Minimum multicuts and Steiner forests for Okamura-Seymour graphs

We study the problem of finding minimum multicuts for an undirected planar graph, where all the terminal vertices are on the boundary of the outer face. This is known as an Okamura-Seymour instance. We show that for such an instance, the minimum multicut problem can be reduced to the minimum-cost Steiner forest problem on a suitably defined dual graph. The minimum-cost Steiner forest problem has a 2-approximation algorithm. Hence, the minimum multicut problem has a 2-approximation algorithm for an Okamura-Seymour instance.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

The impacts of neo-liberal policy on Indian peasantry = 非洲經濟及土地政策

The sustainability of small-scale cultivation, which largely characterizes Indian agriculture, though not in a homogeneous or undifferentiated manner, has been one of the important casualties of the trajectory of neo-liberal policies into which the country embarked upon in the early nineties. Driven by fiscal fundamentalism, this amounted to a veritable withdrawal of the state from economic operations, more so from agriculture. A host of policies adopted like the rationalization of input subsidies, downsizing of incentive pricing, decline in public investments, shrinking public extension services and contraction of institutional credit availability in rural areas all precipitated a widespread agrarian crisis with deflation in farm incomes and emergence of indebtedness among the peasantry (Patnaik, 2002; Reddy and Mishra, 2009; Banerjee, 2009)