Varanasi. Henceforth, the researchers also tested atmospheric situations and its effect on fuel cell. The results of this paper will be useful in designing a device which can mitigate contamination and will ensure successful domestication of Fuel cell. In this paper, various methods of obtaining pure hydrogen gas like Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA), High & Low Temperature Diffusion, Solvent absorption of CO and CO2 are also discussed. . A new model of fuel cell installation is also discussed with an additional stage of hydrogen fuel filtration using PSA, TSA to supply hydrogen fuel with purity up to 99.8%

Essays in microfinance: Theory and evidence on sequential lending.

The dissertation explores mechanisms by which a lender can use timings of loans to engender peer monitoring and increase lending efficiency, when lending to a group of jointly liable impoverished individuals. We show that by disbursing the loans in a sequence (restricting the number of loans per period), the lender can finance a greater range of projects and allow poorer individuals to join the groups. Sequential lending entails lending to one borrower per period with the proviso that the second borrower's loan is contingent on first borrower's repayment. Simultaneous lending lets the borrowers make the decisions on their respective tasks simultaneously, requiring the lender to incentivise tasks collectively. Sequential lending separates the decisions on the task temporally and tasks are incentivised individually. Conversely, the lender's capital is less productive in sequential as compared to simultaneous lending. We show that if monitoring technology is sufficiently efficient, a greater range of projects are feasible under sequential lending. In a case-study of a Microfinance Institution in India, we found evidence of sequential lending. The lender restricted the number of group members that could borrow simultaneously, giving non-borrowers incentives to monitor the borrowers. We found significant income heterogeneity within the groups with wealthier members obtaining a higher proportion of loans. We build a stylised model based on the case-study. We show that the lender can engender negative assortative matching (wealthy pairing-up with poorer individuals) by restricting credit to the group. By requiring that the borrower and the non-borrower acquire a stake in the borrower's project, the lender determines the wealth-threshold for joining the group. Restricting credit creates intra-group competition for loans. The wealthy pair-up with poorer individuals to curtail the competition for loans within the group. By forbidding the group members to borrow simultaneously, the lender is able to lower the wealth-threshold for joining the group

Self Help Groups: Use of modified ROSCAs in Microfinance

The paper documents the group lending mechanism used by a typical microfinance lender in Haryana, India. The mechanism had three interesting features. Firstly, the groups were initially formed as Rotating, Saving and Credit Associations. This enabled the lender to screen the groups. Second, there was significant heterogeneity within the group in terms of income and educational achievements. Third, the relatively wealthy individuals dominated the decision making process in the group and were able to obtain a disproportionate amount of credit allocated to the group